Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

Facebook Plans to Invest $300 million in Local Press


Wed 16 Jan 2019 | 01:52 PM
Yassmine Elsayed

By: Yassmine ElSayed

CAIRO, Jan. 16 (SEE) – Facebook announced plans to invest $300 million over the next three years in news initiatives, with a focus on local news partnerships and other programs.

The move comes at a difficult time for the news industry, which is

facing falling profits and print readership. Facebook, like Google, has also

been partly blamed for the ongoing decline in newspapers' share of advertising

dollars as people and advertisers have moved online.

Campbell Brown, Facebook's head of global news partnerships,

acknowledges the company "can't uninvent the internet," but says it

wants to work with publishers to help them succeed on and off the social

network.

She explained that the money will go toward reporting grants for

local newsrooms, expanding Facebook's program to help local newsrooms with

subscription business models and investing in nonprofits aimed at supporting

local news. It will also be used for Facebook's other, broad news initiatives

such as news literacy programs and third-party fact-checking.

"The industry is going through a massive

transition that has been underway for a long time," she said. "None

of us have quite figured out ultimately what the future of journalism is going

to look like but we want to be part of helping find a solution."

Facebook has increased its focus on local news in the past year

after starting off 2018 with the announcement that it was generally de-emphasizing

news stories and videos in people's feeds on the social network in favor of

posts from their friends.

The $300 million investment includes a $5 million grant to the

nonprofit Pulitzer Center to launch "Bringing Stories Home," a fund

that will provide local U.S. newsrooms with reporting grants to support

coverage of local issues. There's also a $2 million investment in Report for

America as part of a partnership aiming to place 1,000 journalists in local newsrooms

across the country over the next five years.