Facebook putting $300 million into news

Facebook has announced that’s it’s investing $300 million in news programs, partnerships and content over the next three years, with the focus being local news.  

Among the items the tech giant is investing in, according to Facebook:

Pulitzer Center: A $5 million endowment gift to launch “Bringing Stories Home.” Each year, the fund will support at least 12 local in-depth, multimedia reporting projects.

Report for America: A $2 million investment in the initiative to place 1,000 journalists in local newsrooms across the country over the next five years.

Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund: A $1 million investment in this fund will be dedicated to a news innovation and tech hub being created to help evaluate and improve how tech is used in newsrooms. 

Local Media Association and Local Media Consortium: A $1 million investment across the two organizations to help more than 2,000 local member newsrooms better develop and implement revenue streams through branded content on and off Facebook. 

American Journalism Project: A $1 million commitment to this journalism enterprise aimed at growing and sustaining local civic news organizations through venture philanthropy.

Community News Project: A $6 million project, announced at the end of 2018, partnering with some of the biggest regional publishers in the U.K. to recruit trainee community journalists and place them in local newsrooms over a two-year period. 

Facebook says it will commit over $20 million to continue and globally expand its Accelerator pilot, which launched in the U.S. in 2018 to help local newsrooms with subscription and membership models, according to Facebook. 

Facebook is going to hold a two-day “Accelerate: Local News” summit early this year, in partnership with Knight Foundation and the Online News Association.  

“This is just the beginning,” said Campbell Brown, head of Facebook’s News Partnerships, according to Poynter. 

News and Tech