Facebook Set To Invest In Struggling Sectors Of The News Industry

Facebook has announced that it is making its biggest investment yet with a $300 million investment in struggling sectors of the news industry. The money will be put towards journalism programs, news programs, partnerships, and content over the course of three years. Some of the money will be directly invested into nonprofits such as the Pulitzer Center and Report for America.

The planned investment is expected to greatly expand Facebook’s efforts to convert news readers into paid subscribers, benefiting news websites. The focus of the investment is supporting local news, which has been decimated amidst the digital revolution. Facebook has succeeded in taking billions of dollars from advertisers and grabbing people’s attention in an incalculable but surely monumental fashion. Print newspapers were already in between a rock and a hard place before the advent of Facebook, but they are new facing an existential threat. Facebook, as well as Google, have helped speed up the decline of local print news.

There is some skepticism over the intentions of Facebook’s initiatives. Many journalists resent the company’s power when it comes to changing its news feed. Facebook regularly sends massive volumes of traffic to certain websites, which later dries up when that news is no longer trending. These developments also come amid concerns over misinformation and spam, which have proliferated across the digital platform.

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5 years ago