Facebook announced a plan to invest $300 million over three years into local news across the world in an effort to bolster both a struggling industry and its image.
The substantial investment is meant to help both U.S. and international newsrooms “create and sustain viable business models to survive,” the company said on Tuesday, according to Reuters.
Unlike Facebook’s previous investments into the news industry, this latest round is distinguished by how it is not tied to Facebook-related products. Earlier rounds of investment encouraged publishers to rely on delivering news over Facebook, which, eventually, hurt many organizations when Facebook’s strategies shifted, Reuters noted.
“We’re going to continue fighting fake news, misinformation, and low quality news on Facebook,” Campbell Brown, Facebook’s vice president of Global News Partnerships said in a statement. “But we also have an opportunity, and a responsibility, to help local news organizations grow and thrive.”
Facebook’s first round of investments in America will help outlets grow their local reporting resources, research how to use technology to improve news gathering, create new products, recruit “trainee community journalists” and place them in local newsrooms and also help fund a program modeled after the Peace Corp, which will place 1,000 journalists in local newsrooms over five years.
The recipients of the investments include the Pulitzer Center, Report for America, Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund, the Local Media Association and Local Media Consortium, the American Journalism Project and the Community News Project.
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