Facebook Could Help Journalism by Making News Easier to Find

To revisit this article, select My⁠ ⁠Account, then View saved stories. Facebook announced on Monday that it was going to spend $100 million to help local news outlets during the coronavirus crisis. “It’s a moment where getting accurate news about the coronavirus is vital for all us,” says Campbell Brown, the former television news anchor and Facebook’s vice president of global news partnerships. This urgent need for news comes as ad revenues for news sites are drying up.

“Local journalists are being hit especially hard, even as people turn to them for critical information to keep their friends, families and communities safe,” Campbell wrote in a blog post announcing the grant. As if to put an exclamation point on that notion, also on Monday, the Gannett newspaper chain told employees at 100 newspapers that they would have to take unpaid leave. Facebook's gift to local news came after it offered a much smaller $1 million investment two weeks ago. That money was meant to support coronavirus coverage in local publications, but according to Brown, so many requests for that money came in that the company realized that a much bigger sum was needed.

Of the $100 million Facebook is now promising to give out, $25 million will be disbursed as cash grants to local publishers in South Carolina, Missouri and Texas and other places to support their coverage of the pandemic, or to keep them afloat during the crisis. By far the bigger part, though, is earmarked for “marketing” to promote the journalism of local publications. When I asked Brown what that meant, she replied that Facebook would devote that much from its marketing budget, including Facebook ads, to help the bottom line of publications. (Last year Facebook announced a $300 million investment, spread over three years, to help local journalism; this effort is unchanged by the new announcement.

) The $100 million is part of Facebook’s general response to the pandemic which includes a Coronavirus (Covid-19) Information Center with content from the World Health Organization; an effort to scrub the News Feed of dangerous misinformation about the virus; and a ban on ads that try to sell bogus cures or gouge people trying to buy medical equipment. Got a coronavirus-related news tip? Send it to us at covidtips@wired. com.

But missing from the announcement was one thing that Facebook could do immediately to help surface articles about the pandemic: maximize the exposure to the News tab that CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a year ago and that launched last October at a splashy New York City event. Unlike the unmoderated and often untrustworthy mix of articles that people share on the News Feed, Facebook News is curated not by algorithms but actual human editors. They draw from a vetted list of publications—including The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, and, yes, WIRED. In a shift in its policy, Facebook pays publishers for much of this content.