Facebook has named 400 news organizations that will receive grants aimed at supporting coronavirus coverage. The company promised $100 million to prop up local newsrooms impacted by financial fallout from the pandemic.
Campbell Brown, Facebook's vice president for global news partnerships, tells NPR's Mary Louise Kelly about what these grants say about Facebook's priorities. Here is some of that interview:Well, this started as a smaller pilot project with about $2 million. ... What we realized is that local newsrooms were pretty desperate in this moment. They were trying to do more with less and they were being impacted by the economic slowdown in the way that everybody's being impacted.
So we have looked toward partners like the Local Media Association, the Local Media Consortium, the National Association of Broadcasters, to work with us to help us identify those most in need.I think it is. And we're seeing examples of that with the grants that we've already given out. And let me be clear, these have been small grants, in some cases just $5,000. The, finding that four times more cases of coronavirus existed within that community than the rest of the country.
We know the landscape has changed. It's been changing since the late '90s as the Internet grew and newspaper revenues were declining then even before Facebook was invented. So I think we need to be realistic in moments like this. We're not going to uninvent the Internet. We want to adapt and look forward and try to figure out what the new business model is that's going to help local news not only survive this moment, but thrive over the long term.
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