Platforms and Publishers: The Great Pandemic Funding Push
THE PANDEMIC FUNDING PUSH
In 2019, a director at a journalism foundation who worked closely with Facebook and Google wrestled with a shift as those platforms expanded from journalism partners to patrons. “We can’t build a business around having these tech companies fund journalism,” the person said. “That’s what concerns me when some people say they should give us more money… . Is that their role, to be the subsidy for journalism? That seems wrong somehow.”
The two platforms had by then each announced $300 million journalism initiatives: the Google News Initiative and the Facebook Journalism Project. This year, the coronavirus pandemic has only deepened the reliance of news outlets on such support. We’re seeing an accelerated gutting of the news industry, local news in particular, as a result of COVID-19. In the first six months of 2020, cutbacks affected hundreds of news organizations across the United