{"id":252753,"date":"2022-06-15T23:02:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-15T23:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=252136"},"modified":"2022-06-15T23:02:00","modified_gmt":"2022-06-15T23:02:00","slug":"facebook-and-paying-for-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2022\/06\/15\/facebook-and-paying-for-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook and paying for news"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Note<\/strong>: This was\u00a0originally published as<\/a>\u00a0the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On June 9, Keach Hagey and Alexandra Bruell\u2014two Wall Street Journal<\/em> reporters who cover the major digital platforms\u2014reported that Facebook, a subsidiary of Meta Platforms<\/a>, was “re-examining its\u00a0commitment to paying for news,” according to several unnamed sources who were described as being familiar with Facebook’s plans. The potential loss of those payments, the Journal<\/em> reporters wrote<\/a>, was “prompting some news organizations to prepare for a potential revenue shortfall of tens of millions of dollars.” The Journal<\/em> story echoed a report published in May by The Information<\/em>, a subscription-only site that covers technology; in that piece, reporters Sylvia Varnham O’Regan and Jessica Toonkel said Meta was<\/a> “considering reducing the money it gives news organizations as it reevaluates the partnerships it struck over the past few years,” and that this reevaluation was part of a rethinking of “the value of including news in its flagship Facebook app.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meta wouldn’t comment to either the Journal<\/em> or The Information<\/em>, and a spokesperson told CJR the company “doesn’t comment on speculation.” But the loss of payments from Meta could have a noticeable impact for some outlets. According to the Journal<\/em> report, for the past two years\u2014since the original payment deals were announced<\/a> in 2019\u2014 Meta has paid the Washington Post<\/em> more than $15 million per year, the New York Times<\/em> over $20 million per year, and the Journal<\/em> more than $10 million per year (the payments to the Journal<\/em> are part of a broader deal with Dow Jones, the newspaper’s parent, which is said to be worth more than $20 million per year). The deals, which are expected to expire this year, were part of a broader system of payments<\/a> Meta made to a number of news outlets, including Bloomberg, ABC News, USA Today<\/em>, Business Insider<\/em>, and the right-wing news site Breitbart News<\/em>. Smaller deals were typically for $3 million or less, the Journal<\/em> said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The payments were announced as part of the launch of the “News tab,”<\/a> a dedicated section of the Facebook app where readers can find news from the outlets that partnered with Meta (higher payments were made to<\/a> those with paywalls, according to a number of reports). The launch was a high-profile affair, including a one-on-one interview<\/a> between Robert Thomson, CEO of News Corp.\u2014parent company of Dow Jones and the Journal\u2014and Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta. Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, wrote for CJR that the meeting<\/a> was like “a Camp David for peace between the most truculent old media empire and one of its most noxious disruptors,” and wondered how much it had cost for News Corp. to forget about its long-standing opposition to Facebook’s media strategy. The event was “a publicity coup for Facebook; it tamed the biggest beast in the journalism jungle,” Bell wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bell is not the only media industry observer to note that Facebook’s payments<\/a> to media outlets have felt more like a marketing ploy than a sign of a deep and abiding commitment to journalism. “The correct way to view Google and Facebook\u2019s actions, I believe, is through the lens of PR,” wrote Josh Benton<\/a> of the Nieman Journalism Lab<\/em>, a year or so after the launch of the News tab, when Google announced something very similar<\/a>. “The troubles of the news business are a major PR problem for these companies, who \u2014 however fair they or anyone else thinks it is \u2014 get blamed for its ills.” The move to pay media companies did seem like a rather dramatic shift in Facebook’s viewpoint: a little over a year before the launch of the News tab, Zuckerberg seemed to be skeptical that<\/a> paying the media for content was something worth doing. \u201cI\u2019m not sure that makes sense,\u201d he told Vox, during an interview in 2018, after being asked about a proposal from Rupert Murdoch that the social network should pay “carriage fees”<\/a> for news content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Benton and others have noted, the decision to pay publishers\u2014after years of refusing to do so, despite repeated complaints\u2014came amid rising pressure, from legislators in multiple jurisdictions, aimed at getting Google and Facebook to compensate the media industry for the harms allegedly done to it<\/a> by the digital platforms’ control of online advertising. That kind of pressure has been a fairly constant drumbeat in the industry for the past 15 years or so, after publishers in Spain, France, and Germany started pushing for legislation<\/a> that would compel Google to pay for reusing content from news sites. A desire to quell this kind of legislation was part of why Google launched what became its Google News Initiative, in which it committed to pay publishers $300 million<\/a> for training, internships, and other partnership arrangements. Facebook made similar kinds of commitments with its Facebook Journalism Project, which launched in 2017<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pressure on Google and Facebook to pay publishers ramped up with the passing of legislation in Australia<\/a> in 2021, which forced platforms to sign licensing deals with media outlets or face arbitration. Both companies eventually signed a number of deals with publishers (although there was criticism that smaller outlets were left out), and other countries such as Canada and the UK are expected to pass<\/a> similar laws soon. According to the Journal<\/em>, Zuckerberg has been “disappointed” by these regulatory efforts, which have reportedly<\/a> “damped [his] enthusiasm for making news a bigger part of Facebook\u2019s offerings.” And Meta has apparently noticed that “fewer people have been clicking on links to news articles since President Donald Trump left office,” according to The Information<\/em><\/a>. The company also appears to be much more focused on promoting short-form video\u2014as a way of competing with TikTok, the popular video-sharing platform\u2014than appeasing publishers, which could leave even large media players out in the cold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s more on Facebook:<\/p>\n\n\n\n