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The Facebook Journalism Project has spawned several initiatives over the past four years to help media companies and publishers—especially local publishers—develop new ways to generate enough revenue to sustain themselves.
Now, the social networking giant is turning its attention to independent experts, journalists and writers.
More people in those fields are publishing their work independently, noted Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of global news partnerships, in a Tuesday blog post with Anthea Watson Strong, Facebook’s product manager for news.
“The independent creator space is growing,” read the post. “We fully support the work that others are doing and want to ensure that we can provide additional avenues for growth and monetization .. [We] look forward to collaborating with creators of all kinds to build products and features that can have a meaningful impact in sustaining their work.”
Facebook gives extra $1 billion to journalism
Twitter has already been making moves in this space by acquiring newsletter platform Revue in January and integrating it into its platform. It also recently developed a Super Follows feature to enable creators and publishers to monetize premium content.
Brown and Strong said Facebook has invested $600 million to support journalism since 2018, and it has earmarked another $1 billion over the next three years to continue the process.
A collection of self-publishing tools
The platform Facebook is developing will be anchored by a free, self-publishing tool that includes “robust” styling options for creating websites and email newsletters. It will be integrated with Facebook pages, enabling the creation of new content across photos, live videos and stories.
Communities can be created and grown through Facebook groups. Features will be added to Facebook to boost discovery of new content and writers, and to help content creators build direct relationship with their fans.
Independent writers will also have access to insights to help them understand how their content is performing, along with monetization tools to help them build individual websites and businesses, with an initial focus on subscriptions.
Facebook will also offer accelerator services to help creators share best practices with each other.
In recent years, the Facebook Journalism Project has spearheaded several initiatives for media companies and publishers—many with a focus on businesses owned or run by minorities, including accelerator programs to help Black-owned publishers build sustainable businesses, grants to local news publishers and the Branded Content Project to help publishers develop revenue streams.
