As a journalist, I have always followed the trends within the industry, especially with the scandals at CNN and Fox News, the change of ownership within NewsCorp. as Rupert Murdoch retires, the consolidation of many of the nation's largest news media, the ownership of the Washington Post by Jeff Bezos, the downsizing of newsrooms all across the country and the shuttering of many small-town newspapers. These are all troubling trends within what a free and independent media landscape in the United States has always been, since the early days of the Republic.
Last year, Keach Hagey and Alexandra Bruell reported for the Wall Street Journal that Facebook, a subsidiary of Meta Platforms, was "re-examining its commitment to paying for news," according to several unnamed sources who were described as familiar with Facebook's plans. The potential loss of those payments, the Journal reporters wrote, was "prompting some news organizations to prepare for a potential revenue shortfall of tens of millions of dollars."
The Journal story was similar to a report published earlier the same year by "The Information," a subscription-only site that covers technology; in that piece, reporters Sylvia Varnham O'Regan and Jessica Toonkel said Meta was "considering reducing the money it gives news organizations as it reevaluates the partnerships it struck over the past few years," and that this was part of a rethinking of "the value of including news in its flagship Facebook app."
Meta would not comment to either the Journal or The Information, and a spokesperson stated that 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 report, for the past two years - since the original payment deals were announced in 2019 - Meta has paid the Washington Post more than $15 million per year, the New York Times over $20 million per year, and the Journal more than $10 million per year (the payments to the Journal 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 Meta made to about 200 news outlets, including Bloomberg, ABC News, USA Today, Business Insider, and the right-wing news site Breitbart News. Smaller deals were typically for $3 million a year or less, the Journal reported.
The payments were announced in 2019 as part of the launch of the "News tab," a dedicated section of Facebook where readers can find news from the outlets that partnered with Meta (higher payments were made to those with paywalls). The launch was a high-profile affair, including a one-on-one interview between Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp. - parent company of Dow Jones and the Journal - and Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta. Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, wrote that the meeting 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. The event was "a publicity coup for Facebook; it tamed the biggest beast in the journalism jungle," Bell wrote.
Bell is not the only media industry observer to note that Facebook's payments to media outlets have felt more like a marketing strategy than a sign of a commitment to journalism. "The correct way to view Google and Facebook’s actions, I believe, is through the lens of PR," wrote Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab, a year or so after the launch of the News tab, when Google announced something very similar. "The troubles of the news business are a major PR problem for these companies, who - however fair they or anyone else thinks it is - 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 of the idea of paying the media for content. “I’m not sure that makes sense,” 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" for news content.
As Benton and others have noted, the decision to pay publishers, after years of refusing to do so, came 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 by the digital platforms' control of online advertising. That kind of pressure has been a constant drumbeat for the past 15 years or so, after publishers in Spain, France, and Germany started pushing for legislation that would compel Google to pay for reusing content from news sites. A desire to quash 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 over three years for training, internships, and other partnership arrangements. Facebook made similar kinds of commitments with its Facebook Journalism Project, which launched in 2017.
But the pressure on Google and Facebook to pay publishers ramped up with legislation in Australia in 2021, which forced platforms to sign licensing deals with media outlets or face binding arbitration. Both companies eventually signed a number of deals with certain publishers (although there was criticism that smaller outlets were left out), and other countries such as Canada and the UK are expected to pass similar laws soon. According to the Journal, Zuckerberg has been "disappointed" by these regulatory efforts, which have reportedly "damped [his] enthusiasm for making news a bigger part of Facebook’s 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. The company also appears to be much more focused on promoting short-form video - as a way of competing with TikTok, the popular video-sharing platform - than appeasing publishers.
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