Facebook announces investments in Argentina’s News industry

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Facebook today announced a three-year investment program for the news industry in Argentina that will support nearly 150 media companies of all sizes and regions of the country and train more than 3,000 journalists per year.

In addition to commercial agreements with dozens of media companies, the company will invest US$1.5 million over the next 12 months in innovation funds and projects developed in collaboration with national institutions such as the Association of Argentine Journalists (Adepa), the Argentine Journalists Forum (Fopea) and the international organization SembraMedia.

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“We are very excited about this investment, which deepens our ongoing collaboration with the news industry in Argentina. We look forward to creating more opportunities for people to interact with news on Facebook while supporting the news ecosystem, including small and medium-sized media across the country, on and off our platforms,” said Claudia Gurfinkel, Facebook’s director of news partnerships in Latin America to the La Nacion newspaper.

Facebook is currently developing commercial partnerships with about 30 news outlets in Argentina. News brands so far include, in alphabetical order: A24.com, Ambito, Clarín, Diario UNO, El Cronista, El Destape, El Litoral, Infobae, La Capital, La Gaceta, La Nacion, La Voz, Los Andes, Minuto Uno, Página/12, Perfil, Río Negro, San Juan 8, Telefe Noticias, Todo Noticias, Uno Entre Ríos and Uno Santa Fe, among others.

The News Innovation Test is an initiative that aims to bring more news links from media companies to the platform, in addition to the stories they already share on their Facebook pages. These additional article links could be displayed in a variety of places, such as information centers, among other new ways to connect people to the news on Facebook.

As part of this investment plan and to support more than 120 small, medium, and digital-native news media, Facebook developed a series of programs in partnership with Adepa, Fopea and the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), SembraMedia, a nonprofit organization that supports digital media in Latin America, and collaboration with Adira (Asociación de Diarios del Interior de la República Argentina) to drive digital transformation and build sustainable business models.

GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK ARE BEING FORCED TO HELP

Even before Facebook pledged in February 2021 to invest at least US$1 billion to support journalism over the next three years, Google had already done the same in October 2020.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said back them the US$1bn pledge was to support “quality journalism” and a news industry “critical to a functioning democratic society”.

“The business model for newspapers — based on ads and subscription revenue — has been evolving for more than a century as audiences have turned to other sources,” he said in a blog post. “The internet has been the latest shift, and it certainly won’t be the last . . . we want to play our part by helping journalism in the 21st century.”

Google and Facebook are facing regulatory pressure around the world to make systematic payments for news, most notably through the EU’s copyright directive and a radical code of practice proposed in Australia.

Australian publishers have suggested US tech groups should pay the industry as much as US$500m a year under the national code, expectations that Google has described as “completely extraordinary”.

The group has struck a deal with one small publisher in Australia but Brad Bender, vice-president for Google news products, said work there on the Showcase product “was on pause”. “That proposed law is unworkable for our products,” he said.

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