It was announced as a large-scale offensive in early 2019. And it almost sounded too good to be true: The Meta group, known at the time as Facebook, had promised to give journalism a total of 300 million dollars to support local media in particular in the digital transformation. The German-speaking media market would also get some of the windfall. This made the eyes of the industry light up. At that time, Google had long been known as a powerful financial sponsor of media projects, but Facebook’s announcement now promised another source of money for expensive innovations.
At least in the case of Facebook/Meta, now, a few years later, it looks like the beginning of a turnaround. “Facebook is ready to say goodbye to news,” headlined the well-known American industry portal Nieman Lab. And also in Germany, some important employees of Meta, who have taken care of the cooperation with news media, are saying goodbye. Apparently, this also includes Jesper Doub, who came from “Spiegel” around four years ago and held the title “Director International News Partnerships”. Most recently, Doub took care of all partnerships worldwide – outside the USA.
There was no official confirmation of the departure when Meta asked, and Doub could not be reached for comment either. It is clear that the personal details are also related to the massive job cuts in the group. We are talking about 11,000 employees who have to go around the world – it is not known how many jobs will be affected in Germany.
Background: In recent years, Google and Meta have become the world’s most important sponsors of new developments in journalism, apart from the classic sources of income through subscriptions and advertising customers. Similar to Google, Facebook also tried to get on well with the media system on several levels. On the one hand via the local journalism relief offensive mentioned at the beginning, then via the “Facebook Journalism Project” (now “Meta Journalism Project”), which was headed by the well-known US television journalist Campbell Brown. Here, the technology group presented itself as a supporter of innovative journalism concepts and new business models – and made itself popular accordingly.
On the other hand, also through more classic license deals with publishers, where the use of journalistic contributions was paid for by the platform – here Meta concluded agreements with many German media companies for the “Facebook News” service (also with the Axel Springer publishing house, in which e.g. WELT is published. When asked about the cooperation with Meta, Axel Springer said: “The aim of our partnership with Meta is to make the relationship between content providers and platforms fairer and more predictable for both sides. We have also succeeded in this. Our global cooperation is ongoing further very good.”).
The narrative was always that the partnerships were intended to promote “high-quality, independent journalism”. In the case of project-related cooperation, the group acts as a kind of wealthy and elitist training institution that prepares its students (i.e. the journalists) with training courses and tools for surviving in the digital world. A May 2021 statement said: “As part of the Facebook Journalism Project, we have worked with more than 2,600 publishers worldwide and invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a variety of initiatives. Since 2018, we have invested $600 million in the news industry and plan to invest at least $1 billion more over the next three years.”
In the case of license deals, on the other hand, they are acting halfway on an equal footing: the delivery of journalistic content by reputable news media is intended to remedy the increasing spread of false content – and thus position Facebook as a platform for high-quality media content. The hope is that users will spend more time on the Meta Group’s platforms, which also include Instagram and the WhatsApp messenger service. And indeed, Facebook was and is dependent on content designed to attract users and keep them on the platform. The group does not produce or sell its own content.
The publishers always feel cheated by the powerful platforms. These license agreements in particular were intended to mend the relationship that had been divided for years about the free use of journalistic content by Facebook (and other platforms). The reform of European copyright law, which includes a so-called ancillary copyright, which obliges the platforms to pay for the use of journalistic content, also led to the hardening of the ongoing conflict.
The original barter – high-quality journalistic content in exchange for distribution and attention on the platform – was not considered financially viable enough, at least from the media’s point of view, since Google and Facebook in particular are massively sucking off digital advertising revenues. The forecast is that this trend will continue to worsen.
Against this background, the various initiatives and projects in the news business were declared – at least by Facebook – as a new turning point to change the difficult relationship to journalism. In the best-case scenario, a new source of revenue should be created to compensate for the slump in sales in the printed media business. On the other hand, these new interdependencies created financial dependencies and caused heated debates in recent years: Were people really willing to voluntarily hang on to the drip of one of the gravediggers of the journalistic business model?
When asked by WELT about Meta’s future strategy, a spokesman classified the importance of journalistic content: “For the majority of people, news is only a fraction of what they use our platforms for. Facebook and Instagram users are increasingly interested in content created by creators, especially videos.” The rep emphasizes that Meta will continue to help news media “align their strategies,” including Facebook News Offers exist – after all, current contracts have to be fulfilled – and cooperation with fact-checkers, for example from the German Press Agency (dpa), would endure. It is of course unclear how long this guarantee of existence will apply.
But the reference to the short videos also shows where Meta is headed. The pandemic has given the so-called creator economy a boost, which the group is now taking a closer look at. Content creators – the community currently includes around 50 million people worldwide – are amateurs who film quickly edited moving images on all sorts of topics and post them on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram to become known there and earn money with the attention. Such videos attract a great deal of predominantly young users and, in case of doubt, generate more advertising sales than news, which is of a negative nature, especially in times of war and crisis.
All of this has little to do with the support of professional journalism – on the contrary, the refocusing on the creator scene may contribute to the journalistic job profile being diluted even more. In combination with the dramatic loss in value of the Meta group (the share fell by 64 percent over the course of the year), new priorities are set. Not to mention the big bet on building a metaverse, a kind of internet update that meta boss Mark Zuckerberg is pouring billions of dollars into.
When asked if Meta distances itself from news journalism, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute in Oxford, says: “It is clear that Meta is withdrawing from directly supporting journalism via grants.” His assessment: “I think that reflects the fact that journalism isn’t particularly important to its core offerings and business, and that the company — even before sales plummeted — has felt that investments over the past few years haven’t done much in terms of the recognition it presents itself as A major project by the Reuters Institute on people’s trust in news, which Meta is sponsoring with several million euros, is scheduled to run until the summer of next year, as agreed.
According to US media reports, Meta manager Campbell Brown told employees back in July that the company would spend less time developing Facebook News. According to a report by the business online service Axios, the three-year contracts negotiated with the US media will not be extended, at least not on the basis of monetary payments. And the so-called “top stories”, which were previously compiled by employees, could soon be created by an algorithm. Support for Instant Articles, a way to read news articles within Facebook, announced with great fanfare in 2015, is expected to end next spring.
As much as the motives for promoting journalism through Meta can be questioned: In fact, in the new funding environment of the tech giants, interesting projects have emerged that probably would not have been financed otherwise. At the time the local journalism help was announced, Meta was promoting the aforementioned Oxford project. Facebook was – and so far – also (alongside Google) with significant sums in the millions since 2015 the most important financier of the journalism festival in Perugia, Italy, which has developed into the largest class reunion of European journalists since 2012.
In Germany, for example, funds went to the Correctiv research editorial team, which was originally funded purely by the foundation, for example to set up a fact check newsroom. Educational institutions such as the Hamburg Media School have also succeeded in acquiring funding from Facebook for workshops and journalistic training programs in recent years. In this way, the group has woven a tight network of contacts and connections into German journalism. This not only created financial dependencies, but also enabled resilient networks and professional exchange.
Apart from the personnel departures, there are still no concrete official announcements – but the turnaround has obviously been heralded. Those initiatives and organizations that depend on Meta funding, as in the USA, could face financing problems in the medium term. Publishers would, also in the medium term, lose sales on the income side, which would be unpleasant in view of the fundamentally difficult situation with falling advertising revenues.
The cooled enthusiasm for journalism says something about Meta specifically, but more importantly says something about tech companies’ idiosyncratic journalism relationships in general. The desire for support was evidently there, even if the motives may not have been entirely altruistic. But when it ultimately comes down to it, you’ll have your own front door swept.
*Disclosure: Co-author Stephan Weichert has worked with Meta’s News Partnerships team for several years and provided the Hamburg Media School (HMS) with multi-million dollar third-party funding in 2017 and 2019 to implement a continuing education program he developed raised for journalists who have flowed to HMS. Today, Weichert heads the independent VOCER Institute for Digital Resilience together with the journalist Alexander von Streit.
