Facebook has planned a three-year commitment to invest $300 million towards news/journalism sector.
"We don't want publishers to be dependent on us, but we do want to support them," Campbell Brown, Facebook's Vice President of global news partnerships, said in a telephone interview, according to CNN. Some of the allocations out of the $300 million commitment are yet to be finalized. Facebook will hold a two-day summit in March for further discussions with local news publishers, as revealed by Brown (according to CNN's report).
Facebook’s funding will support non-profit organizations like the Pulitzer Center and Report for America, among other publishers. Local websites and newspapers have apparently been facing thinning readership largely due to proliferation of social networking/digital giants like Facebook and Google who are rapidly grabbing the largest shares in the advertising industry.