Facebook’s £4.5 million Community News Project wants to solve local journalism’s problems

Social media giant Facebook is launching a new Community News Project in the UK to address the problems faced by local news providers.

The new initiative will see Facebook provide a £4.5 million fund, which the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) and local news providers including Newsquest, Reach and Archant, will use to train and pay the salaries of around 80 journalists over two years.

Local news has been suffering in recent years, mainly as a result of a decline in advertising revenue because businesses are choosing to advertise on platforms such as Facebook and Google.

As a result, newsroom numbers are falling with only 15 per cent of UK journalists working in newspaper publishing, down from 24 per cent in 2012.

Facebook wants to shore up these numbers by offering grants to train new journalists, to ensure communities around the UK benefit from high-quality journalism. The two-year programme will see trainees receive the skills necessary to report on the issues that matter the most to the communities around them.

Depending on their previous experience, the trainees will work towards the NCTJ Diploma or a new National Qualification for community journalism. They will also receive training from Facebook on digital news-gathering skills.

Facebook said: “We're excited about the opportunity to help more local news reach more people through the Community News Project. We hope it can play a small part in boosting community engagement in towns, cities and counties across the UK, and open up new opportunities for the next generation of journalistic talent.”

One aspect of the programme is to ensure that local newsrooms reflect their communities, particularly when it comes to diversity. According to research by the NCTJ, journalists in the UK are more likely to be white, have attended private school, and come from wealthier backgrounds, which isn’t representative of the UK as a whole.

As all the training for the new community journalism roles will be paid for, the aim is to remove some of the barriers that some people face attempting to enter the industry.

This isn't the only initiative currently addressing the problems faced by local news organisations. Last year, the BBC funded 150 new journalism jobs as part of its Local Democracy Reporting scheme, which supports reporters covering news for local organisations as well as the BBC. The idea was to offer funds for new jobs which would lead to more coverage of local news.

In addition, Google has its Google News Initiative, which allows organisations to apply for grants to improve their digital news offering as well as to finance investigations.

This is the first time Facebook has dedicated funds to improving journalism anywhere in the world. However, given the impact the platform has had on the issues facing journalism, whether that's declining revenue or the prevalence of fake news on the social network ahead of Brexit and the 2016 US Presidential Elections, there are questions over whether this is the right approach.

For one, the news providers partnering with Facebook on the scheme said there is no guarantee the community journalists will receive a job at the end of the programme. The trainees will have a salary during the two years, but as local news organisations are facing declining revenues, they may not be able to secure employment afterwards, which is one way in which this scheme may struggle.

Local news, and journalism as a whole, is currently facing a myriad of problems. Whilst that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to tackle them, given the reason behind them often stems from platforms like Facebook, this project may be too little, too late.