The Writers’ Arena Beckons: Facebook Spends Massive $5 Million to Enter Substack Race

In its efforts to compete against the burgeoning trend of email newsletters, epitomized by the success of Substack, Facebook is trying to recruit journalists to its platform to publish. According toReuters , Facebook is spending $5 million paying local journalists in multi year deals.

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Growing the Independent Creator Space

The publishing platform was initially announced by Facebook in March. Among its features for writers is a free, self-publishing tool for creating and sending newsletters, integration with Facebook Pages, the ability for journalists to create Facebook Groups to grow community support, a dashboard to help writers understand how their content is performing, and more.

On the reader side, there will also be new discovery tools to “help audiences easily discover new content and writers.”

At the time it introduced the platform,Facebook noted that:

The independent creator space is growing. We fully support the work that others are doing and want to ensure that we can provide additional avenues for growth and monetization as well. We’re just beginning this work and look forward to collaborating with creators of all kinds to build products and features that can have a meaningful impact in sustaining their work.

Facebook is reportedly looking to promote independent journalism from underrepresented voices. Initially, it is open to journalists in the United States to apply for—beginning Thursday, April 29—with priority given to those who cover news for “Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian or other audiences of color.” Weighting will also be in favor of geographic locations which do not currently have news outlets.

As with Substack, journalists on Facebook’s platform will be able to monetize their work through selling subscriptions. In the future, other monetization tools will be available, although Facebook has yet to reveal what these might be.

Facebook’s News Drive

Whether Facebook can make a success of this new venture remains to be seen. The social networking giant says that it will be investing $1 billion in news over the next three years, of which this current $5 million is just a tiny percentage.

While Facebook is a platform through which news spreads, it is frequently cited as problematic in some cases. That could be anything from moderation challenges inremoving fake news spreading on the platform or Facebook’s tendency to hoover up ad revenue, which has coincided with a dip in such revenue streams for traditional media.

Recently, Facebook clashed with the Australian government over whether it should be paying news outlets for content.