‘To sit down with them is valuable’: With $3m in grants and advice, Facebook finds favor from local newspapers

Many big publishers have a fraught relationship with Facebook over everything from its dominance over the ad market to a new political and policy, but the platform is drawing praise from local news publishers. Facebook in June wrapped up a three-month-long Local News Subscriptions Accelerator program. In three gatherings in New York, Austin, and Facebook’s offices in Menlo Park, Facebook brought together people from 14 metro papers representing the country’s big newspaper chains to exchange best practices in growing subscriptions at local papers. The participants, which included the Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle and Seattle Times, met monthly, got training from experts and designed programs to put the training into action, which Facebook is funding with grants totaling $3 million. The impact of the $200,000 grants won’t be known for a while, but given the general climate tension between publishers and Facebook, there was a feeling of pleasant surprise when the program ended. (Facebook is evaluating how to continue the program but didn’t have specifics.)