Journalism

France has hailed a victory in its long-running quest for fairer action from tech companies after Facebook reached an agreement with a group of national and regional newspapers to pay for content shared by its users. Facebook announced a licensing agreement with the APIG alliance of French national and regional newspapers, which includes Le Parisien and Ouest-France as well as smaller titles.

Facebook is looking to introduce more news products for its News Tab in the coming months, including more curated collections around big events and breaking news. The News Tab, a separate destination for news on Facebook from publishers selected by the tech giant, has helped the company address regulatory scrutiny that it doesn't do enough to combat misinformation. It is currently live in the US, UK, Australia and Germany, with other English-speaking countries in consideration.

As social media and technology companies face criticism for not doing enough to stem the flow of misleading information on their platforms, a sizable portion of Americans continue to turn to these sites for news. A little under half (48%) of U.S.

The sad fact is that America’s news and information ecosystem is eating away at our democracy.  And we are not paying attention, partly because neither traditional nor new media are living up to their responsibility to cover the issue. They’re not about to discipline themselves. (And how laughable it is to see expensive ads from Facebook saying that it supports updating internet regulations when, of course, they will fight to the death anything resembling real public interest oversight.) The larger point here is that successful self-government depends upon a well-informed citizenry.

Radio and television stations’ local content – particularly news – provides great value for audiences on the major technology platforms. However, broadcasters are not fairly compensated for this valuable content because of the way the markets currently operate. The reason for that is simple – these tech platforms have substantial market power in their provision of services, and they use that power for advancing their own growth and benefit to the detriment of local broadcast journalism.

The House Antitrust Subcommittee debated an antitrust bill that would give news publishers collective bargaining power with online platforms like Facebook and Google, putting the spotlight on a proposal aimed at chipping away at the power of Big Tech. At a hearing. Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, emerged as a leading industry voice in favor of the law. He took a divergent path from his tech counterparts, pointing to an imbalance in power between publishers and tech platforms.

House Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-RI), Ranking Member Ken Buck (R-CO), Rep Mark DeSaulnier (D-CA), and Senate Antitrust Subcommittee Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) announced the introduction of the bipartisan Journalism Competition and Preservation Act that will allow small news outlets to band together to negotiate with large online platforms like Google and Facebook. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act will establish a temporary, 48-month safe harbor that allows small news publishers to negotiate collectively with online platforms to protect Americans’

The residents of Thursday Island, a speck on the archipelago Torres Strait Islands, have relied for years on Facebook to learn of everything from cyclone warnings to crayfish prices. The platform doesn’t eat up data the way other websites do, a priority for the remote communities, where people often use prepaid phones. Newspapers and radio stations with staffs made up of indigenous reporters publish Facebook updates in local dialects—a critical feature for those for whom English is a third or fourth language. It’s as real-time as the island can get.

Democrats are morphing their scrutiny of online falsehoods into a broader campaign against misinformation on right-leaning television outlets — a development that Republicans and some media organizations are calling a government attack on the First Amendment. The Democratic efforts include a House hearing where lawmakers lambasted conservative-leaning broadcasters and ca

Facebook said it would spend at least $1 billion to license material from news publishers over the next three years, a pledge that comes as tech giants face scrutiny from governments around the world over paying for news content that appears on their platforms. The spending plans are in addition to $600 million that Facebook paid since 2018 in deals with publishers like the Guardian, Financial Times and others to populate its Facebook News product in some countries.