Funding Intermediaries: Google and Facebook’s Strategy to Capture Journalism

Abstract

With more and more governments around the world considering or having already passed laws aiming to regulate the relationship between news publishers and online platforms, primarily, by ensuring a form of remuneration of the former from the latter, we ought to understand the current situation. This paper seeks to inquire whom platforms fund, how and why. We created a dataset of organizations that have participated in Google News Initiative or Facebook Journalism Project by gathering data from communicative and informative material found on the websites of platforms and beneficiaries. Through our analysis, we identified stakeholders that play a crucial role in the realization of platforms’ funding programs, whom we call funding intermediaries. Therefore, this paper contends that the platforms’ strategic decision has not only been to distribute money through a complicated governance structure, but also to target parts of the industry that have been hurt by an ongoing crisis, aggravated by the platforms’ dominance of the advertising industry. However, funding journalism ensures neither media capture, i.e., positive or lack of critical coverage, nor regulatory capture, i.e., avoiding or adjusting regulation. As a result, we ultimately propose to approach capture as a political-economic concept to study platform power.