Report: Google Will Fund Local News Outlets with McClatchy

Google is reportedly launching a project with McClatchy that will fund local news outlets in an effort to combat the decline of local news. The tech titan claims it will have no editorial control over the outlets.

According to Axios, the Local Experiments Project will “fund dozens of new local news websites around the country and eventually around the world,” however Google claims it will “have no editorial control over the sites.” Google is partnering in the effort with McClatchy, a publisher that owns 29 daily newspapers around the country.

“Big tech companies like Google and Facebook are often blamed for the demise of the local news business model. Now, both are trying to fix the broken local news ecosystem for the sake of their audiences, which they say crave more local news,” Axios reported, adding that a “partnership between Google and McClatchy” will “launch three new, digital-only local news operations on multiple platforms.”

Axios further reported that “McClatchy will choose 3 cities that are less than a half million people for the site launches,” and “there will eventually be people on the ground in those cities.”

“Smaller cities will be the focus. McClatchy CEO Craig Forman says it’s targeting cities with less than a half million people because that’s where local news decay is worst,” the news outlet noted.

In a statement, Google’s Vice President of News, Richard Gingras, proclaimed, “We will be spending many millions of dollars on this overall,” and reportedly explained that small cities “are important because people there have a strong sense of community, which can harder to tap into at the metro and national levels.”

This month, it was reported that Facebook wants to boost local news, but is largely unable to due to “news deserts.”

“One-third of Americans live in a place where Facebook can’t find enough local news being shared on its service to justify building a localized aggregator for that area,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “Facebook said it needs to be able to identify at least five news articles a day related to a city that are shared on the platform to justify building a Today In [local news system] for that city.”

“The places where this isn’t happening aren’t only in sparsely populated areas,” continued the Journal. “Even high-density states such as New Jersey have significant areas where Facebook was unable to find sufficient local-news coverage.”

Engadget reported that last week that, “Approximately 1,800 papers have shut down in the US since around the time Facebook came online 15 years ago.”