Facebook revealed its plans to create a $5 million fund for journalists – which would help them write and curate articles on Facebook’s upcoming newsletter platform. The platform is a free-publishing tool for users to easily create newsletters, to target key audiences on the platform and to earn subscription revenue from readers.
Facebook is welcoming independent journalists – especially those who write material targeted at “Black, Indigenous, Latin, Asian or other audiences of color” – to join the platform. Moreover, Facebook will collaborate with the International Center for Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists to review and select journalists from the submitted applications.
Facebook initially announced their newsletter in March and that they were hoping to provide independent journalists, writers and experts a platform to build a career and to monetize their content:
“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’s newsletter platform launch comes months after Twitter announced its acquisition of the startup newsletter platform Revue. With there being steep competition between social media companies to build an effective newsletter platform – it is quite clear that there is huge demand within the journalism community for a digital way to build a career and earn income.
At the moment, Twitter and Facebook’s biggest competition is the well-established newsletter platform Substack – which has 250,000 paid subscribers overall and has its top ten publishers earning a combined revenue of $7 million annually.
Do you think Facebook can compete with Substack? Let us know in the comments section below!