In another move by dominant internet platforms at least to appear to support struggling traditional media,Facebook Inc. will invest $300 million over the next three years to support local news in the U.S., the company announced today.

The money will go toward programs, partnerships and content, said Facebook, adding that it felt responsible for helping local news organizations. The company has been partly blamed for the decline in journalism, though Google, Craigslist and traditional media firms themselves all share responsibility.

“We’re going to continue fighting fake news, misinformation, and low-quality news on Facebook,” said Campbell Brown, Facebook’s vice president of global news partnerships. “But we also have an opportunity, and a responsibility, to help local news organizations grow and thrive.”

The company added that it will help such organizations build sustainable business models, emphasizing the importance of having local news sources. “Over time, we think this work can have the added benefit of fostering civic engagement, which research suggests is directly correlated with people’s reading of local news,” Brown said.

A similar initiative was launched in the U.K. in November last year when Facebook invested $6 million in a “Community News Project.” It was intended to train journalists to work at local newspapers and to encourage more reporting from towns that had lost their local media during the age of social media.

Part of the money will go toward improving technology to help organizations better gather news while also creating new products. As in the U.K., Facebook will also train new journalists to work in newsrooms. Some $2 million will go toward this training, with the outcome intending to bring 1,000 new journalists to local news outlets over the next five years.

An additional $5 million will go toward supporting in-depth stories from communities, with at least 12 stories chosen as a recipient of a grant each year.

Facebook said it will also expand its “Accelerator pilot,” a program started last year to help local news media stay afloat by getting more subscriptions and memberships. “This year, we’ll commit over $20 million to continue the local Accelerator in the United States and to expand the model globally, including in Europe,” Brown said.

There have been some critics of the move, just as there were in the U.K. Those criticisms relate mostly to Facebook “controlling the supply chain” of news, and further increasing its power.

For the most part, though, the project is seen as positive. Since Facebook has been blamed for being the go-to platform for “fake news” disseminators, supporting journalism with integrity can’t be a bad thing.

Photo: Scott Schiller/Flickr