The problem Facebook is running into: Many parts of the country dont have enough local news to sustain that special section of the app.
Once it figured that out, Facebook looked at the geographic distribution in which the article was shared to figure out which publications are local.
Roughly 35 percent of Midwestern, Northeastern, and Southern Facebook users couldnt have seen more than five local news stories on Facebook about their town on any single day over the past four weeks, according to Facebook.
On a state level, New Jersey was the worst place for finding local news on Facebook, with 58 percent of users unable to do so on any day in the last month.
At least some of that money will go toward a new program the company announced Monday called Facebook Journalism Project Community.
On one hand, its certainly positive that Facebook has taken an interest in preserving local news; last year when it announced its big News Feed algorithm change, it added that it will also push more local news to users feeds.
On the other hand, Facebook is partly responsible for the decline of local news, so it should have an interest in preserving it not only for the good of readers, but more news organizations means more content for Facebook and more reasons for people to keep using its products.
Companies like Facebook and Google have completely changed the distribution of news, and they dominate the advertising business that has historically supported digital news formats.
Facebook controls about 22 percent of all digital ad spend in the US, according to eMarketer, and helped hasten print ad revenues decline.
Original article