UK publishers are increasingly confident that Boris Johnson’s government will pass Australia-style legislation forcing Google and Meta to pay for news.
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The Compass Experiment’s uncertain future
An earlier version of this piece was featured in the Tow Center for Digital Journalism’s weekly newsletter.
In March 2019, Craig Forman, then McClatchy’s president and CEO, announced a new partnership with Google News’ Local Experiments project. Dubbed the Compass Experiment, its goal was to create three digital-only outlets in communities with little access to local news, with help from Google as a technology and innovation partner. According to Forman’s announcement, the Compass Experiment’s local news sites would be wholly owned and operated by McClatchy, a 163-year-old, family-run company that oversees dozens of newspapers. The project was to be funded for three years through the Google News Initiative, a wide-ranging endeavor that the company started in 2018 with a pledge to invest $300 million dollars over the course of three years to aid the ailing news industry, which has seen more than 2,100 newsrooms disappear since 2
Facebook shut down news sharing in Australia, and Google threatened to pull out of the country altogether over a new media law. But that’s not stopping regulators in other countries from preparing similar regulations.