The state’s largest media conglomerate has announced it is partnering in a new project with “Google News Initiative” – which by design aims to do away with print newspapers.
The Maine Trust for Local News, an arm of a Colorado-based “nonprofit,” the National Trust for Local News, already stopped printing its weeklies earlier this year.
Now it says it is expecting a project-funding award from the initiative whose mission favors digital over print.
Though the amount of the cash layout is so far a secret, InfluenceWatch.org, a public-policy watchdog, says the initiative has two clear major goals: 1. Phasing out printed newspapers to transition to online formats, and 2. Relying more on “artificial intelligence” for putting stories together.
News of the plans of the national trust – which owns the flagship Portland Press Herald and several other dailies in Maine – to join the initiative comes from Tom Wiley, the national group’s recently hired CEO.
Wiley broke the news on his LinkedIn page, saying newspapers he oversees are now competing with each other for a chunk of Google’s money.
What he doesn’t say is what InfluenceWatch.org will: that the Google News Initiative was founded “to transition to predominately digital media and away from traditional print media.”
The initiative, created in 2018, has hundreds of millions of dollars set aside to help finance a growing number of newspapers nationwide to ditch print for digital.
Google, a digital platform competing with every print newspaper from Maine to California and all points in between, denies that its goal is a takeover of the nation’s newspapers.
“Through the Google News Initiative, we collaborate with the news industry in creating, testing and implementing new ways to reach readers in the digital age,” Google says.
The initiative also says it “works with news publishers and journalists to fight misinformation.”
What exactly does Google consider ”misinformation?”
InfluenceWatch is pretty sure exactly what that means – presenting news lacking a liberal editorial slant.
The initiative “has partnered with openly left-leaning news outlets, as well as ostensibly mainstream metropolitan-liberal news sources including the Washington Post and the New York Times,” according to InfluenceWatch.
Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who maintain majority voting control of its parent company Alphabet, Inc., generally hold left-of-center or liberal political views and have donated to Democrat causes.
Brin in particular has made substantial donations to left-leaning organizations and Democrat campaigns.
Besides wanting newspapers to avoid liberal “misinformation,” Google is also promoting the use of AI to produce articles.
“The Google News Initiative has stated that in the future, the program will employ artificial intelligence to support more projects such as the initiative’s Local News Experiments Project, which funds and supports local news operations,” InfluenceWatch says.
The Local News Experiments Project is what Wiley, who oversees the bulk of Maine’s journalism, recently announced he’s helping promote as part of his job.
He’s giving it a cute new name at the company he heads: “News Innovation Sprint,” a competition among his own newspapers to see who can pitch the best journalistic ideas to get a slice of the Google News Initiative’s cash.
The implications seem to be obvious for the future of the Maine Trust for Local News: eventually phasing out all remaining print products as well as leaning more on artificial intelligence for doing journalistic research.
The national trust two years ago bought five dailies – the Press Herald, Lewiston Sun Journal, Brunswick Times Record, Kennebec Journal, and Waterville Morning Sentinel – and several weekly papers from Maine Today Media.
The trust then phased out the print versions of many of its smaller newly-acquired papers across the state in favor of a digital format.
It announced nine months ago it was “eliminating or reducing print publications of weekly newspapers and shifting to mail delivery of daily newspapers in some markets as part of a series of steps to cut costs and focus resources on digital platforms.”
That’s the same time it then laid off nearly 50 employees.
Two months later, the trust decided it wanted nothing to do with running a printing press so it reached an agreement with Reade Brower, aka Maine Today Media, to manage its printing plant through his company RFB Advertising.
The printing operation is located in South Portland in the same building that houses the Portland Press Herald news staff.
Brower previously owned the printing facility before selling it to the trust along with the newspapers.
