Solutionist Philanthrocapitalism and Its Impact on News Outlets

The final speakers in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session are Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos and Lucia Mesquita, who are working with the concept of philanthrocapitalism to examine the funding of journalism in the Global South. This philanthrocapitalism represents an evolution of funding models in recent decades: a substantial number of private organisations, including major digital platforms, with a strong focus on capitalist business efficiency are now providing a great deal of the available funding.

An example for this is the Google News Innovation Challenge, providing grants to smaller and larger journalism organisations. How does this affect the relationships between news organisations and platforms, and does this create new dependencies on these platforms? The project conducted interviews with some 34 GNI grantees in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East to explore this.

Most of these grants go to established news organisations; these support the development of minimal viable products, but do not see them through to their full implementation. The grants are thus essential for further technological development, especially for smaller organisations that often lack technological expertise for development – but working together on technology projects can be challenging because of the differing expectations of such project.

The funding processes and reporting requirements for the GNI are far easier than for other grant schemes; but the work on these projects also consumes staff time that could be used elsewhere, and the minimum viable products they produce end up dying after the conclusion of the projects because there is no funding for their further development, deployment, and maintenance. These technologies therefore do not necessarily lead to more quality journalism. Only the larger organisations tend to be able to sustain these developments in the longer term.

These projects also generate a perception by journalistic organisations that technology is a solution to their problems; this is not necessarily the case, however. News organisations are socialised into a Silicon Valley-inspired solutionist mindset – there is a need to develop a more responsible stance towards innovation.