First batch of Google’s $100 million is paid. Here’s who won big and who didn’t

Every two weeks starting April 30, newsrooms across Canada are receiving cheques in the mail with their share of the $100 million paid by Google as a result of the Online News Act.

The group in charge of disbursing the funds, the Canadian Journalism Collective, has released their first disclosure list, announcing which publications in this first batch of recipients received how much money. 

Out of the total $100 million annual payout, $2 million is reserved for CJC’s operations, $7 million is slated for CBC, $30 million will go to broadcasters, while the remaining $61 million is being split across all other publications that have a footprint on Google and meet certain criteria. Federal regulations for how to apply for these funds took effect on Dec. 19, 2023. 

According to CJC executive director Sarah Spring, the eligibility criteria for these funds were decided by an interim board of publishers before Spring was hired to lead the collective in March 2025. 

“They worked with a lawyer to essentially interpret the Online News Act and turn the language of the Online News Act into eligibility criteria,” Spring told J-Source. 

Out of about 600 applicants, the initial list of recipients includes 108 publications which have received a total of over $22 million. 

The payout amounts so far range from millions — $4.2 million for Postmedia Network and $2 million to The Globe and Mail — to thousands — about $5,000 each to Peterborough Currents in Ontario and Drumheller Mail in Alberta. 

To qualify for any funds at all, Spring said publications need to produce news that can be looked up on Google, need to have been incorporated by 2023 and have to employ at least two full time equivalent employees with T4s for proof. The amount each outlet gets is determined by the number of employees. 

“Everybody submits their eligible hours that they’ve paid journalists in 2023, and we are paying 60 per cent of what they’re claiming,” Spring said. 

With the fast-changing nature of Canada’s journalism workforce — frequent layoffs, acquisitions, as well as the emergence of new publications — this criteria means some outlets are getting paid for employees that have since been laid off, some are owned by U.S. companies and two so far have been denied altogether. 

Indigenous online publication deemed ineligible

The publisher of IndigiNews, an online Indigenous publication, was informed in mid-March that the outlet does not qualify for any of the $100-million fund this year. 

According to Spring and IndigiNews publisher Eden Fineday, this is because the publication was operating under a parent company in 2023, and its parent company now qualifies to get funding for the employees IndigiNews had that year, even though IndigiNews is now independent and fully Indigenous-led as of January 2025. 

According to a statement published by IndigiNews staff earlier this month, the “executive director of the CJC informed us that we cannot ‘prove’ that IndigiNews employed journalists in 2023, the year upon which this first cycle of funding is based. Because the next round of funding will be based on 2024 staff hours, we have been told we will also be excluded from that funding round as well.”

IndigiNews has been operating since well before 2023. The publication was founded in 2020 by APTN and Discourse Media — now Discourse Community Publishing — and was incubated under parent company DCP for five years, until January 2025.

“IndigiNews’s former parent company is eligible to receive those funds,” reads the statement, referring to money the publication would have received based on its employee count in 2023. IndigiNews’s current leadership, which is now entirely Indigenous, gets none of those funds this year. 

“We did dispute it with the CJC and that was formally denied also,” said Fineday.

Based on its number of employees, Fineday said IndigiNews would have received around $56,000 if they had qualified for a share of the Online News Act funds. Its former parent company, DCP, has received over $107,000, according to the CJC’s disclosure list. 

In a statement provided to J-Source, DCP CEO Brandi Schier said the group “fully acknowledges concerns raised by IndigiNews about equitable access to journalism funding.” 

According to Schier, DCP finalized the process of transferring ownership of IndigiNews to tâpwêwin media in December 2024. The process included selling the publishing assets to tâpwêwin for a symbolic $1 amount and paying back what it called “unspent funding and revenue” that DCP received to support IndigiNews journalism in 2023 and 2024.

“The thing about IndigiNews is we’ve always been precariously funded; we’re in a very precarious position even now,” Fineday told J-Source. “The LJI program was extended until Sept. 30, which is amazing, except we still haven’t seen any money from that.”

The publication employs three full time reporters and one editor along with freelancers and, according to Fineday, its last layoff took place in 2021 after the federal Local Journalism Initiative program scaled back its allocation of positions. Without continued LJI support or other grants, the publication would likely need to cut two full-time reporters.

Spring, who was formerly the executive director of the Documentary Organization of Canada and hails from the filmmaking industry, calls IndigiNews’ ineligibility a “heartbreaking situation” and one she’s looking to rectify.

“I didn’t know about the fact that this is something that happens in the journalism sector until this came up,” Spring said. “There’s obviously something that has to be changed for the next round of funding, because we weren’t able to support IndigiNews this round.” 

The CJC’s disclosure list does not contain any Indigenous-led publications, which Spring said is because of a technicality. 

The first batch of recipients, she said, is almost all businesses that are federally verified as a qualified Canadian journalism organization and can claim the Canadian journalism labour tax credit. 

Publications that applied under ‘Indigenous news’ categories and were approved are up next, she said, with a second list of recipients to be shared by CJC on May 28. 

The second publication that has thus far been denied funding by CJC is so far unknown.

Question marks

A related funding distribution quagmire that CJC is contending with involves who gets the money when one publication has acquired another after 2023, and both had submitted applications. 

For example, Postmedia Network — which is majority owned by a U.S. asset management company — bought Atlantic Canada’s largest newspaper chain, Saltwire, in summer 2024. The new parent company then immediately laid off about 30 per cent of Saltwire’s staff. 

Both Saltwire and Postmedia Network had applied for a share of the $100 million, Spring said, based on the number of journalists each employed a year prior to this acquisition-and-layoff cycle. The question of who gets Saltwire’s share is up in the air. 

“We have too many question marks right now to really have a firm answer on exactly what to do,” Spring said. “This is something we’re actively looking at…I can’t really comment on it.” 

The disclosure list contains other publications that are linked but have received their own individual chunks of Google money. For Kelowna online publication Castanet and its parent company Glacier Media, for example, both were given hundreds of thousands of dollars separately. 

Audits and accountability

Though the amount each publication receives is based on the number of employees, Spring said the purpose of the Online News Act was not to compensate individual journalists.

“The logical way to think about it is that it’s money for journalists, but …the law isn’t actually framed in that way,” she said. “It’s compensating the news organization as contributing to the landscape of news in Canada for the fact that the articles that they produced were being indexed on Google, and Google was not giving them any kind of compensation.”

There is no requirement for recipient news businesses to hire back laid off employees or spend their funds specifically on digital news operations. But they are required to spend it on journalists. 

“We’re allowed to (conduct) spot audits if we have any question marks about someone not spending that money on journalists,” Spring said. 

For the purposes of transparency and accountability, the CJC will be producing its own annual audit to reveal how the organization spends its yearly $2 million. 

Spring is the CJC’s first salaried employee, she said, and along with a coordinator and application verifiers, makes up an office of five. 

“I came on board with a fund that was midway through operating, [and] also seeing some things that could be improved, because it really was quite a small operation doing an enormous amount of work,” Spring said. 

“Our plan is that, when the next round of applications open in July, we’re going to have a functional website so that people can actually access the information they need to figure out if they’re eligible to apply. It’ll be a highly functional system at that point so it’ll be easy to log in and see what the status of your application is.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 3:44 p.m. PT on May 30, 2025 to include comment from Discourse Community Publishing’s CEO.