Facebook will donate £4.5m to fund 80 local newspaper jobs for the next two years, as the company faces further questions over its relationship with the media and long-term impact on the news business.

The social networking company will make the money available to subsidise the cost of trainee journalists based in newsrooms across Britain with the objective of providing “reporting from towns which have lost their local newspaper and beat reporters”.

Facebook has always previously insisted it is more interested in working with publishers to build their revenue rather than giving direct cash transfers to pay for journalists. This scheme, the first Facebook has attempted anywhere in the world, will take the form of a cash donation to the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ), a registered charity.

The organisation will then divide it up in coordination with the local publishers, with trainee journalists on the scheme given formal training and then employed directly by local newspapers for the duration of the two-year pilot scheme.

Charlie Beckett, professor of media at the London School of Economics, broadly welcomed the idea but warned newspaper groups could become dependent on the Facebook cash. He said such a move would change the relationship between publishers and the tech company

“If the cost of these posts is covered by Facebook then you won’t bother spending the money yourself. Over time that’s almost inevitable,” he said.

His academic department this week published a report calling for a similar scheme but with greater independent oversight and mandatory protections to ensure funding is secure after the two-year pilot. “The risk isn’t that Facebook can’t afford it. This is peanuts for them. If Facebook decided in a couple of years’ time that the heat is off them they could shift the money elsewhere,” Beckett said.

The NCTJ chief executive, Joanne Butcher, acknowledged there were concerns in the publishing industry about the company’s impact on the news business, but said: “Our experience of working with Facebook has been a very positive one.

“The view I have is that Facebook is sincere in its hope that this will lead to the creation of more relevant, timely local news. In terms of our charitable objectives we are there to attract, train, and qualify outstanding journalists.”

As yet, there are no details of where the jobs will be based, although recruitment for the new positions is expected to start from January. The scheme will place an emphasis on finding trainees from a range of socio-economic backgrounds and include school leavers, in a bid to make newsrooms more representative of the audiences they serve. Salaries are expected to reflect trainee status; the NCTJ says a typical wage for such a job is about £17,500 a year.

Regional newspaper groups insisted they would continue to run their own trainee schemes and not simply use the new reporters – who are expected to focus on “community” reporting rather than court or specialist journalism – to replace existing jobs.

Five of the largest regional publishers, which cover outlets in most major cities, will be invited to apply to the fund: Reach, Newsquest, Midlands News Association, Archant and JPI Media, the new owner of the defunct Johnston Press titles, which went into administration at the weekend.

“We know that we’re in a difficult industry,” said Laura Adams, the content director at Archant, which publishes titles including the Eastern Daily Press and Islington Gazette. “Our teams have shrunk and we’ve had to make many different efficiencies but this is positive because we can invest.”

Google, which is separately battling regulation of its Google News service, has given cash sums to publishers for many years through its News Initiative programme.

Traditional publishers have an uneasy relationship with Facebook and Google, which some blame for taking away the advertising revenue that previously subsidised large regional newsrooms. However, both send substantial traffic to websites, with publishers becoming increasingly reliant on them for readers.

Facebook helped revolutionise the news industry during the early part of the decade with chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a personalised newspaper, sending enormous numbers of readers towards stories as publishers reconfigured their newsrooms to ride the viral publishing boom.

But a series of scandals involving misinformation on the network, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as US president and the 2016 EU referendum, has caused it to re-evaluate its role in the news ecosystem – meaning many publishers have seen a decrease in the numbers of readers referred by the social network.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Zuckerberg told a staff meeting that the company was suffering from “bad morale” as a result of “bullshit” attacks in the media, and reiterated his willingness to fire employees who leaked information. The remarks were then leaked to the media.