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 Ch. 1: Funding Fit |
 Ch. 2: Impact |
 Ch. 3: Success |
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Overview
From bedroom communities outside New York City to the rural exurbs of Boston to postindustrial behemoths like Philadelphia, new media makers have begun launching news and information projects to fill information gaps in their communities.
These are not random acts of journalism, such as eyewitnesses uploading photos or videos of a major catastrophe. Nor are they the rants of Internet cowboys opining on the state of neighborhood affairs in their individual blogs.
Rather, these new projects are often organized acts of journalism, constructed with an architecture and a mind-set to investigate discrete topics or cover geographic areas. The projects provide deliberate, accurate and fair accounts of day-to-day happenings in communities that nowadays have little or no daily news coverage.
And increasingly, as legacy news organizations fret about future business models or fail entirely, these shoestring start-ups are attracting support from philanthropic organizations whose mission statements never mention the word “media.”
J-Lab has discovered that 180 community, family and other foundations have contributed nearly $128 million since 2005 to news and information initiatives in communities across the United States. Our initial reporting excluded grants to public broadcasters because we’ve long known of the generous philanthropic support for their work. Nor do we include in this amount such things as underwriting for documentaries or grants for journalism training or for student news services.
“Good-quality journalism – knowledge of what’s going on in the community – is in my estimation just about as important as K-12 education.”
- Buzz Woolley, Founder,
Voice of San Diego
This is funding that went to support at least 115 news projects in 17 states and the District of Columbia in the last four years, with some projects receiving multiyear funding. We’re sure there are more grants we haven’t yet found, but one thing is clear: Philanthropic foundations are increasingly embracing the idea that journalism projects can be a funding fit.
Some foundations are just getting their feet wet in this arena, enticed by matching grants from traditional journalistic funders such as the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation or urged by the alarm bells sounding as news coverage vanishes in communities across the country.
For the most part these foundations are not so much seeking to shore up commercial news enterprises as they are looking to shore up community knowledge sharing. They are looking to build community, not simply to cover it.
And they can be forthright in acknowledging this. Listen to San Diego philanthropist Buzz Woolley, who founded the enterprising Voice of San Diego in 2004 out of frustration that news critical to the city’s health was not being brought to citizens’ attention.
“We did not start this as an act of journalism or an act of business,” Woolley said of his news site. “We did this as a civic effort to provide information to the community about things that are important.”
Woolley likened journalism’s civic importance to that of public schooling: “Good-quality journalism – knowledge of what’s going on in the community – is in my estimation just about as important as K-12 education.”
Many funders see their support as no less than a bulwark to defend democracy. “The core of all this is that democracy needs a free flow of information,” said Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of the Knight Foundation, which has blazed a trail in funding news start-ups with initiatives such as the Knight News Challenge and the Knight Community Information Challenge and with support for J-Lab’s New Voices community news projects.
Now Ibargüen is jump-starting a role for other foundations to fund media by promising to match their support for community news and information projects to the tune of $24 million over the next five years. The first call for projects attracted 170 proposals for $5 million in Knight funding. Twenty-one winners were announced in February 2009.
A Starting Point
Whether you want to start a community media project or possibly fund one, this toolkit is a place to start. It includes online and video resources to capture lessons from the new media makers and their funders, and it draws on J-Lab’s continuing research and discovery from the field.
In the coming pages you’ll find chapters on:
- How foundations and philanthropists are matching their missions with media.
- How new media makers are affecting their communities.
- How site funders and site operators measure success.
- Who’s funding what: a database of grants since 2005.
Plus we offer short case studies of four successful grant-funded initiatives:
- New Haven Independent and one of the Connecticut foundations that helps fund the site.
- PlanPhilly in Philadelphia.
- Voice of San Diego in California.
- New Castle News & Opinion Weekly in Chappaqua, N.Y.
The accompanying videos offer some compelling looks at how citizens and professional journalists are creating new kinds of news sites.
If you’re already involved in community media, we hope this toolkit will give you a sense of the larger landscape as well as tips and resources to help you stay in the game.
Jan Schaffer
Executive Director
J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism
May 2009