Funding Tools Archives

Report

Toolkit

Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Journalism: What Funders Can Do

Michelle Polyak and Katie Donnelly, Dot Connector Studio

October 16, 2019

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are fundamental to fostering robust American journalism that supports a healthy democracy. The failure of newsrooms to fully reflect their communities, to build a culture of inclusion that supports and retains diverse staff, and to foster equitable models of reporting that reflect the truth of people’s lived experiences is undermining trust in media and risking the sustainability of the press.

Foundations can play a role in addressing these concerns, but too often funders have exacerbated these problems through grantmaking that reinforces inequalities. Funders must therefore urgently refocus their efforts on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as the right thing to do, both morally and strategically.

Back to Ideas

Blog

A Bold Funder Collaboration Focuses on Supporting Journalism that Strengthens Democracy

Josh Stearns

November 1, 2018

Something remarkable starts today. Across the country 155 newsrooms are banding together for a year-end campaign to stand up for journalism that strengthens democracy. Today is the first day of NewsMatch, a national call to action to support trustworthy local news and critical investigative reporting. For the next two months a group of funders will double donations to nonprofit newsrooms across the country. At a moment when news deserts are spreading and journalism is under attack, nonprofit newsrooms are expanding and refuse to back down. They are united in their commitment to serve the public, Now more than ever, they need the public’s support.

From November 1 to December 31 individual donations of $1,000 or less will be matched, dollar for dollar, up to $25,000 per newsroom. At NewsMatch.org you can search for participating newsrooms that report on issues you care about or cover your community, and you can donate to them all in one place.

Now in its third year, NewsMatch is a unique partnership between local and national foundations and companies that aims to raise millions of dollars for quality news, build the long term capacity of the nonprofit news sector, and raise awareness of the important role of journalism in our democracy. Local and national funders interested in supporting public interest journalism can still get involved (reach out to me at jstearns@democracyfund.org to discuss how NewsMatch can meet your goals)

Originally created by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in 2016, NewsMatch has more than doubled in dollars, donors, and participants in three years as it has become a platform for foundations and corporations to pool their funds and expand their impact. “NewsMatch is more than just a campaign. It is a movement that accelerates a new lane of journalism,” writes Karen Rundlet, a Journalism Director at Knight Foundation, “NewsMatch is stronger with multiple sources of financial support.”

New Funders Join NewsMatch to Support Quality News

In 2018 NewsMatch is growing significantly with new funders and newsrooms, representing the increased importance of nonprofit news to keeping our citizens informed, holding our leaders accountable, and covering the issues facing our communities and our nation.

One of the new funders joining NewsMatch in 2018 is the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation. Jonathan Logan, a longtime supporter of investigative reporting in the United States, invests in journalism that creates positive change. “NewsMatch is a perfect fit for us,” Logan said, “we look for opportunities where our support will make a significant difference.” The Jonathan Logan Family Foundation’s gift will both support the national campaign and provide an extra match opportunity to specific local newsrooms. “We are able to support dozens of worthy newsrooms by being part of the main NewsMatch fund, and at the same time offer additional support and incentives to more than a dozen newsrooms in the Deep South and post-Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico, regions of particular importance to us,” Logan said.

Facebook has also significantly increased its support this year, after partnering with NewsMatch in 2017 to raise awareness about the campaign. In August the Facebook Journalism Project announced it was contributing $1 million to the NewsMatch fund. “We are thrilled to do our part to help support these publishers that are providing critical news for communities across the U.S. and helping fill gaps in public information,” said Jason White, Facebook’s director of news partnerships. “This is Facebook’s second year supporting NewsMatch, and over this time, we’ve seen an increase in the importance of nonprofit newsrooms to the local news ecosystem.” Facebook is the first corporation to join the campaign.

In parallel with NewsMatch, at least 20 other foundations and donors have set up local matching efforts with individual newsrooms during the last months of the year. These donors include the University of Texas at El Paso which is providing $65,000 in matching dollars to Borderzine, The Zellerbach Family Foundation and The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation which are supporting Fostering Media Connections, the Asta MacDonald Memorial Match supporting WDET Detroit Public Radio, South Dakota philanthropists Dan and Arlene Kirby who are providing $25,000 in matching dollars to South Dakota News Watch, a match from the PRI-PRX Board, a group of major donors in Michigan who will be matching donations to East Lansing Info, and Hugh and Jackie Bikle, the Calhoun & Christiano Family Fund, and the Randy and Rebecca Wolf Family Fund who together are supporting BenitoLink.com with a $25,000 match.

Foundations Expand Their Support with More Dollars for More Newsrooms

In addition to these new supporters a number of foundations returned to support NewsMatch for a second year, and expanded their support in 2018. The Gates Family Foundation, which supported one newsroom in 2017, is offering an additional $1,500 match to eight Colorado newsrooms in 2018 as part of the Colorado Media Project, which aims to strengthen and accelerate sustainable, civic-minded journalism in Colorado. Melissa Milios Davis, vice president for strategic communications at the Gates Family Foundation, sees NewsMatch as a way to encourage Colorado outlets “to come together to brainstorm ways to increase individual donations at each outlet, while also amplifying the vital role that community support plays in sustaining high-quality local news in Colorado.”

The Wyncote Foundation in Pennsylvania is also increasing the number of newsrooms it is supporting through NewsMatch. “Wyncote Foundation is pleased to support the NewsMatch initiative again this year,” David Haas, Wyncote Board Vice Chair said. “NewsMatch allows us to support a range of strategies that strengthen non-partisan, fact-based journalism covering local and regional issues of concern to citizens in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and that further civic dialogue and engagement within and across our communities.” Through these partnerships with NewsMatch, these place-based funders are making individual donations to local journalism go even further.

Solving Big Problems Together

All of these partners join Democracy Fund, the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, Knight Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation who continue to support NewsMatch, which is housed at the Miami Foundation. Collaboration is core to the success of this effort. The campaign is driven by the Institute for Nonprofit News and the News Revenue Hub, both of whom support the 155 participants during NewsMatch and year round. By creating shared trainings, templates and resources, these two organizations have helped to create an unprecedented, coordinated approach to end-of-year fundraising across the nonprofit news sector.

“Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation’s grant to NewsMatch supports the growth of nonprofit news across the country as well as locally in Oklahoma,” said program officer Tyler Tokarczyk. “The collaboration between national and local funders, and the participation of national and local news organizations makes NewsMatch a truly unique giving opportunity we are proud to contribute to again in 2018.” By combining partnerships in the field with partnerships across funders, NewsMatch is able to tackle big challenges none of us could do alone.

NewsMatch launches today and will begin matching individual donations to participating newsrooms, but foundations, companies and donors who want to join the effort are still welcome to contribute. The fund is housed at the Miami Foundation which handles all the administration and logistics for partner funders, making it easy for foundations and donors of any size to join NewsMatch. As the nonprofit news field has grown there is an urgent need to expand NewsMatch even further to support the journalism our nation needs. NewsMatch helped make 2017 a record-breaking year for giving to nonprofit news — this year we have to go even bigger with your support.

Back to Ideas

Blog

Congress Needs Modern Tech to Keep Up with Constituents’ Needs. Here’s How Philanthropy Can Help.

Chris Nehls

July 12, 2018

Even before the emergence of so-called “resistance tech,” investors, venture funds, and foundations were pumping money into tech tools that make it easier for citizens to express their opinions to their elected representatives. This support has empowered constituents with more ways to contact their elected officials, and as a result, a civic engagement has grown over the past decade, burying members of Congress with ever-increasing volume of emails, phone calls, tweets, texts, and even faxes (yes, faxes).

Although civic engagement is essential to our democracy, Congress sorely lacks the commensurate resources to keep up with the staggering volume of constituent communication. Several reasons exist for this disparity. For one, Congressional offices are a minuscule market when compared to the business opportunity that activating millions of constituents represents to start-ups. Institutional rules and security requirements further hamper product innovation. Vendors must go through rigorous and opaque certification processes with House and Senate administrators before they can release products to congressional staff. These administrators have forbidden common workplace applications like Slack for security concerns. Meanwhile, Congress doesn’t invest adequately in its own technological and communications capacity to the point that offices still have fax machines in 2018.

Democracy Fund and our affiliated social welfare organization, Democracy Fund Voice, recently awarded several grants to address the disparity between the tools available to congressional staff and the technological innovations of the digital advocacy industry. These grants will enable staff to gauge constituent sentiment quickly and efficiently, deliver more meaningful and satisfying replies, and save offices countless hours of staff time currently spent on menial tasks. They also pave the way for further innovation.

A grant to the Tides Foundation will support the Popvox LegiDash Fund to build “LegiDash,” a closed social network for constituents and member offices. This tool will give congressional staff a new way to connect with folks back home one-on-one, offer a clearer picture of district sentiment in the aggregate, and provide a trusted alternative communications portal to Facebook, satisfying a growing concern on Capitol Hill about what the tech giant does with the data generated on members’ official pages.

Congressional vendor Fireside21 will use a grant from Democracy Fund Voice to research machine-learning techniques that automate much of the rote, labor-intensive processes that member offices use to organize bulk constituent email. The resulting improvements of this research could save offices dozens of personnel-hours a week and make further advances – such as content analysis of constituents’ social media comments on elected representatives’ accounts – possible.

These grants follow the success of Democracy Fund grantee the OpenGov Foundation to develop and deploy Article One, a voice-to-text tool that saves offices many hours by transcribing constituent voicemails. Fireside21 recently partnered with the nonprofit to offer this service to members in the House of Representatives.

This approach is an experiment in using philanthropy to build technological capacity for congressional offices in ways the marketplace cannot provide. Importantly, these grantees are trusted partners of congressional stakeholders, with years of experience collaborating with Congress to understand the needs of members and staff as the foundation of product design. If the grants are successful, harried staff will have capacity to craft more meaningful responses to constituents in less time, rebuilding constituents’ trust that Washington is listening. They will also free up staff hours that offices can reallocate to researching public policy, drafting legislation, and conducting oversight.

Using technology to make the most labor-intensive parts of constituent service more efficient is an exciting prospect, but it’s not our only goal in funding this space. We will continue to explore other projects and tools that can rebuild congressional capacity to address the nation’s most pressing public policy issues. Lorelei Kelly at Georgetown University’s Beeck Center likens this lawmaking capacity to a technical stack, or the overlapping components that build a technological system or software platform. Right now, this stack is breaking down. Technology can assist members of Congress in a variety of ways, from helping to build relationships with subject-matter experts at the district-level, creating new venues for constituent-member discussion in real time, leveraging troves of data to formulate policy and evaluating whether those initiatives are meeting desired outcomes.

Building this capacity makes it more likely that constituent sentiment, now often channeled into mass advocacy campaigns, can actually produce desired policy change. Congress needs knowledge-building solutions, like quick access to high-quality, impartial information; situational awareness within the institution itself; visibility into staff networks working on shared issues; and – universally – more time to act upon constituent needs.

Ideally, Congress would give itself this capability with an in-house version of 18F or a Congressional Digital Service; until that happens, philanthropy and private investors have a civic obligation to reinforce the technological infrastructure of the first branch of government. The challenges are so fundamental that even modest levels of funding, if properly placed, can create transformative change within the congressional workplace. A stronger democracy will be the ROI.

Back to Ideas

Blog

Local People Will Create the Future of Local News

Teresa Gorman

February 7, 2018

Josh Stearns co-authored this piece with Teresa Gorman.

Local news is critical to a healthy democracy, and we believe that the future of local news is local. This simple idea has shaped the way Democracy Fund has thought about its work to support and strengthen the public square in America.

Today we are announcing two new locally-based and locally-driven funds — totaling more than $2 million — that will invest in ideas, people and organizations that are working to ensure people have access to the news and information they need in these communities. The funds will focus on building more vibrant news ecosystems as vital parts of just communities and a healthy democracy.

These funds are not focused on maintaining the status quo in local news, but on pushing forward changes that improve how journalism serves the public and makes news and information more resilient over the long term. Through these funds, we will work closely with local partners to increase giving to local news and invest in long-term solutions — over short-term fixes — especially in the areas of business models, collaboration and community engagement.

In New Jersey, we will build on our previous work in partnership with the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the Knight Foundation by establishing the New Jersey Local News Lab Fund with $1.3 million over two years. New Jersey has become a bold laboratory for new models of collaboration, revenue experiments, and community engagement (read more about previous work in New Jersey in this report). This new fund will continue that momentum and help broaden the work there beyond newsrooms to other civic information networks and institutions.

The North Carolina Local News Lab Fund is the start of a new multi-year commitment to the state. We are kicking off the fund with $700,000 for the first 18 months. The work we’ve done in New Jersey to strengthen their news ecosystem will inform our work, but we recognize that this new fund must be built to respond to the unique local context of North Carolina. To that end, we commissioned local journalist and community organizer Fiona Morgan to undertake a year-long research project on the strengths and challenges of local news and information in North Carolina.

The two funds, housed at the Community Foundation of New Jersey and North Carolina Community Foundation, will be managed by advisory groups made up of local stakeholders and Democracy Fund. As a national funder we recognize that we are guests in these communities and have set these funds up to ensure funding decisions are rooted in local knowledge and experience. We take seriously the advice from longtime philanthropy leader Pru Brown who wrote in a paper prepared for Democracy Fund, “ultimately, perhaps the most useful lens for place-based philanthropy is asking at every stage whether the decisions the national foundation is making and the way it is operating promote or undermine local ownership.”

A key goal of these funds is to catalyze new momentum locally around supporting local public-interest news that serves all communities. As such, both funds are built as open platforms for partnership with other funders and donors. We are working closely with local and regional foundations in each state to expand the size of the funds, leveraging even more dollars to support local news and information efforts. That work is ongoing, and we look forward to sharing more about the amazing partners we are working with in the coming weeks and months.

This work is just a piece of Democracy Fund’s broader work on local news, which includes the national NewsMatch campaign, revenue research, and shared services like Membership Puzzle Project and News Revenue Hub. Additionally, Democracy Fund supports bridge builders and network connectors in local regions who are on the frontlines of weaving together stronger news ecosystems through collaboration and capacity building.

We are thrilled and humbled by this work and by the people who are working with us. Democracy Fund is committed to working in deep partnership with local communities, to learning, and to operating transparently and openly. If you are interested in working with us reach out at LocalNewsLab@democracyfund.org and sign up for our weekly newsletter The Local Fix.

Back to Ideas

Blog

A New Fund Aims to Put the Public Back into the Public Square

Paul Waters

January 23, 2018

Today four foundations are announcing a new joint fund designed to fuel a new era of journalism rooted in listening to communities. The Community Listening and Engagement Fund (CLEF) is dedicated to helping news organizations better listen, engage, and produce more relevant content for the communities they serve. Democracy Fund is honored to join the News Integrity Initiative, Lenfest Institute for Journalism Education, and the Knight Foundation in creating this new resource to bring proven models of public-powered journalism to more newsrooms around the country.

The new fund, which launches with $650,000 from the four founding partners, will subsidize the costs for newsrooms to adopt Hearken and GroundSource, two incredible platforms designed by journalists to bring the public more deeply into the reporting process.

Hearken provides newsrooms with unique tools to foster genuine audience engagement. Their model, called “public-powered journalism,” puts everyday people at the center of journalism, so they are able to communicate their information needs to reporters directly. Audiences are not only consumers, but partners in the production of meaningful stories. GroundSource is a unique platform that connects newsrooms to their communities. Outlets are assigned phone numbers that establishes an open line of communication between reporters and their audiences. Journalists can seek perspective on certain stories in the works, or encourage people to share thoughts on local issues most important to them.

We understand that at the root of so many challenges newsrooms face is the need to make journalism more relevant and responsive to the public. Developing a culture, practice, and workflows around listening is the key to unlocking this potential. Supporting tools like Hearken and GroundSource will help rebuild trust, rethink business models, and rebuild public interest journalism in news outlets throughout the country.

Read more about the Community Listening and Engagement Fund, why we love the CLEF name, and learn how to apply here. We see this new fund as core to our strategy for strengthening trustworthy journalism.

At Democracy Fund, our approach to journalism is focused on building trust and engagement. We are working on many fronts to foster practices that make news outlets more responsive and representative of their communities. To that end, we support efforts to help newsrooms authentically connect with and involve community members, transform reporting practices, represent the perspectives of diverse communities, and produce more relevant and thus more highly valued news.

We break this work up into two key tracks focused on Audience Engagement and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Through our Audience Engagement work we invest in innovations and support projects that help journalists better engage and involve their audiences in news generation, production, dissemination, and discussion. For example, we support the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas whose rigorous research is helping test what works and what doesn’t, the Gather Platform which is building a community of practice around engaged journalism, the Coral Project which is helping newsrooms build online communities and the American Press Institute’s Metrics for News program which helps newsrooms understand what communities want and how best to deliver it.

We recognize that no single product, practice, or platform can improve trust and authentic audience engagement if America’s newsrooms and the organizations supporting them remain disproportionately white in their staff and male in their leadership. We see steady progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion as a necessary condition of success in our work to mend the deteriorating connections between news outlets and the communities they serve.

Our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion work focuses on improving the diversity of sources, stories, and staff in news outlets. This work occurs across three dimensions. The first pertains to creating an inclusive environment at news outlets. The second constitutes recruiting, retaining, and promoting diverse staff, including leadership. The third involves working to develop and sustain minority ownership of media properties like Blavity, Q City Metro and the Richmond Times. We are excited for the work of our grantees like the Ida B. Wells Society which is expanding the ranks of investigative reporters and editors of color, the Maynard Institute which is training newsroom leaders, the Emma Bowen Foundation which provides internships for diverse journalism students, and many others. We have begun an exercise to map this space on an institutional level, and we are excited to connect with new organizations.

We believe that the Community Listening and Engagement Fund can help us work across these strategies, accelerating the adoption of new practices that put people back at the center of journalism. We are grateful to the Lenfest Institute who is hosting and managing the fund and to the vision of the News Integrity and Knight Foundation who are joining us in the launch today. At Democracy Fund, we are committed to supporting innovations in engaged journalism through grantmaking, partnerships and collaboration to strengthen the Fourth Estate and the democratic principles that our nation is founded on. We will continue to seek out opportunities to collaborate with news outlets, journalism support organizations, and partner funders to achieve this goal.

Back to Ideas

Brief

Learning From North Carolina

Fiona Morgan, In Consultation With Melanie Sill

December 5, 2017

Democracy Fund’s Public Square Program defines a local news ecosystem as the network of institutions, collaborations, and people that local communities rely on for news, information, and engagement. Healthy news ecosystems are diverse, interconnected, sustainable, and deeply engaged with their communities. When an ecosystem is healthy, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Looking at local news and information through this ecosystem lens raises new, compelling questions. For example, instead of asking how do we save traditional models of local news, we ask about ways of strengthening people’s access to information that is central to a healthy democracy. Instead of asking about the health of any one organization, we examine the robustness of the relationships between them. Instead of asking how we can get people to pay for news, we ask what might be a range of models to support news as a service to communities.

To that end, we commissioned a series of reports from regions around the country to better understand the complex forces shaping local news ecosystems from North Carolina to New Mexico. In this report, the authors have sought to ask these questions, and map out the strengths and challenges facing North Carolina as the landscape of local news continues to shift due to economic and technological change. This report, researched and written by Fiona Morgan, with Melanie Sill contributing significant insights and feedback, seeks to map out key contours of the news ecosystem in North Carolina. Although the report’s initial purpose was to inform our investments in local news, we are making its findings available to the public. We do so to help serve the field and welcome further feedback that will inevitably add new layers and richness to our understanding of the field.

The report is based on interviews with more than two dozen people from different sectors and geographic areas in North Carolina that took place in the spring of 2017. It also pulls from previous research by Morgan and by Democracy Fund Senior Fellow Geneva Overholser. Morgan discusses journalistic and financial challenges facing local news in North Carolina and identifies bright spots in the ecosystem — for example, audience engagement initiatives, promising business models, and emerging collaborations. Her report concludes with 10 suggestions for developing a more robust ecosystem in North Carolina, ranging from convening conversations to forming partnerships to tackling concrete problems by building practical solutions.

Democracy Fund is grateful for the thoughtful reporting and analysis by Morgan and Sill, who are well-connected journalists and students of media in the state. (see “About the Author”). The report has also profited from the insights of many people in and out of North Carolina, including Overholser, whose earlier interviews with North Carolina journalists and publishers provided a foundation, and Dr. Phil Napoli of Duke University, a grantee of Democracy Fund who is mapping the health of media ecosystems across the country. We are also grateful for the work of Penelope (Penny) Muse Abernathy who has been a stalwart advocate for local news and a chronicler of its challenges in North Carolina and across the United States.

This report presents an overview of North Carolina’s local news and information ecosystem but does not attempt to catalogue or cover every part of it. We welcome feedback, further information, and questions about North Carolina’s local news and information ecosystem, our ecosystem approach to supporting local news, and Democracy Fund’s Public Square program to localnewslab@democracyfund.org.

Back to Ideas

Report

Effective Place-Based Philanthropy

Prudence Brown

October 17, 2017

Democracy Fund believes that strong local news and a vibrant public square are critical to a healthy democracy. Today, local news is struggling in communities across America. Newsrooms, facing dwindling advertising revenue and diminishing trust, have been forced to shrink, or in many places, disappear altogether. While there are bold experiments to rebuild newsroom capacity in some regions, these experiments are unevenly distributed and precarious. The Democracy Fund local news strategy is focused on creating a more connected, collaborative, and sustainable future for public-interest journalism.

Because local news must be responsive to and reflective of the local communities it serves, we have designed our local news strategy around deep partnerships with local funders, journalists, and communities. We want Democracy Fund to be a catalyst for expanding local efforts to create robust news ecosystems. We recognize that in pursuing place-based philanthropy to strengthen local news, we are guests in other’s communities. We can’t do this work alone.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the roles and practices of national foundations undertaking place-based work. Democracy Fund commissioned Prudence Brown, a respected leader in place-based philanthropy, to provide her insights as we design a new program to support and strengthen local journalism and civic engagement.

Many of the themes and considerations in this paper are applicable to funders in other sectors. As such, we are sharing this work with the broader field. We think this is important both for the sake of transparency and accountability, and because we hope others can learn alongside us. This paper is just the start of our learning journey. We welcome any comments about lessons learned from other national-local partnerships.

Back to Ideas

Blog

How Local-National Funding Partnerships Can Strengthen Local News

Josh Stearns

October 17, 2017

Democracy Fund believes that strong local news and a vibrant public square are critical to a healthy democracy. That is why our local news strategy is focused on creating a more connected, collaborative, and sustainable future for public-interest journalism. But we recognize that we can’t do it alone, and that partnerships with other foundations are critical to rebuilding a vibrant public square.

Today we are releasing a new paper that we commissioned to help us learn about how to build effective and equitable partnerships that put local stakeholders at the center of our work to support local news. The paper, “Effective Place-Based Philanthropy: The Role and Practices of a National Funder,” is relevant to funders and nonprofits working on a range of community development and engagement efforts.

We believe that the future of local news is local. That may sound like a bland truism, but it raises important questions for a national foundation who wants to genuinely and authentically support diverse local communities to strengthen their local news ecosystem. Solutions to the crisis in local news need to respond to local context and needs. We can and should learn from what is working elsewhere, but we should also recognize there is no silver bullet and that only through deep listening and partnership can we create meaningful and lasting change.

For this reason, we have designed our local news strategy around deep partnerships with local funders, journalists, and communities. We want Democracy Fund to be a catalyst for expanding locally driven and locally supported efforts to create robust news ecosystems. We recognize that in pursuing place-based philanthropy to strengthen local news, we are guests in other’s communities. We take that role seriously and humbly.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the roles and practices of national foundations undertaking place-based work and learn from past projects. Democracy Fund commissioned Prudence Brown, a respected leader in place-based philanthropy, to provide her insights as we developed our strategy.

Drawing significantly from recent literature and Brown’s own experience and observations, this paper is organized around key questions that national funders can consider as they develop new place-based partnerships. After each question, Brown provides a brief discussion and concrete suggestions for decision-making and action. While the audience for this paper is largely other foundations, we believe that the lessons here are also useful in empowering nonprofits and grantees.

Many of the themes and considerations in this paper are applicable to other sectors well beyond journalism and media. As such, we are sharing this work with the broader field. We think this is important both for transparency and accountability, and because we hope others can learn alongside us. This paper is just the start of our learning journey. We welcome any comments about lessons learned from other national-local partnerships to LocalNewsLab@democracyfund.org.

Back to Ideas

Blog

News Match Launches With $3 Million in Matching Funds for Nonprofit Newsrooms Across the Country

Josh Stearns

October 2, 2017

Today three foundations are putting up $3 million in matching dollars and inviting the nation to stand up and support local news and investigative reporting. The News Match fund is a collaboration between Democracy Fund, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

News Match is the largest grassroots fundraising campaign ever to support nonprofit and investigative news organizations. Across the country, 110 newsrooms are participating. Together we want 2017 to be a record-setting year for donations to news to ensure that innovative, nonprofit newsrooms have the resources they need to deliver high-quality reporting to the communities they serve. Donors can contribute up to $1,000 between now and December 31, and every donation will be matched, up to a total of $27,000 per organization.

Why News Match, Why Now?

News Match comes at a time when journalists are facing a perfect storm of economic challenges and political attacks. A robust, independent press is essential to fostering an informed and engaged public and vital for a healthy democracy. The News Match fund launches today with $3 million but was built as a platform for other foundations and donors to join. National funders can contribute to increasing the matching fund and local funders can partner to match donations just to newsrooms in their area. Find out more about how funders can work with News Match here.

“The accountability and investigative function of journalism is essential for our democracy and it has been under-resourced for many years,” said Kathy Im, Director of Journalism and Media at MacArthur. “News Match endeavors to strengthen a free and independent press and help restore Americans’ faith in the news media.”

New Ways to Support Quality News

Launching alongside News Match is a new website— www.newsmatch.org—the first one-stop platform for donating to nonprofit news. You can search for newsrooms by location or topic, and you can donate to multiple newsrooms with one simple transaction. The site, which is hosted by the Institute for Nonprofit News, is just one way News Match is building the capacity of the field.

The participating foundations have invested more than $750,000 in technology, training and communications support to expand the capabilities of nonprofit news organizations to build a more sustainable future rooted in community support. Building on the success of the News Revenue Hub, News Match participants will have access to new tools, workshops and coaching to fortify their relationships with readers and donors. “This initiative will help new organizations that are imperative to our democracy build resources and widen their supporter base, just when they need it most,” Jennifer Preston, Knight Foundation Vice President for Journalism, said in a statement.

Knight Foundation launched the inaugural News Match in 2016, helping 57 nonprofit news organizations raise more than $1.2 million in match donations. This year, with support from Democracy Fund, Knight Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, News Match will nearly triple the number of dollars available and almost double the number of newsrooms who are participating. The Miami Foundation is serving as fiscal sponsor for the fund.

Back to Ideas

Report

Communities Of Practice

Angelica Das Edited By Jessica Clark

April 26, 2017

At a time when news and journalism are experiencing significant disruption, Democracy Fund is seeking to better understand and equip news outlets and reporters for public engagement. Individual newsrooms are ill-equipped to deal with large-scale transformations in platforms, news economics, and audience habits. Culture shifts are difficult to achieve and often happen from the bottom up or the outside in. We recognize that new solutions are needed across organizations that can be compared, replicated, scaled, and evaluated.

Communities of Practice (CoPs) provide a structure in which this activity can happen adjacent to or outside of legacy settings. This paper examines the theory and evolution of CoPs and explores in greater detail the nascent CoPs developing around engaged journalism. The appendix provides a checklist for building and grouping CoPs.

Democracy Fund is committed to supporting a vibrant media and the public square. By examining how CoPs have developed in the field of engaged journalism to date, we can better understand how a community of practice provides useful structures for learning, growth, and innovation. We can also learn how the ideas can be applied to other communities in journalism, including leaders at local news hubs, media business innovators, and other cohorts where new practices are emerging.

We welcome your feedback on these ideas and look forward to hearing more from you about how communities of practice are being adopted in your newsrooms and communities.