Topic: Philanthropy

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What We Learned Through NewsMatch Can Help All of Local News

Josh Stearns
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May 14, 2019

There are almost-weekly reminders about the struggles facing local news. Last week the entire staff of the New Orleans Times-Picayune were laid off when the paper was sold to a competing paper. When 14 staff were laid off at the Cleveland Plain Dealer in April, it fell to one of those laid-off staff to cover the story. Zooming out, these individual stories fit into a troubling trend: America has lost nearly half its newspaper staff between 2008 and 2017, and almost 1,800 newspapers have closed their doors since 2004.

In the face of these struggles, the annual NewsMatch campaign, now entering its fourth year, provides a number of important lessons for how we can strengthen and support local news. NewsMatch is a national campaign that helped newsrooms around the country raise more than $7.6 million from hundreds of thousands of donors at the end of 2018. Today NewsMatch is releasing its annual learning report, which documents how the campaign meets three interlocking goals: Raising awareness about the role of journalism in our society, expanding community support and funding for news, and strengthening newsrooms’ long-term fundraising capacity.

We know raising awareness is a pressing need because the Pew Research Center recently found that 70 percent of U.S. adults think local journalism is doing well financially and only 14 percent have directly paid for local news. For local news in America to thrive newsrooms will have to dramatically shift public perception by engaging more deeply with audiences, documenting the impact of their journalism, and being transparent about the challenges they face. NewsMatch is creating new pathways both to raise awareness about the crisis in local news and enabling people to take action by supporting the quality journalism our nation needs.

Download the report at bit.ly/newsmatchlearning
Download the report at bit.ly/newsmatchlearning

Building Public Awareness About Nonprofit News

Between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31, 2018, the campaign helped 154 nonprofit news organizations across the country raise more than $7.6 million in unrestricted funding, which is being invested in more and better journalism, crucial general operating support, and improved fundraising capabilities. Since 2016, NewsMatch has helped nonprofit newsrooms raise more than $15.8 million for reporting and operations.

Core to the success of NewsMatch is how the program has helped spark a new kind of local and national conversation about the role of nonprofit news in America. The campaign runs a national awareness effort, provides 500+ hours of training to local and investigative newsrooms, creates a campaign-in-a-box toolkit for participants, and coordinates a national day of action called #GivingNewsDay in partnership with Giving Tuesday. These and other resources help newsrooms communicate their value and work to their community and ask for support, reminding people that good journalism shapes every other issue they care about.

The public is noticing. In two months — November and December of 2018 — over 240,000 people gave to news organizations. That is more than digital subscriptions to the Seattle Times, Boston Globe, Star-Tribune, and Dallas Morning News combined, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report. Critically, 52,000 of those donors were new and were supporting a nonprofit news organization for the first time. The year before, in 2017, 43,000 new donors gave for the first time during NewsMatch, for a two-year total of 95,000 new donors.

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The learning and evaluation report released today outlines how the team behind NewsMatch designed the 2018 campaign, what worked and what didn’t. It covers how NewsMatch operates, what we are learning about building community support for journalism and the impact the campaign is having on newsrooms, donors and philanthropy.

Helping Foundations See Local News as a Priority

In examining the lack of understanding of the local news crisis last month in Bloomberg, Gerry Smith wrote last month that many people “have yet to conceive of journalism as a critical component of a free society, and may not think of a newsroom in the same way they do the Salvation Army or the American Red Cross.” This disconnect persists even though a growing body of research has mapped our how the erosion of local news is tied to lower voter turnout, fewer candidates running for office, less responsive elected representatives, and an increase in corruption and government waste. It is not enough to expand individual donations, we must also create new on-ramps for local and national foundations to support nonprofit news. According to an analysis released last year by Northeastern University and Harvard’s Shorenstein Center local news comprised only 5% of total grants given to media from 2010 to 2015.

That is why NewsMatch is also creating new on-ramps for local and national foundations around the country to easily support and strengthen nonprofit journalism. NewsMatch has been designed as an open and trusted place for funders who want to invest in local news and investigative reporting and learn more about effectively supporting journalism. In 2018, NewsMatch continued to drive new philanthropic dollars to participating newsrooms:

  • The national matching fund grew to $3.7 million, an increase of 116 percent. Seven funders contributed to the national fund.
  • Regional and issue-focused funders offered partner matches for cohorts of newsrooms (for examples, newsrooms reporting on sciences and health, investigative newsrooms in the South, Colorado news outlets, etc.). Four funders set up these targeted matches alongside the main fund.
  • Participating newsrooms independently leveraged their participation in NewsMatch to secure more than $675,000 in additional, direct matches for their year-end campaigns. (This was down a bit from 2017.)
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The campaign helps funders make the most out of their dollars by matching them with individual donations and supporting long-term capacity building in newsrooms. That capacity building work is starting to pay off. In a year when nonprofits overall only saw 1.5 percent year-over-year growth in individual donations, the average NewsMatch participant raised 11 percent more during the campaign in 2018 vs 2017. Small and medium newsrooms saw the biggest growth in year-end support, with 30+ percent increases in individual donors, donations, and dollars raised during NewsMatch. While the dollars raised during NewsMatch 2018 are notable, the real success is how the program is building long-term capacity for newsrooms to build meaningful connections with communities as readers and donors.

Growing the Campaign in 2019

Part fundraising program, part capacity building effort, and part public awareness campaign, NewsMatch achieves a complex set of goals while making it as easy as possible for anyone — individual donor, newsroom, funder — to participate. The Nieman Journalism Lab’s Christine Schmidt described how these elements come together, writing: “The campaign caught the budding nonprofit news sector at a critical stage in its growth and is giving it a jetstream by helping coach newsrooms, funders, and individual donors into seeding its future.”

NewsMatch participants at work: Hechinger Report, Texas Tribune, ProPublica, High Country News
NewsMatch participants at work: Hechinger Report, Texas Tribune, ProPublica, High Country News

NewsMatch was founded in 2016 by the John S. And James L. Knight Foundation and each year the number of NewsMatch participants has grown. That growth puts pressure on the national matching fund and we are currently seeking new and additional partners to support NewsMatch for 2019 and 2020. Support for NewsMatch 2018 was provided by the Colorado Media Project, Democracy Fund, Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, Facebook Journalism Project, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Knight Foundation, Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, Present Progressive Fund at Schwab Charitable, Rita Allen Foundation, and Wyncote Foundation in partnership with The Miami Foundation, Institute for Nonprofit News and News Revenue Hub.

If we can together raise $5 million dollars for the national fund we can turn it into more than $10 million for local and investigative journalism this year. (If you are interested in exploring how to get involved in NewsMatch, or to set up a partner fund for a region or issue you care about, email Josh Stearns, jstearns@democracyfund.org.)

Based on what we learned from the 2018 campaign we are going to be making the materials and training more customized to serve the growing list of newsrooms who are at very different stages of growth and development. The NewsMatch team will also be working to better support organizations serving underrepresented communities and led by people of color. We recognize that it is critical for NewsMatch to do more to engage, listen, and serve these newsrooms, especially in light of longstanding inequities in how philanthropy has funded these organizations and communities. Finally, we will explore collaborations with others across the media landscape, beyond just nonprofit news, that can help drive more attention to the crisis in local news and the profound need to support it right now.

NewsMatch 2019 will kick off in November of 2019, but there is a lot of work to do before then. Find out more at NewsMatch.org and follow the campaign on Twitter and Facebook.

 

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Report

Hispanic Media Today

Jessica Retis
/
May 13, 2019

Today we’re releasing Hispanic Media Today: Serving Bilingual and Bicultural Audiences in the Digital Age, a new report that explores the origins of Hispanic* media in the United States, its growth in recent decades, the complex nature of Latino media and its diverse audiences. The report is an exploration into the challenges and opportunities to sustain Hispanic media in the future.

As with other media sectors, Hispanic media is facing significant financial hurdles due to the virtual disappearance of traditional advertising. Following rapid growth in the 1990s and 2000s, Hispanic daily newspapers have seen more than a 10 percent decline in circulation over the past five years, consistent with other media sectors. On top of financial shortfalls, traditional Hispanic media has also grappled with adapting to the digital transformation and meeting the demands of an increasingly digital audience.

A survey by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists have found that 42 percent of Latinx journalists reported downsizing or cutbacks in staff hours at work, and more than 75 percent say they have been asked to do more with less resources. And 40 percent are concerned about job security.

In addition to financial challenges, Latino media also must take into account the complex diversity of the Hispanic population, which means that local audiences can differ from the shared history and culture of the Spanish-speaking outlet which serves that region. In spite of these struggles, Hispanic media has weathered the downturn better than many mainstream media because of its deep connection to community. And in the past decade, amidst a digital divide across language, age, and immigrant status, a number of bilingual and English-language digital media for younger Latinx audiences have emerged.

Spanish-language media in the U.S. has varied greatly in its more than 200 years of existence, and has served many roles. Publications have ranged from politically conservative to liberal, with varied readerships composed of exile, immigrant, or native Latinx communities. While disseminating local, regional, national and international news according to audience interests and needs, Hispanic media has also highlighted cultural and patriotic activities and served as a forum for public expression.

Hispanic media has also shaped and promoted social and political activism advocating for civil rights and defending Latinx communities against abuse from authorities. For example, Spanish-language radio programs in the early 1920s provided not only entertainment but also information and political advocacy. Spanish-language T.V. programming has also grown over the last 50 years, and provides information on issues of interest to Latinx communities, such as immigration, politics, health, education, and culture, as well as imported Latin American entertainment.

The story of Hispanic media in America is not a simple linear story and there are enormous opportunities to invest in this space and elevate the work of these journalists.

Philanthropic funders and investors should continue to provide critical operating resources to Spanish-language media and invest in helping them develop and design new revenue models. In addition to solidifying revenue, several recommendations to help grow Latino media became apparent during our research. For example, funders should also engage in initiatives to help the next generation of bilingual and bicultural journalism students when they enter the job market, as they make grants to keep Hispanic media afloat. An infusion of youth and fresh ideas into Hispanic media companies would help organizations become more sustainable.

Diversity of newsroom stories, staff, opinion, revenue and ownership is a crucial part of making sure the news reflects the communities it serves. We must do our part to uplift and better serve Hispanic media, to ensure that Americans have access to accurate, diverse sources of information that foster the full participation of every individual in our democracy.

It is our hope that the recommendations outlined in this report further support Hispanic media today, so that diverse, bicultural, bilingual stories can be told tomorrow.

*Hispanic and Latino are used interchangeably in this post by request of the author, as both pan-ethnic labels tend to be used throughout the United States.

Jessica Retis is an Associate Professor of Journalism at California State University Northridge, a current Democracy Fund grantee, and co-editor of the recently released book, The Handbook of Diasporas, Media, and Culture. To learn more about Jessica’s work, visit http://csun.academia.edu/JessicaRetis or follow @jretis.

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Announcing the Legal Clinic Fund: Strengthening Legal Support for Local News

Estizer Smith
/
May 9, 2019

Most of the coverage of struggles in local news has focused on their revenue and changing business model. However, along with those issues, local newsrooms are facing new legal threats and challenges, just at the moment when they have fewer resources to fight First Amendment battles.

Today, we are announcing a new fund designed to support legal clinics at universities around the country that focus on strengthening and defending the first amendment, media access, and transparency. These clinics combine the skills of talented law students with legal scholars and practicing lawyers to take on legal challenges both local and national. Their university affiliations mean that they are geographically diverse, with the potential to cover areas that are comparatively isolated, while educating and uplifting the next generation of first amendment and transparency lawyers.

Democracy Fund has partnered with the Klarman Family Foundation and the Heising-Simons Foundation to launch the Legal Clinics Fund at the Miami Foundation and applications open today. The fund is looking for proposals from clinics that would benefit from increased capacity and infrastructure support, are pursuing a collaborative project, or are seeking to experiment with their model.

Applications are due June 7, 2019. Click here for more information and to apply.

There is a unique opportunity right now to invest in strengthening these legal clinics and building the networks between them in ways that buttress their ability to be a strong force for First Amendment litigation and a critical legal resource for journalists. We believe the fund can help achieve that goal, and we are committed to providing multi-year funding to grantees so that they have time to iterate, grow, and expand their impact, and so that the fund has the ability to engage in a robust evaluation and learning practice.

The needs of a free press are rapidly changing as the challenges facing it have grown and become more aggressive. We’ve written about the need for a modern conception of press freedom, and the role we believe we have to play in helping to meet the needs of the field. We believe that legal clinics can provide a new backbone for legal support around the country and are excited to expand their capacity to fight First Amendment battles on all our behalf.

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Blog

Invest in Listening Infrastructure

Sabrina Hersi Issa
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April 24, 2019

“Diversity is essential to the success of the news industry, and journalists must include diverse voices in their coverage in order to reach a broader audience. We have stories to tell, but many in our audience have stopped listening because they can tell that we’re not talking about them.”
— Gwen Ifill

As part of research conducted for the Engaged Journalism Lab exploring how philanthropy can support diverse, inclusive newsrooms, I visited local newsrooms, interviewed experts, technical practitioners and community groups, sat with journalists and listened.

Many opportunities for philanthropy to fund stronger, more resilient and diverse journalism ecosystems involves backtracking and investing in critical infrastructure to support those ecosystems and to formalize heretofore informal mechanisms that serve diverse audiences and communities. To date, this project has unpacked opportunities for media funders to support data infrastructure, adaptive leaders, reimagined newsroom spaces and how national issues are reported in local community narratives.

As Ifill’s quote explains and significant data pointing to the consistent struggle to develop and grow audience share in local communities where populations are steadily increasing, it can be argued that diverse audiences have “stopped listening” to mainstream news. But that does not mean diverse communities have stopped communicating messages, stories and narratives that deserve attention. For many communities that public square now lives online.

There is safety in small numbers and low levels of trust in technology platforms mean many meaningful conversations are unfolding in silo’ed corners of the Internet. It is up to journalists to meet diverse communities where they are and to invest in engagement not as a means for audience growth, but as mechanisms for listening to the voices gathered there and producing quality journalism that serves the public.

For the purposes of this research, listening infrastructure is defined as a collection of explicit processes, systems and tools intended to support a journalist’s capacity to monitor meaningful public conversations in online communities in order to increase human dimensions and depth in reporting.

The intention is essentially the definition and can be reverse-engineered through three questions:

1. How do journalists find meaningful conversations in online communities beyond their own?

2. How do journalists show up/conduct themselves in online communities beyond their own?

3. What do journalists use to continuously listen and learn from online communities beyond their own?

For local newsrooms the mechanisms to pay for resources that can systemize, improve and boost journalists ability to pay attention are cost-intensive, both in staff time and budget resources. The listening infrastructure that does exist is far from structured, effective or formalized and essentially boils down to social media monitoring subscriptions. As a result, individual reporters have their own individual systems and their own methods for discerning what gets their limited time, attention and energy. Often this boils down to attention being determined by push notifications, Nuzzel and curated Tweetdeck columns. In my research, I occasionally came across groups of journalists who covered similar beats, such as gun violence, and shared pooled resources as a means to both boost one another’s listening infrastructure and better cover a wide, disparate community with increasingly growing online community silos.

This is a challenge that exists in industry spaces beyond newsrooms. A substantial part of this research has involved scanning similar fields and communities also undergoing deep transitions and shifts to surface what lessons, patterns and practices in those spaces can be applied in the newsroom context. In the social change movement space, there is also a critical listening infrastructure gap. Social change movement organizations also tend to serve communities that largely exist online and struggle with continual misalignment between which communities they exist to serve and which communities their campaigns ultimately pay attention to.

In the ocean conservation space, those silos are even more prevalent and with extreme scarcity in funding, the barriers for collaboration among competitive organizations are even higher. In 2011 Rachel Weidinger founded Upwell, an effort to build a backbone for listening and measurement for the ocean conservation space that had previously not existed. The intention was to build listening infrastructure to be shared across organizations in order to better inform online campaigns, information sharing and collaborative community building. Upwell billed itself as the ‘PR agency for the ocean’ and broke ground developing innovative big listening practice: sifting through high volumes of news and online conversations for movements and pairing that big data with analysis and distributed network building.

Image of Upwell's map of online conversations about the ocean.
Image via Upwell.us

What was the outcome for all these buzzwords?

Conversation metrics rather than individual campaign level metrics. In a newsroom context, the outcome of an infrastructure like Upwell would look similar to this MIT Media Lab report analyzing the collective impact in online conversation and attention resulting from press coverage of stories like the shooting death of Trayvon Martin every single week. It also allowed for amplification and networking building on top of the analysis of online conversational metrics.

The existence of Upwell allowed online engagement within the ocean conservation space to shift from a micro to a macro level and for campaigners to strategically and authentically participate in online conversations already in progress. It created, through a set of tools and processes, capacity for paying attention at scale that was not previously possible.

In an interview with me for this research Weidinger, now a Future for Good Fellow at the Institute for the Future, explained Upwell’s approach that was grounded in both offline community engagement (meeting the ocean conservation digital managers where they are) and online community management (sourcing rich conversation metrics in unlikely places through listening to social conversations about the ocean).

Photograph of Rachel Weidinger. To learn more about her work go to www.rachelweidinger.com/about
Image of Rachel Weidinger – https://www.rachelweidinger.com/about

Collectively the practices that powered Upwell was in service to answering the question:

Can we use the momentum of focused attention to raise an issue above the noise?

Creating a Values-Based Listening Infrastructure

“I think because whatever story we’re telling about an issue, if that’s voting rates or ocean acidification, it has a lot of facets. It has a lot of variability across communities. It has usually narrative about issues and are very deeply tied into cultural perspectives. So you will see different cultural perspectives reflecting different understandings of social ramifications of what impacts them in their community.”

There is a critical role for media funders to use their position as a collaborative convener to leverage insights pulled from big listening practices and support collectives of newsrooms or groups of journalists in building listening infrastructure aligned with the intention to support shared resource collaboration across newsrooms covering serve diverse communities.

“It is possible to have very targeted niche conversation, but because it’s a very laborious research method and because they’re going to turn up so much value in that research method, you might as well have a bigger lens. So, I think coalitions of collaboratives that will get an issue for multiple perspectives are able to take full advantage of what comes out of it. I think working with funders before because they can take the confirmation, learn from it, change their funding pattern potentially, and offer share that with their grantee networks and the larger networks they’re a part of. That’s when I think this information is valuable. You can create a weather report and you can have a weather report for an entire country and keep it to yourself if you want to. But that feels like a spectacularly inefficient approach to me because if there are really high value assets and if you’re only using it to reshape your own incoming patterns, you’re not getting anywhere near the value you could get out of that investment.”

Weidinger explained the three building blocks to Upwell’s listening infrastructure:

1. The System, monitoring and analyzing online conversations

“Designing a system that supported the ability to pay attention to the large conversation in a deeper way more than anyone else working in the field. That depended on building trust over time, following conversations, trending keywords and Radian6 type of practices that we developed for understanding the conversation at a large scale over time and being able to look at the historic conversation and also people within over time.”

2. The Network/Community Management, leading data-driven attention campaigns

“For big listening to go deep, you have to build the network for the very beginning. It involved face-to-face meetings with influencers and leaders and senior management and all of the big blue and green organizations with scientists and government officials. We are only able to do that because Upwell was initially fiscally sponsored under the umbrella of Ocean Conservancy before spinning out independently which is one of the two large ocean conservation and organization that at that time was 40 years old and had a great reputation with lots of people so we were able to leverage their network in addition to building a network on our own.”

3. The Tide Report newsletter, sharing knowledge with the sector

“Our goal with the newsletter was to recount. We wanted to have the hottest ocean news of the day so that if nothing else it could standalone with a — ‘This is your professional news roundup for today’ utility. This gave us the eyeopener that we wanted and it made it easier to get people on our list and it meant that people would trust their colleagues and their peers, other organizations and conversations we were amplifying.”

The second piece of the newsletter was to get as close to one click sharing as possible. This probably feels like less revolutionary today, but it felt like a crazy project that we started doing in 2012… because people are super busy and we knew that most of the network of influencers and social media managers we were working with were going to give that email, if we were lucky, 30 seconds. If they saw something cool that they think would benefit their personal brand or their organization’s brand, that felt like were vital and important to them then they are going to share it. All of this was in service to building trust by regularly illustrating our commitment to listening back to our community.”

After Upwell: Open Sourcing Infrastructure

The tools and systems Upwell used is commonplace in digital newsrooms but formalizing the infrastructure: the intentionality, values-based metrics and sharing methodologies has led to Upwell continuing to deliver value long after it has shuttered. Ultimately the lesson in Upwell is a lesson in impermanence, that while we design for the long game, things that go up must come down and yet there is still immense knowledge to be gained in studying the heart that went into the scaffolding.

Sabrina Hersi Issa is an award-winning human rights technologist and leads global research and analysis for philanthropy. She organizes Rights x Tech, a gathering for technologists and activists and runs Survivor Fund, a political fund dedicated to supporting the rights of survivors of sexual violence.

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As We Wait for Attorney General Barr to Release the Mueller Report, What Foundations Should Do

Joe Goldman
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April 12, 2019

Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the Mueller report — and anticipation for the report itself — have captivated the interest of the American people and a divided Congress, with jubilation from the president’s supporters and disappointment from his critics.

But the success of the special counsel’s investigation should not be measured by those whose political interests are best served. Rather, its completion should go down in history as a victory for the rule of law — that is, as long as the full report and supporting documents are released to the public.

Congress and the American people must have the opportunity to understand the truth of what happened to be in a better position both to protect future elections and to restore faith in our democratic norms.

Foundations are in a unique position to pave the way forward by investing in causes that further both of these goals.

Integrity of the Ballot Box

There are two core priorities philanthropy can support to protect the tenets of our democracy.

First, we must protect the integrity of our elections. The health of our democracy requires public trust in our electoral systems. The Mueller investigation — both through its current indictments and what will presumably be laid out in the report — should help us get to the bottom of how a foreign power interfered with the 2016 election.

Thanks to the investigators’ efforts, we will have the product of more than 2,800 subpoenas, nearly 500 search warrants, more than 230 orders for communication records, 13 requests of foreign governments, and approximately 500 interviews with witnesses to learn from.

The American public must demand to see the report so we can identify opportunities to bolster our election system. This would allow foundations to invest in work that promotes election modernization, development of data-driven policies, and advancements in new technologies that help reduce barriers to voting. In addition, we need to work with nonprofits seeking to strategically provide secretaries of state and local election boards with the resources to maintain the system’s integrity. Without the partisan distraction of alleged collusion, leaders from both parties can get serious about protecting our democracy from manipulation.

An Independent Justice System

Second, we must protect the rule of law and the independence of our justice system. It is easy to forget that months ago, it was unclear whether the special counsel would be allowed to complete his investigation. We should all be grateful for efforts made over the past two years to protect the independence of the investigation, despite unrelenting pressure from the president and his allies.

Once the report is provided to Congress, it will have its own constitutional responsibility to exercise oversight, thoroughly investigate the underlying evidence, and consider appropriate policies for the future. The attorney general’s conclusion that there is insufficient evidence to establish that the president committed a crime by obstructing justice is not the end of the matter. Only by digging into the facts can the public be sure justice has been served.

New York State’s Inquiry

Foundation leaders also must defend continuing investigations by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere to ensure they are able to complete their work without interference. These investigations, equally representative of the rule of law at work, are looking into deeply important questions related to the integrity of our government — including potential conflicts of interest. They must be allowed to continue unimpeded.

For philanthropy, investing in nonprofit work that protects this oversight is a crucial way to protect our democracy. Remember that Robert Mueller’s 22-month investigation convicted five associates of the president’s and indicted 34 people on nearly 200 criminal charges. The special counsel’s job was not to attack or convict Donald Trump. It was to uncover the truth and ensure justice is done. The special counsel has been able to complete his investigation, and by working together to support and galvanize programs and organizations that uphold our constitutional norms, we can still achieve our goal of a strengthened, vibrant democracy.

 

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Report

African American Media Today

Angela Ford, Kevin McFall, Bob Dabney
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February 28, 2019

Today, as we close Black History Month, we’re releasing African American Media Today: Building the Future from the Past, a look at the origins of the Black press in the United States and its future, offering recommendations for better practices moving forward.

Black newspapers were essential in providing information to freed slaves and sharecroppers who sought better lives than those offered on plantations. The safe passage, potential opportunities, marriages and deaths of the new, evolving culture of a recently freed people were realized and reported on through Black legacy newspapers.The Black press has played a crucial role in the Fourth Estate since its inception in the early 19th century. In the early days, the Black press reported mainly on issues affecting the newly-formed African American community and identity. African American news organizations highlighted the challenges and triumphs of the Black community, while providing a more nuanced portrait of the lives of Black Americans when mainstream media would report predominately negative or otherwise bigoted stories of Black Americans.

Today, the Black press struggles to remain in operation. While the virtual disappearance of traditional advertising has challenged the news industry as a whole, it has been particularly damaging to the Black newspaper industry. Shrinking staffs have left many operations without tech savvy or the manpower to quickly pivot to new revenue building operations. And while some mainstream news institutions establish paywalls for their digital media platforms, many in the African American community understand that readers are unlikely to accept news through the paywall model.

We know that diversity within journalism—in stories, in staff, and media ownership—is a vital part of ensuring the news reflects the communities which it serves. Therefore, we must do our part in supporting independent Black media outlets to make sure the multitude of stories existing in the Black community continues to have a platform.

The National Newspapers Publishers Association (NNPA), a 70+-year-old trade association comprised of African American publishers, reports its current readership at 20.1 million per week. And its demographic is 99 percent African American. Furthermore, the Black digital audience has strong numbers among Millennials and Generation Z. Some legacy outlets and NNPA members are shifting business models to appeal to an online audience, while several young entrepreneurs have launched digital-only platforms. No matter the approach or solution, Black Americans agree – almost unanimously – we must maintain independent Black media outlets. Mainstream media does not always capture news and information that is actually relevant in as much as it does write about Black Americans. And even then, these outlets are often one-note in their depictions of the Black community.

In response to the challenges facing the Black press, the Obsidian Collection is developing four potential revenue models for Black Legacy Press and digital media platforms targeting African American audiences. As our organization grows, we are attracting new media members to this movement. We will embrace emergent technologies and innovative practices to ensure the independent lack voice remains an integral part of the American conversation and news landscape, and we hope you’ll join us.

Angela Ford is the Founder and Executive Director of The Obsidian Collection Archives, a Democracy Fund grantee. This report was written by Angela with her colleagues Kevin McFall and Bob Dabney. To learn more about their work, visit www.theobsidiancollection.org or follow @ObsidianCollec1.

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Op-Ed

Op-Ed: Trump’s Emergency Declaration Threatens Philanthropy’s Core Values

Joe Goldman
/
February 20, 2019

In November, I joined with 40 other foundation leaders to call on our colleagues across philanthropy to respond to unprecedented threats facing our democracy—threats to the independence of the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and to the rule of law generally.

Less than three months later, our country is facing a new constitutional crisis that demands our leadership and resolve. We must not accept President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to secure funding to build a wall on our Southern border. He is blatantly taking a page straight out of the authoritarian playbook and his action must not stand.

The President’s declaration demonstrates his disregard for our Constitution and his willingness to circumvent our system of checks and balances. Declaring an emergency when none exists sets a dangerous precedent for the rule of law. It is the quintessential example of the executive branch appropriating power to itself. Just as we cannot allow any president to weaken the independence of our system of justice, we must also not allow this president to unilaterally achieve his policy goals at the expense of the Constitution’s promise of parity between the co-equal branches of our government.

Read more from Joe Goldman at The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

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NewsMatch 2018 raises $7.6 million, fueling growth in local news and investigative journalism.

Josh Stearns
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February 12, 2019

The last month has been a difficult one for journalism in America. In a span of just two weeks roughly 2,000 journalists have lost their jobs or been offered buyouts. The nation’s six largest daily newspaper companies seem caught in a dangerous dance of consolidation and cost cutting. Even the Newseum, a museum dedicated to journalism, announced that it had to sell its landmark building down the street from the U.S. Capitol in January. All of this comes after a decade of struggle that has profoundly eroded journalism’s ability to serve local communities and live up to its role in our democracy.

However, there is another side to the story of journalism in America today.

New data from newsrooms all across the country shows that 2018 was a record-breaking year for community support of nonprofit news. Individual donors to journalism organizations gave more than $116 million in 2018, a 50 percent increase over 2017. In November and December alone, over 240,000 people gave to news organizations and more than 50,000 were new donors who supported a nonprofit newsroom for the first time.

This growth in giving to nonprofit journalism was fueled by an innovative national campaign called NewsMatch. Now in its third year, NewsMatch doubles donations to support quality journalism at the end of the year and provides expert training, individualized coaching and a campaign-in-a-box to grow the long term sustainability of local news and investigative journalism.

Over the last year, nonprofit journalists were a driving force for good, holding elected officials accountable, revealing injustice and waste, and shining a spotlight on public safety and health. NewsMatch members have provided critical reporting on family separation in Texas, covered coastal restoration in New Orleans, revealed patterns of abuses within New Mexico’s foster care system, and drove accountability through local reporting on #MeToo in Minnesota.

Fueling a New Era of Giving to News

  • NewsMatch 2018 helped 154 newsrooms raise $7.6 million from individual donors and a coalition of foundations and companies making it the largest-ever grassroots fundraising campaign to support local news.
  • Nonprofit news organizations are getting more successful at year-end fundraising. The average NewsMatch participant raised 11 percent more during the campaign in 2018 vs 2017.
  • Small and medium-sized newsrooms saw the biggest growth in year-end support, with 30+ percent increases in individual donors, donations, and dollars raised during NewsMatch.
  • NewsMatch was a platform for local philanthropy. Participants secured more than $675,000 in additional matching commitments from major donors and foundations during the campaign.
  • In the three years since NewsMatch was first launched it has helped participating newsrooms raise more than $14 million.

Community Support Drives Community Impact

The dollars raised through NewsMatch will make sure that more stories like these can be told in 2019. The funds will go to hire more journalists, engage local communities, fight for access to government secrets, and ensure that more people have access to the information they need to live their lives and make decisions about their families and the nation.

NewsMatch 2018 supported 154 newsrooms in 42 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, with two-thirds of them focused on state or local journalism. All the participating organizations are members of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) which has guidelines about ethics, editorial independence and donor transparency. Ten years ago INN was founded by 27 nonprofit newsrooms and today the organization has more than 200 members. The remarkable growth of the nonprofit news sector — and the fact that the public is increasingly stepping up to support it — is an important counterbalance to the challenges facing journalism.

However, nonprofit news is still nowhere near filling the gaps left behind by the years of deep cuts in local and national journalism. Just this month, the Knight Commission on Trust Media and Democracy released its final report. The commission writes, “With traditional business and financial models for journalism under siege, major investments in and new approaches to supporting sustainable nonprofit and journalism collaborations are essential, particularly at the local level.”

Coming Together to Meet the Challenge

NewsMatch is answering that call by pioneering new approaches to supporting and strengthening local news and investigative reporting. The campaign created the first one-stop website where people can find and donate to multiple nonprofit newsrooms. The fund, which is housed at the Miami Foundation, is a unique platform for philanthropy, drawing support and collaboration from a diverse range of local, national and niche funders and companies including Democracy Fund, the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, the Facebook Journalism Project, the Gates Family Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Present Progressive Fund at Schwab Charitable, the Rita Allen Foundation, and the Wyncote Foundation. NewsMatch has created a simple on-ramp for funders who want to help rebuild journalism in America.

By combining philanthropic support with individual donations, NewsMatch focuses on not just raising money but also building the capacity of newsrooms to create durable and sustainable relationships with their audience. News Revenue Hub, a core partner of NewsMatch, provided more than 500 hours of training and consulting to newsrooms last year. Through templates, toolkits and technology tools the Hub provides newsrooms with proven models and best practices for cultivating donors and members.

That work doesn’t happen overnight. While we celebrate the remarkable progress and growth of NewsMatch in 2018 the team is already busy building the program for 2019. With the nonprofit news sector growing each year, NewsMatch needs to grow too and is currently recruiting new corporate and philanthropic partners who want to support the program. NewsMatch has also engaged Third Plateau, a social impact strategy firm, as an independent evaluation partner. A full evaluation of the program will be made available to the public this spring.

NewsMatch is helping build more trusted, sustainable local news and investigative reporting, but the real heroes here are the journalists and staff who work for nonprofit newsrooms all over the country. It is their work, their stories, their connection to community that makes NewsMatch possible. It is why NewsMatch exists, and how NewsMatch succeeds.

In the coming weeks we’ll be sharing more stories of how newsrooms made 2018 a record-breaking year and what they are planning for 2019. Follow NewsMatch on Facebook and Twitter to find out more.

Credits: Oklahoma Watch, PublicSource, ProPublica Illinois, Texas Observer
Credits: Oklahoma Watch, PublicSource, ProPublica Illinois, Texas Observer
Back to Ideas

Building a Team to Invest in Democracy

Lauren Strayer
/
November 26, 2018

Following the 2016 election, Democracy Fund heard from many philanthropists seeking advice on what they can do to respond to the threats facing our political system. For some, the last two years have brought a newly pervasive sense that our democracy is under threat and that our political system is far more fragile than most of us assumed. We feel the same way, and we are humbled that interested donors and their advisors are turning to us and to our peers for guidance.

Through our efforts to support these new partners, we discovered that Democracy Fund can play a helpful role in providing advice and connections to philanthropists who are learning about the field. To that end, I am delighted to share that we are building a new team at Democracy Fund to help us be a better resource to philanthropists, advisors, and our peers. The team will be led by a newly created position, the Director of Partnerships.

This swell in philanthropic interest comes at a pivotal time. Despite a clear and pressing need, the level of philanthropic support for this field remains critically low. Whether you look at voting, journalism, or civic education, many of the most capable and innovative organizations in the space have struggled through multiple cycles of feast and famine and need more resources to meet the challenges at hand.

To make progress on issues that are important to the American people and to ensure the health of our democracy for future generations, the United States needs deep investment by philanthropists and advocates. Policy reforms ranging from the future of affordable housing to climate change depend on a political system that is responsive to the public. A more equitable society requires eliminating barriers to voting and reducing the influence of money on politics. And improving the ability of individuals and communities to thrive rests on a functioning government, fair enforcement of the rule of law, and stability in our politics. Despite the reality that progress hinges on a healthy democracy, the field receives less than two percent of overall philanthropic giving.

Building a healthier democracy together

Working with our peer funders, we hope the Democracy Fund Partnerships team can be a resource to donors and to the field. Our goal is to make the expert capacity of our staff and our collaborative approach available to interested philanthropists. We believe that enlisting greater philanthropic energy, ideas, and resources to the fields in which we work is one of the most effective ways for us to meet the scale of the challenge.

Our new team will educate and engage philanthropists who are new to democracy with the goal of helping them to enter the field. Led by the Director of Partnerships, the team will help donors and their advisors make strategic decisions to invest in our country’s democracy. It will take some time and experimentation to build this program, but there are a few things you should expect to see:

  • Resources: Democracy Fund will work with our peers to develop resources that help new donors to better understand the space, including investment guides highlighting the most innovative and high-impact strategies and organizations in the field. The Foundation Center’s data tool for the democracy field is an excellent example of the kind of resource we have helped create in the past that can help philanthropists understand the existing landscape.
  • Educational Events: Over the past 18 months, Democracy Fund has partnered with the Giving Pledge to educate members of that network about opportunities to strengthen democracy in the United States. We expect to organize more briefings and workshops like those we organized with Giving Pledge to inform new donors.
  • Joint Funds: Democracy Fund participates in and has created several collaborative funds that enable donors to easily contribute to vetted, highly effective grantees working to protect the health of our government, elections, and free press. Our Public Square program, for example, works with other journalism funders through NewsMatch, the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund, and the Community Listening and Engagement Fund. We aim to work with our peers to develop other similar funds that make it easier for new donors to enter the space.

Our Commitment to the Field

Our new efforts to build philanthropic partnerships will not slow our existing efforts to deploy our resources to support the field. Since Democracy Fund began, we have committed more than $100 million in grants and built a team of more than 45 people with deep expertise on issues ranging from journalism and elections to Congress and government accountability. Thanks to the generosity and leadership of Pierre Omidyar we intend to continue to invest at a similar level in the coming years.

At the same time, our commitment to our existing grantees will not limit our advice to new donors – we hope to help philanthropists find their own path into the field, whether or not it mirrors the path that we have chosen.

We are grateful for the mentorship and ongoing partnership of many foundations who have supported this field for decades, including the Knight Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. At such a deeply important moment for our country, we are excited to begin this important work and will continue to share our progress as the team grows and the program develops.

Back to Ideas

Op-Ed: How Philanthropy Can Do More to Stand Up for America’s Democracy

Joe Goldman
/
November 25, 2018

When the chief justice of the Supreme Court finds it necessary to reprimand the president of the United States for undermining the independence of the federal judiciary, it can be difficult to objectively know if that signifies a constitutional crisis.

Compared with Watergate, we are living through a slow-motion Saturday Night Massacre as the president and his allies test the limits of our democracy every week and sometimes every day. Instead of igniting from one clearly crossed red line, a constitutional crisis is creeping up on us.

As philanthropic leaders, we find it especially challenging to know what our role should be at a time like this. We represent nonpartisan institutions concerned about issues as disparate as civic engagement, civil rights, the environment, the arts, and more. That work can only truly thrive when our democracy is healthy, and so while we remain committed to our individual missions, we must also stand up and support people and organizations working to protect constitutional norms…

Read more from Joe Goldman at The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Democracy Fund is a foundation working to build an inclusive, multiracial democracy that is open, just, resilient, and trustworthy.

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