Philanthropists galvanize around news

“Foundations should provide operating and project support with few or no strings attached.”

2017 is the year that philanthropy stops asking, “Why should we fund news and information?” and starts asking, “How do we get started?”

For years, funders have averted their eyes from the alarming loss of journalism jobs and coverage of local and state issues. This presidential election made it virtually impossible for them to ignore it any longer.

The Geraldine R Dodge FoundationIn the swirl of confusion and fear about fake news, echo chambers, and threats to press freedom, funders are now grasping the consequences to our communities when there are no journalists covering city council meetings or providing substantive statehouse reporting to keep elected officials accountable. Weeks away from the inauguration, foundations are waking up to the reality that this major transition of power will likely impact the issue areas they support, and that they can’t achieve their longterm objectives as long as the public is starved for relevant, reliable information about those issues.

Funders will be tempted to make grants that, in effect, seek to buy coverage in order to promote their agendas, by offering to fund beats or specific investigations, requesting editorial review and enacting quotas for stories written. But this would be disastrous to an already divided society, sowing further distrust for both philanthropy and journalism. Instead, philanthropy should focus on infrastructure: supporting a broad array of organizations — newsrooms, libraries, and civic tech organizations, as well as projects that promote open data and transparent government — that will strengthen news ecosystems across the country and give people access to information they crave.

Foundations should provide operating and project support with few or no strings attached. Additionally, they should give dollars that help newsrooms and other community-based nonprofits take creative risks, explore new revenue streams, and collaborate with partners. Doing so provides organizations the stable support they need while also empowering them to experiment, learn, and adapt to a changing landscape. Funding infrastructure also insulates philanthropy from accusations of deliberately influencing coverage.

There is no quick, easy fix to rebuilding capacity for news and information organizations or cultivating constructive dialogue and solutions for pressing issues; it will require sustained philanthropic investment and patience. But the opportunity here is immense. Journalists and their community-based partners can become the superheroes people desperately need right now: promoting understanding among neighbors; empowering people to participate in important local decisions; holding elected officials accountable; amplifying the voices and ideas that are never heard; and restoring the public’s trust in institutions. And fortunately, there are good models to turn to — thoughtful and creative leaders in the field demonstrating how people-powered journalism can act as a bulwark against fear, hate, and apathy.

Philanthropy has been too slow to value news and information organizations as community anchors. They have viewed media funding as a program area unto itself (one that they have not been particularly interested in), rather than a vital pathway for helping people discuss, understand, and engage with urgent issues. 2017 is the year this changes. Funders will make a bold longterm commitment to strengthening news and information ecosystems, recognizing it as a systemic way to inform, engage, and improve our communities and people’s lives.

Molly de Aguiar is the program director for informed communities at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

Maria Bustillos   “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”

Sarah Marshall   Focusing on the why of the click

Almar Latour   Thanks, #fakenews

Errin Haines   Chaos or community?

Jonathan Hunt   Measurement companies get with the times

Corey Ford   The year of the rebelpreneur

Michael Oreskes   Reversing the erosion of democracy

Matt Karolian   AI improves publishing

Tressie McMillan Cottom   A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting stratifies into hard layers

Elizabeth Jensen   Trust depends on the details

Asma Khalid   The year of the newsy podcast

M. Scott Havens   Quality advertising to pair with quality content

Keren Goldshlager   Defining a focus, and then saying no

Lam Thuy Vo   The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication

Peter Sterne   A dangerous anti-press mix

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-checking bot

Pablo Boczkowski   Fake news and the future of journalism

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Earn trust by working for (and with) readers

Tanya Cordrey   The resurgence of reach

Richard Tofel   The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us

Ashley C. Woods   Local journalism will fight a new fight

Guy Raz   Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever

Olivia Ma   The year collaboration beats competition

Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel   A rebirth of populist journalism

Taylor Lorenz   “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing

Vivian Schiller   Tested like never before

Alexis Lloyd   Public trust for private realities

Ken Schwencke   Disaggregation and collection

Francesco Marconi   The year of augmented writing

Jim Friedlich   A banner year for venture philanthropy

Megan H. Chan   Cultural reporting goes mainstream

Sara M. Watson   There is no neutral interface

Tim Herrera   The safe space of service journalism

Mathew Ingram   The Faustian Facebook dance continues

Moreno Cruz Osório   The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism

Amy Webb   Journalism as a service

David Skok   What lies beyond paywalls

Liz Danzico   The triumph of the small

Melody Kramer   Radically rethinking design

Amy O'Leary   Not just covering communities, reaching them

Millie Tran   International expansion without colonial overtones

Libby Bawcombe   Kids board the podcast train

David Chavern   Fake news gets solved

Burt Herman   Local news gets interesting

Dhiya Kuriakose   The year of digital detoxing

Priya Ganapati   Mobile websites are ready for reinvention

Margarita Noriega   From pinning tweets to tweeting pins

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   News after advertising may look like news before advertising

Steve Henn   The next revolution is voice

Zizi Papacharissi   Distracted journalism looks in the mirror

Andrew Losowsky   Building our own communities

Matt Waite   The people running the media are the problem

Juan Luis Sánchez   Your predictions are our present

Mario García   Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward

Geetika Rudra   Journalism is community

Sarah Wolozin   Virtual reality on the open web

Aja Bogdanoff   Comments start pulling their weight

Erin Millar   The bottom falls out of Canadian media

Carla Zanoni   Prioritizing emotional health

Nushin Rashidian   A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions

Scott Dodd   Nonprofits team up for impact

Sue Schardt   Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love

Jon Slade   Trusted news, at a premium

Nathalie Malinarich   Making it easy

Robert Hernandez   History will exclude you, again

Ryan McCarthy   Platforms grow up or grow more toxic

Cory Haik   Navigating power in Trump’s America

Dannagal G. Young   The return of the gatekeepers

Alice Antheaume   A new test for French media

Mary Walter-Brown   Getting comfortable asking for money

Swati Sharma   Failing diversity is failing journalism

Ray Soto   VR moves from experiments to immersion

Jonathan Stray   A boom in responsible conservative media

Mary Meehan   Feeling blue in a red state

Sam Ford   The year we talk about our awful metrics

Ståle Grut   The battle for high-quality VR

Dan Gillmor   Fix the demand side of news too

Joanne Lipman   The year of the drone, really

Ole Reißmann   Un-faking the news

Alberto Cairo   Communicating uncertainty to our readers

Erin Pettigrew   A year of reflection in tech

Rachel Sklar   Women are going to get loud

Gabriel Snyder   The aberration of 20th-century journalism

Mark Armstrong   Time to pay up

Andy Rossback   The year of the user

Coleen O'Lear   Back to basics

Laura E. Davis   Show your work

Ariane Bernard   Better data about your users

Jeremy Barr   A terrible year for Tiers B through D

Javaun Moradi   What can we own?

Anita Zielina   The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom

Adam Thomas   The coming collaboration across Europe

P. Kim Bui   The year journalism teaches again

Bill Keller   A healthy skepticism about data

Umbreen Bhatti   A sense of journalists’ humanity

Katie Zhu   The year of minority media

Felix Salmon   Headlines matter

S.P. Sullivan   Baking transparency into our routines

David Weigel   A test for online speech

Doris Truong   Connecting with diverse perspectives

Dan Colarusso   Let’s make live video we can love

Andrew Ramsammy   Rise of the rebel journalist

Reyhan Harmanci   Bear witness — but then what?

Claire Wardle   Verification takes center stage

Mandy Velez   The audience is the source and the story

Rachel Schallom   Stop flying over the flyover states

Samantha Barry   Messaging apps go mainstream

Sydette Harry   Facing journalism’s history

Andrea Silenzi   Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Truthiness in private spaces

Molly de Aguiar   Philanthropists galvanize around news

Lee Glendinning   A call for great editing

Kawandeep Virdee   Moving deeper than the machine of clicks

Renée Kaplan   Pure reach has reached its limit

Laura Walker   Authentic voices, not fake news

Caitlin Thompson   High touch, high value

Michael Kuntz   Trust is the new click

Carrie Brown-Smith   We won’t do enough

An Xiao Mina   2017 is for the attention innovators

Julia Beizer   Building a coherent core identity

Emily Goligoski   Incorporating audience feedback at scale

Cindy Royal   Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid

Liz McMillen   The year of deep insights

Trushar Barot   API or die

Mira Lowe   News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”

Tracie Powell   Building reader relationships

Nicholas Quah   Podcasting’s coming class war

Amie Ferris-Rotman   Вслед за Россией

Emi Kolawole   From empathy to community

Tim Griggs   The year we stop taking sides

Annemarie Dooling   UGC as a path out of the bubble

Helen Havlak   Chasing mobile search results

Christopher Meighan   Unlocking a deeper mobile experience

Mike Ragsdale   A smarter information diet

Kathleen Kingsbury   Print as a premium offering

Rebekah Monson   Journalism is community-as-a-service

Andrew Haeg   The year of listening

Hillary Frey   Forests need to burn to regrow

Rubina Madan Fillion   Snapchat grows up