Newsrooms who hope to win philanthropic support must first learn about what matters to funders. That’s one takeaway from a roundtable conversation hosted by the Lab for Journalism Funding, where funders shared advice with news leaders seeking to support their journalism in part through philanthropy.
The panel included current and former funders with experience in funding journalism. Sam Moody is a strategic philanthropy consultant and recently served as the associate director of the Colorado Media Project, where he designed and managed multi-million-dollar funding programs across Colorado. Jennifer Preston, a veteran journalist and independent philanthropic advisor, formerly served as vice president of journalism at the Knight Foundation, where she helped shift the foundation’s strategic priorities to address the crisis in local news. Paulette Brown-Hinds is the founder of Voice Media Ventures and the publisher of Black Voice News. She is also a member of several boards, including the James Irvine Foundation board of directors, where she drives investments in local journalism in Southern California.
Their insights create a solid foundation for newsrooms seeking philanthropic support, including tips on how to strengthen your case for funding and advice on how to tell when a funder is a good fit.
Focus on helping your community — not saving your newsroom
“It’s not about saving the organization or the institution or the news outlet,” Brown-Hinds said. “It’s about the value you provide.”
Although it’s true that many newsrooms are in dire need of more funds to survive, painting a picture of crisis is not a persuasive tactic when appealing to funders. It’s stronger — and more mission-driven — for news organizations to approach potential funding partners with a description of a real community need and an idea for how they can meet it.
“What purpose do you serve for your community? What need are you meeting for your community?” Moody asked. “Your proposal should be able to clearly articulate what your community needs from you, how you know it (and) what you’re going to give them.”
A proposal that articulates only what the newsroom needs will lead funders to feel that they are not focused on the right thing, Moody said.
Preston said newsrooms should demonstrate their commitment to the community by asking community members what they need, and then show funders that they’ve done that listening.
She added that many funders also expect news organizations’ solutions to community problems to involve more than just strict journalism, by adding in community engagement like convenings.
Highlight how local information strengthens other community institutions and efforts
Another challenge many newsrooms face when seeking philanthropic support is the fact that news outlets are not the only organizations doing good work in communities. The funders explained that journalism has a superpower worth emphasizing.
Moody said nonprofits, institutions and government agencies are more effective at improving communities when people care about each other — and that requires knowing about each other.
“That’s the thing that local news does,” he said. “Local news is like a grease in the mechanism that helps all the other institutions and resources in a community respond better (and) coordinate better.”
Moody said he rarely thinks about journalism as competing with these other institutions that could be funded. Instead, he thinks about local news as being “a necessary part of an ecosystem.”
Preston gave an example from Alberto Ibargüen, former CEO of Knight Foundation, on the special role journalism plays in communities.
“He would talk about the polluted pond in your community: How do you know that you need to clean up the pond if no one is reporting independently that the pond is polluted?” she said. “You need to know what the problems are.”
Then, news organizations can report on solutions and engage the community around those solutions to continue improving their communities.
Look for alignment
When starting to build relationships with funders, Preston said the most important thing is finding alignment. She said to use your reporting skills to do this.
“You have to dig in to your funder’s website,” she said. “Look at their press releases. Look at their statements, their announcements, their mission. Look at who else they fund. Make sure there’s alignment with your values and their values, and incorporate that into your pitch.”
Start local
Preston said most local newsrooms will have a better chance at success with local funders than with larger, national ones.
She encouraged newsrooms to look for connections with local foundations by asking their staff, boards, friends and family for personal ties — and asking for introductions when they arise.
Moody also emphasized the importance of starting local when looking for philanthropic support.
“If you start local and you’re like, ‘we serve this community’ and there’s a community foundation, a local foundation, that serves this community — your odds of getting alignment around some issue that that community needs addressed are much higher,” Moody said.
Instead of starting conversations with funders from the mindset that they have money you want from them, Moody said to start by asking what they are hearing about community needs and seeing if you can help each other.
“All of the best relationships I’ve ever had as a funder were with nonprofits or newsrooms or civic institutions where we were able to view ourselves as peers in the challenge of meeting community need,” he said.
Relationships take time
Often, funding opportunities are by invitation, not just by an open call or a cold call. For this reason, Brown-Hinds said it’s important to build relationships with funders and focus on doing good work in the community.
“So much of this is making sure you have the reputation of being a good news organization that is really serving your community,” she said. “A lot of it is the relationship building that has to take place over time by doing the good work.”
She said she has seen cases where national funders reach out to local or regional funders to ask for their perspectives on local organizations if they don’t know the applicants well. And, in some cases, national dollars come through local or regional intermediaries.
In all of these situations, having a good reputation in your community and strong local relationships improve your likelihood to receive support.
If there are any ethical concerns about a partnership, ‘no’ is the right answer
When building partnerships with funders, it’s critical for news organizations to keep their editorial integrity intact.
“It’s really important that the newsroom approaches all encounters with funders practicing the highest ethics,” Preston said. “If it doesn’t feel right, it’s wrong. And if you have any ethical questions, ‘no’ is the right answer.”
Some situations that could bring up ethical questions would be if a funder approaches a news organization and suggests their own idea for a specific, investigative project they think the newsroom should undertake, or if the funder requests media coverage on their own work or tries to dictate editorial decisions in other ways.
Brown-Hinds emphasized that mission and purpose alignment matters.
“We always focus on community first, and thriving community — and if it’s something that goes against that, then we’re not going to support it,” she said. “There are some folks who would kind of like to use the relationship as a kind of PR for their organization and we want to make sure that it’s more about the information needs of the community. So if you find that there’s not alignment, you don’t want money from them.”
Moody pointed out that most funders that suggest partnerships that cross the lines of ethical journalism do not have “malicious interests.” More often, he said, they’re just new to funding journalism and they are attached to their own framework for thinking about a community problem.
If a case like this does arise, Moody said the best response is one that brings the focus back to a journalistic process rooted in community listening, centering the work and its goals on what the community has said it needs.
At the end of the day, the place where community needs, journalistic solutions and funder goals overlap is where philanthropically-funded journalism will have the biggest impact.
Editor’s note: Artificial intelligence was used to help the author transcribe the audio recording from a virtual call. All quotes have been checked for accuracy by a human.