Big Grants for Topic-Specific Journalism Bring Opportunity, Concerns Over Independence
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Recent flooding in Brisbane, Australia. The AP recently received an $8 million grant to boost climate journalism. Alex Cimbal/shutterstock
In mid-February, the Associated Press announced it received a three-year, $8 million grant from five funders, including the Rockefeller and Walton Family foundations, to hire 20 new reporters to cover climate change’s impact on agriculture, migration, urban planning, the economy, culture and other areas around the world.
AP News Vice President Brian Carovillano called the arrangement “mutually beneficial” for the nonprofit agency and its funders, each of which has made tackling climate change a top priority in recent years.
Funding for topic-specific coverage has always been a component of the journalism giving ecosystem, with funders like the Gates Foundation earmarking support for priorities like education and global health. But the AP grant caught my attention for two reasons.
The first is its size. The $8 million grant is AP’s largest single expansion bankrolled by philanthropy and exceeds the Gates Foundation’s biggest journalism commitment between 2020 and 2021 by a whopping $3 million. Just as important, the AP grant is earmarked for climate change, a field that our deep dive into journalism giving identified as the most promising funding opportunity for organizations in the months and years ahead.
This topic-restricted funding approach can also raise questions about who, exactly, is calling the editorial shots. While Carovillano stressed that AP’s patrons would have no influence over the reporting, it hasn’t stopped some critics from arguing that its funders were essentially paying for coverage that would advance their funding priorities. In the likely event that funders ramp up this kind of support in the future, it will be incumbent on outlets to eliminate even the slightest perception of conflict of interest.
“There is no financing system that perfectly protects editorial independence, once and for all,” said Vincent Stehle, executive director of Media Impact Funders, a network of over 80 grantmakers that support media and technology in the public interest. “But there is no reason why grant support is inherently more corrupting than advertising revenue. These principles require people on both sides of the table to operate with integrity and they have to be refreshed and maintained on an ongoing basis.”
Lay of the land
When it comes to restricted, topic-specific support for journalism, there are basically two forms of funding, according to Jim Friedlich, executive director and CEO of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, in an email to IP. The first targets “capacity building, such as the support of added news gathering, diverse voices, technology capabilities, or strengthened fundraising,” while the second targets “general news-gathering categories such as investigative or statehouse coverage, or specific topics like climate change, healthcare or gun violence.”
The AP gift falls into this second category, which up until recently has been something of a niche area for grantmakers. Stehle of Media Impact Funders pointed me to a report from researchers at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center and Northeastern University, which found that foundations earmarked just 8% of support for journalism between 2010 and 2015 to specific beat coverage, like money in politics, immigration or racial justice.
Our white paper on the topic picked up on this theme as well, and listed funders providing topic-specific journalism support in fields like religion (Lilly Endowment), education (Lumina Foundation), health (the California Wellness Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Association of Health Care Journalists, and Helmsley Trust), and the environment and science (Earth Journalism Network, Walton Family Foundation, Sloan Foundation, Fund for Environmental Journalism).
The Shorenstein/Northeastern report also found that 15.8% of grants went to “subject-specific, deep vertical news orgs.” Lenfest’s Friedlich cited a handful of such single-issue outlets, including The Trace (gun violence and policy), Inside Climate News, or The Marshall Project (criminal justice) that benefit from philanthropic support.
A highly scaled strategy
The Gates Foundation is arguably the journalism space’s largest provider of topic-specific funding. In a 2020 Columbia Journalism Review piece scrutinizing the foundation’s journalism grantmaking, Gates critic Tim Schwab wrote, “when Gates gives money to newsrooms, it restricts how the money is used—often for optics, like global health and education, on which the foundation works—which can help elevate its agenda in the news media.”
Such funding is clearly not without precedent. What’s unique about Gates’s approach is its scale. According to Schwab, the foundation allocated more than $250 million to journalism organizations through the end of June 2020, while adding the caveat that “the full scope of Gates’s giving to the news media remains unknown because the foundation only publicly discloses money awarded through charitable grants, not through contracts.”
I searched the Gates Foundation’s grants database to get a handle on the foundation’s more recent giving, and found that it committed $48 million to journalism in mostly multi-year commitments to 44 organizations in 2020 and 2021. Only one grant was earmarked for general operating support.
The foundation’s five biggest commitments flowed to the Netherlands-based Stichting European Journalism Centre ($4.6 million; 37 months), NPR ($4 million; 35 months), CNN ($3.6 million; 38 months), The Guardian ($3.5 million; 36 months), and Germany’s Spiegel Online ($2.9 million; 41 months).
To Schwab’s point, most of its commitments flow to outlets producing coverage pertaining to key priority areas. For example, the $4 million commitment to NPR supports “high-quality, evidence-based, and sustained coverage of global health and development issues including as affecting the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people.” Its $3.6 commitment to CNN enabled the network to “report on gender equality with a particular focus on least-developed countries, producing journalism on the everyday inequalities endured by women and girls across the world.”
Growing interest in climate reporting
It’s worth noting that Gates’s strategy stands in contrast to those of some of the field’s top funders. A review of Knight’s 2020 or 2021 grantmaking didn’t reveal any support earmarked for coverage on its other priority areas arts and culture and boosting civic engagement. Similarly, I was unable to find a MacArthur Foundation grant between 2020 and 2021 that bankrolled coverage specific to its four “big bets” which are climate solutions, criminal justice, nuclear challenges, and strengthening transparency in Nigeria.
These findings anecdotally corroborate research showing that foundations earmarked a mere 8% of journalism support between 2010 and 2015 to specific beat coverage. And yet, that was a period of time when climate change had yet to reach critical mass across the broader funder community.
Last December, IP’s 2021 Philanthropy Awards named climate change as philanthropy’s second-biggest cause of the year, right behind COVID. “After advocates, scientists and philanthropy journalists spent so many years pleading for more climate funding, this area of giving blew up this year,” we wrote. Around the same time, we published our deep dive into journalism and public media giving, which listed climate change as an emerging funding opportunity area for fundraisers.
Not coincidentally, the five funders behind the AP partnership—William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Quadrivium, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—have made combating climate change a top philanthropic priority.
One of the journalism space’s biggest proponents of topic-restricted funding has also been boosting his climate change bona fides of late, so it probably won’t come as a shock to learn that Bill Gates’s climate advocacy network, Breakthrough Energy, recently launched a publication called Cipher to “accelerate the technological transformations required to get to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 through trustworthy and objective journalism.”
Cognizant of the fact that Cipher’s mission is identical to that of its main funder, the outlet’s home page notes its “editorial leadership has final say over our journalism. We include disclaimers as needed when we cover topics, people and/or companies that are in or connected to the Breakthrough Energy network.”
The need for firewalls
Writing for CJR, Schwab argued the Gates Foundation’s journalism strategy incentivizes outlets to chase funding, even if it’s earmarked for coverage that may not be particularly resonant to its audience. Critics of the AP gift, like The Capitolist’s Brian Burgess, Dan Gainor, vice president of Free Speech America and business for the Media Research Center, and the New York Post—that paragon of journalistic excellence—have deployed a similar line of reasoning, arguing that piles of foundation money can erode the outlet’s editorial independence and credibility.
“There’s nothing specifically wrong with having a particular editorial slant,” Burgess wrote. “The problem in the AP’s case (and with so many other media outlets) is that they feign objectivity and pretend the donations don’t influence their reporting. But that’s impossible.”
Time will tell if the funders behind the AP gift influence its reporting and what, exactly, that looks like. But protecting against such influence is something editors have been charged with throughout the history of the industry.
“Journalism has always relied upon somebody to pay the bills, whether that comes in the form of advertising, subscription, membership contributions or foundation grants,” said Media Impact Funders’ Stehle. “Journalism has always had editorial and publishing firewalls to protect reporters from feeling the pressure of any of these financial interests in shaping coverage.”
As a leader of an organization that is both a funder and a beneficiary of foundation funding, Lenfest’s Friedlich has been on both sides of this arrangement. He told me that “almost all news philanthropists seek to support strong, independent journalism rather than set a specific editorial agenda. Most funders understand that any attempt to steer or manipulate coverage would undermine the freedom and impact of the press, the very qualities we seek to support and that we hold most dear.”
The size and scope of the AP gift suggest that we shouldn’t be surprised if foundations ramp up topic-restricted support that covers their key priority areas. Assuming outlets have the requisite firewalls in place, Stehle considers this kind of support beneficial to the sector and society at large. “If there are more funders engaged, there is less danger that any one donor will have an out-sized influence on coverage.”
Correction: This story has been corrected to reflect that The Guardian received a $3.5 million grant from the Gates Foundation.
