The journalism industry, which has been suffering in recent years due to declining circulation and ad sales, recently received some financial life support from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, in the form of $1.8 million in grants.
The foundation – whose goal is to invest in the future of journalism by building the ethics, skills and opportunities needed to advance "principled, probing news and information" – distributed the grants among 18 journalism organizations nationwide.
The largest grant was awarded to the Challenge Fund for Journalism VI, which received $400,000 to help attract new donors and make important organizational changes. The Challenge Fund is sponsored by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the McCormick Tribune Foundation, and supports youth media, investigative reporting and ethnic media organizations.
The other largest donations included a $300,000 grant to the Oklahoma Museum of History to support its effort to digitize its files, and a $150,000 grant to Brandeis University to help fund the Innocence Project – an investigative reporting center – and the university’s Ethics & Justice Investigative Journalism Fellowships.
Many of the donations focus on new media and journalism innovation, including a $150,000 grant to iFOCOS for operating support and for Pitch It – a competition to identify promising early-stage innovative media projects – and $60,000 to the University of California at Berkley to fund the multimedia training program for professional journalists.
Other areas of concentration include journalism education, as seen in the $100,000 grant to the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism, which will help fund the Politics & Journalism Semester – a twice-yearly program that places college journalists in internships with major news bureaus in Washington.
This support of the journalism industry comes at a crucial time – the Center on Communication Leadership and Policy reported that newspaper revenues declined 17 percent last year and 25-30 percent in the first quarter of 2009.