Terrific New Report on New Media Funding

American University’s Center on Institute for Interactive Journalism released a terrific report this week on funding for new media projects.

“New Media Makers: A Toolkit for Innovators in Community Media and Grant Making” finds that at least 180 community, family and other foundations have contributed nearly $128 million in grants to news and information initiatives in the United States since 2005. In fitting interactive form, the report is actually a written report, a website, case studies and a toolkit combined.

Although three very large efforts account for more than $56 million (Center for Public Integrity, New American Media/Pacific News Service, Center for Investigative Reporting) funding supported at least 115 news projects in total in 17 states and the District of Columbia, with many projects receiving multiyear funding. The leading funding of new media journalism projects, the Knight Foundation, supported this research project as well.

The findings are important for a few reasons:

1. It’s important to illustrate that although Knight is the largest funder it isn’t the only funder of new journalism projects.

2. The projects are not just large and national in scope but small and local as well. New journalism is going to come in lots of different forms and packages.

3. The list of funders is both a “Who’s Who” and a “Who’s That”, a terrific mix of household names like Gates and Hewlett and smaller, local foundations that you probably haven’t heard of unless you live in Ross, CA or New Haven, CT. This is great news for new media projects, particularly local ones, that funders don’t have to come from journalism or be born to new media to appreciate the need to invest in new ways of collecting, curating and distributing news and information.

Terrific information and lessons learned here, take a peek.

PS  J-Lab, if the database was just sortable by column that would be even more helpful.

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