What We Learned from a Deep Dive Into Journalism Funding—and Where Donors May Be Headed Next

Earlier this year, IP began rolling out a series of research papers we call “The State of American Philanthropy.” These briefs draw on past coverage by IP, as well as new interviews, grantmaking data from Candid, and other outside sources to help our members gain a deeper understanding of key areas of giving.

We think of these white papers as living documents to be updated on a regular basis, but bringing them to life in the first place ended up being a pretty hefty task. It’s also been a highly rewarding process, providing us with deep, new insights that we thought we’d share a few glimpses of here.

So far, I’ve worked on briefs in the fields of theater, dance, music, higher education, and journalism. That has meant distilling an extensive amount of information into an accessible, 30-page document for time-constrained grantseekers. Some topics proved more challenging than others, and “Giving for Journalism and Public Media,” published a few weeks ago, proved to be one of the more complicated papers to pull together. (Members can access all State of American Philanthropy research papers here.)

It’s a vast terrain that encompasses public radio stations, community nonprofits and university journalism schools. It’s also a relatively nascent field that’s growing at an astonishing clip. Funders are constantly expanding their definition of “journalism” beyond conventional investigative reporting to include activities like boosting news literacy and acting as a Big Tech watchdog.

Then there’s the unique nature of the work itself. After spending years covering the journalism and public media beat, I’m always struck by funders motivated by a powerful desire to restore trust in civic institutions and heal the body politic. It’s an ambitious—a cynic would call it quixotic—way to do philanthropy, and just when it seems the stakes can’t get any higher, a new dynamic, whether social media-driven vaccine hesitancy or hedge funds’ accelerated decimation of for-profit news outlets, rears its head, adding more complexity and nuance to funders’ already full plate.

Here’s how the editors and I wrapped our heads around this topic, what we learned in the process, and some recent developments that may be taking donors in new directions.

A sprawling, fast-changing field

The starting point for the State of American Philanthropy white papers is data provided by Candid, a leader in philanthropy research, but sometimes, we have to finesse the information a bit, as was the case here. We left out certain categories of giving, such as work on open data and net neutrality, opting to include them in other papers. And since our main goal is providing fundraisers with insights into donor priorities and how to access funding, we didn’t cover giving from donor-advised funds housed at Fidelity and Vanguard, which offer little visibility or accessibility.

On the other hand, Candid doesn’t capture some major gifts from individual donors, family foundations and corporations. We made sure to spotlight many of these funders—Craig Newmark, Pierre Omidyar, Meta, Google and others—due to their influence and the fact that organizations can occasionally access their support.

We also needed to go into a bit more historical context than in some of our other issue briefs. As recently as the late 1990s, the journalism funding ecosystem consisted of only a handful of major foundations and donors. This small footprint was inversely proportional to the thriving for-profit news sector. Newspaper revenues were surging, the internet was still in its infancy, and most Americans had access to at least one local outlet that provided trustworthy coverage.

U.S. newspapers’ advertising and circulation revenues peaked at $49 billion in 2006. But in 2012—the same year when Facebook (now Meta) went public—that figure had plummeted 49% to $25 billion.

As a result, the paper unpacks some of the trends that led to the decline of for-profit news, and with it, the explosion of journalism and public media philanthropy over the last 15 years. These trends included how Facebook and Google killed off print advertising, shrinking government appropriations for public media outlets, and the role misinformation played in the 2016 election, plus recent watershed events like the pandemic, George Floyd’s murder, and the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill.

Funding and nonprofit leaders I spoke with backed up the expansiveness of the terrain. Their concerns ran the gamut, including boosting support for outlets serving communities of color, educating readers on how to detect misinformation, and providing nonprofit outlets with technical expertise to grow digital advertising revenue.

We eventually centered the brief on four “big issues” that had solid consensus across the interview cohort—bolstering local news, strengthening investigative reporting, combating misinformation, and investing in issues of equity.

Experts stressed that these issues do not exist in respective vacuums. “The way to address misinformation and disinformation—which flourish in the absence of clear information—is to rebuild public trust,” said Media Impact Funders’ Executive Director Vince Stehle and Communications Director Nina Sachdev in a joint statement. “But you need to rebuild local news and invest heavily in diverse voices and communities in order to get there.”

Spotlighting key funders

Media Impact Funders, which “advances the work of a broad range of funders committed to effective use and support of media in the public interest,” lists approximately 100 members on its site. Our next challenge was to whittle down this broad funder ecosystem to a more accessible number.

That includes the giving of a handful of mega-donors at the top of the pyramid, like Craig Newmark, Pierre Omidyar, and John and Laura Arnold, plus Facebook and Google. Since 2018, the two tech giants have given at least a combined $700 million in journalism-related support, far eclipsing the giving of prominent private foundations. Similarly, Newmark made a $20 million gift to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in 2018. That single gift represented 38% of the Lily Endowment’s total journalism-related grantmaking ($52 million) from 2014 to 2018, according to Candid.

Grantseekers will be happy to know that some of these funders are accessible to nonprofits. The Facebook Journalism Project—now the Meta Journalism Project—accepts applications three times a year for its Community Network grants, while Craig Newmark Philanthropies encourages nonprofits to fill out an online information request to be considered for a grant.

Of course, the brief also explores the grantmaking priorities of prominent private foundations like the Knight, Mellon and MacArthur foundations and Open Society Foundations, plus community foundations, which are quietly emerging as the sleeping giant of journalism philanthropy.

An underlying tension

Meta and Google’s omnipresence brings me to an underlying tension that ran through the entire brief—a kind of cold war between funders that are (theoretically) united around similar goals.

As an example of how it works, one of the funding community’s top concerns is mitigating the proliferation of online misinformation. Yet two of the field’s largest funders committed to the cause also happen to be the biggest proliferators of misinformation. We quote a Wall Street Journal article that points out the ways Facebook and Google rely on algorithms designed to maximize “the reach of the incendiary—the attacks, the misinformation, the conspiracy theories. They pushed us further into our own hyperpolarized filter bubbles.”

Some peer funders say that until these companies de-escalate incendiary and inaccurate content, their sizable donations aimed at combating misinformation and mitigating polarization will only go so far.

“We do not yet have the visibility into platform operations that allows us to truly understand what is happening, who sees what, and to properly study the impact and reach of social media in particular,” Vera Franz, deputy director at OSF’s Information Program, told me. “We need access to the platforms’ data and algorithms so we can understand and keep the platforms accountable.”

Nobody expects we’ll get a look at Meta’s algorithms anytime soon. So what’s a civic-minded funder to do? For Craig Newmark, it’s providing $20 million to launch the Markup, a nonprofit outlet that investigates the effects of the tech industry on society. OSF, meanwhile, is “working with civil society groups to create accountability for the platform companies,” Franz said.

Another option that we did not discuss in the paper was funding to break up or otherwise rein in Big Tech. Frankly, at the time, it just wasn’t something most funders in this space seemed to have much of a stomach for, opting instead to double down on support for trusted news outlets. We did, however, note that this might become a bigger area of interest down the line.

Lo and behold

On October 1, just a few weeks before we published the white paper, our hunch proved accurate. The Wall Street Journal published “The Facebook Files,” reporting on the company’s awareness that its products cause harm and its leaders’ unwillingness to address these shortcomings. A few days later, whistleblower and former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen testified before Congress, laying out how the company was misleading the public on its progress in tamping down hate speech and misinformation.

Later that month, Politico reported that Haugen received PR and government relations support from Luminate, the organization founded by Pierre Omidyar. The organization also gave $150,000 to Whistleblower Aid, the nonprofit that is providing Haugen’s legal representation and advice. A source told the publication that Luminate began to work with Haugen after she went public earlier in October, and that we can expect Omidyar’s vehicles to continue funding similar work.

Readers know that Omidyar is the rare deep-pocketed critic of both capitalism and Big Tech. His Omidyar Network hosted a series on whistleblowing in the tech industry back in early February and has argued for breaking up Facebook and Google. But Luminate’s support for Haugen, who went toe to toe with what is arguably the most powerful corporation on the planet, represents a significant escalation in the campaign to counteract online misinformation.

In other words, the cold war is turning hot. Time—and our next wave of research on this topic—will tell if Omidyar provides cover for foundations or other civic-minded billionaires (Soros? Laurene Powell Jobs?) to take a more confrontational approach toward Big Tech.

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