For more than 40 years, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), has been at the forefront of defending journalists around the globe, ensuring they can report the truth safely and without fear of persecution. As attacks on the press continue to escalate—both internationally and here in the United States—journalists face mounting threats, including online harassment, physical violence, and legal and regulatory challenges.

In this Q&A, we sit down with Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists, to explore the organization’s insights on the state of press freedom, the critical role of funding in supporting independent journalism, and the unique threats posed by a shifting political landscape in the U.S. and abroad. CPJ, which joined as a member of MIF in 2024, has also recently announced the Climate Crisis Journalist Protection Initiative, a $1 million effort to provide climate journalists with assistance, safety training, and other forms of support.

This conversation comes at a pivotal moment, as the world grapples with the growing weaponization of distrust against the press and an urgent need to bolster the safety and resilience of journalists everywhere.

Nina Sachdev, Director of Communications, Media Impact Funders: CPJ is an intermediary, and I think it’s important to give our network an understanding of the role you play as both a grantseeker and a grantmaker. When did grantmaking become a more central focus of your work? Can you talk about the evolution of your grantmaking strategy?

Jodie Ginsberg, CEO, Committee to Protect JournalistsJodie Ginsberg, CEO, Committee to Protect Journalists: As part of our journalist assistance program, which provides rapid support to address the immediate needs of journalists in distress, CPJ has been providing emergency grants directly to journalists worldwide since 2001. However, the growth in demand for this assistance in recent years has been staggering. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we’d spend about $200,000 annually on emergency grants. This year, the budget for this fund is $1 million. Journalists are facing more threats than ever before, from rising anti-media rhetoric to climate and technological change, to protracted conflicts. As an organization with a core mission to ensure their safety, we decided to prioritize our grantmaking program to meet this clear and dire need.

Not only have we had to scale up our support dramatically in a short period of time, we’ve also had to rethink how our financial assistance can be even more impactful and efficient. While we primarily provide direct assistance to individual journalists, last year we also began partnering with organizations based in various countries and providing block grants to address the needs of many journalists at once. For example, we provided a grant to the Belarusian Association of Journalists that covered the cost of basic needs and family visits for 23 imprisoned Belarusian journalists, and provided a grant to the Rory Peck Trust Therapy Fund to support a group of freelance journalists with therapy costs throughout the year. As this program continues to evolve, we’re eager to explore creative solutions like these to be able to help more journalists more effectively.

Nina: How are you measuring the effectiveness of your grantmaking? Is there work that CPJ considers especially successful in terms of impact?

Jodie: CPJ’s grantmaking program is quite unique. When a journalist requests an assistance grant from CPJ, it’s because they are facing an urgent threat. They might be fleeing their home, seeking urgent medical care after being attacked, or dealing with trauma following an assignment. We also provide more than just funds. For example, a journalist who receives a grant to cover the cost of a plane ticket might also receive administrative support in an asylum or visa process, or we might work with a journalist we’re financially supporting on a safety assessment. We make sure that our support is holistic in ensuring journalists’ safety and stability so that they can continue to report the facts. Journalists who receive support from CPJ report back to us with tremendous relief, and are grateful that there was an organization able to help them while experiencing a grave, often life threatening, emergency.

Simply put, our grants keep journalists and journalism alive.

Of course, as our assistance program grows, and we increase the amount of grants given to other organizations, we are keen to evolve the way that we measure its impact. We’ll soon be piloting a new assessment strategy to help us better measure and understand the impact of our assistance. Any journalist who receives a grant from us will be sent a survey where they can provide feedback on how they were helped. We’re also looking into a longitudinal study to measure how our emergency assistance keeps journalists at work and in the field in the long term.

Nina: Last year, MIF produced research that provided an updated snapshot of the global journalism funding landscape. In a funder survey, when asked about motivations for supporting journalism, ensuring the safety and security of journalists ranked last. While there is general consensus among funders about the significance of the safety and security of journalists, many say that the actual implementation of safety and security measures is falling short. What’s going on here? 

Jodie: Unfortunately, safety and protection have long been neglected as a core element to media development and press freedom. This has been the case in regards to government funding, the philanthropic community, and even news organizations themselves. Safety and security is historically thought of as something only war correspondents need to deal with, but we need to expand this thinking. Investing in financial sustainability of the media, building reporting skills and capacity, and investing in technology are all derailed when journalists are not safe to engage in the essence of their work. 

From my conversations with journalism and media funders, they absolutely recognize the importance of investing in safety and security, but often don’t quite know where to start. There’s a whole ecosystem of journalism support and protection organizations, and we all work collectively and collaboratively, specializing in different areas, to meet the needs of journalists around the world. It’s really important for funders to understand this landscape, and have conversations with support organizations about what exactly they do so that they can decide where to put resources.  

MIF is a great place to start this learning process, we’d encourage funders who are willing and able to dedicate resources towards safety to connect with us and our fellow intermediary organizations here in the network. We also always recommend that you connect with journalists directly, if you support a media outlet, it’s always a good idea to ask them about their current safety needs. 

Nina: On a recent call MIF hosted for funders who are thinking about the safety and security of journalists in a shifting political environment, you spoke of a range of challenges ahead, including the sowing of distrust, police overreach, increased physical and legal threats, to name a few. How does CPJ approach balancing immediate needs and the longer-term work needed to shift the narrative around the importance of journalism? 

Jodie: We’re certainly approaching this new reality as a marathon, not a sprint. We have a blueprint this time around about what it looks like to have an administration in power that is openly and brazenly hostile to journalists and the press, not only from 2016, but from politicians around the world that follow the same rubric.  

In the short term, CPJ has positioned itself to be a resource for safety advice and support to journalists across the U.S. as they navigate these treacherous waters. We’re part of the Knight Election Hub, a coalition of organizations providing rapid safety support to journalists covering the post-election period in the United States, providing free safety sessions on online threats, cybersecurity, and physical security. 

In the long term, we are taking a multi-pronged approach because we’re dealing with a landscape that is more dangerous for journalists to work in on so many fronts, and there’s no one-stop solution for this. We’re cognizant that journalists in the U.S. are vulnerable to legal and regulatory attacks, as such we are focusing our advocacy on defending the safeguards for media freedom domestically, including federal shield laws. We’re also prioritizing organizing more training sessions and convenings for journalists and newsrooms so that they are properly prepared for any threats that may come their way, be it from a legal threat, an interaction with police, navigating a protest or wildfire, or an online doxxing attempt.

Nina: In September, CPJ announced the $1 million Climate Crisis Journalist Protection Initiative, whose goal is to ensure that journalists reporting on climate issues are able to do so freely and safely. There’s been a more than 40% increase in attacks on environmental journalists in recent years. Why? Are you seeing specific regions or types of coverage where you’re seeing heightened risks? 

Jodie: The reality is that covering climate change isn’t just about covering extreme weather events anymore. As the climate crisis manifests in manifold ways, environmental journalism now covers a broad range of topics, from land rights and use of natural resources, to migration and displacement, and conflict and human security. By their nature, these stories intersect with powerful interests, they involve probing political corruption, organized crime networks, and corporate interests. Holding these powerful actors to account comes at a high risk. They can and do target journalists with physical violence, detention and arrest, online harassment or legal attacks, restrict access, and even murder to silence them.   

Certainly we see some hot spots, we see a high rate of incidents occurring especially in countries with territories encompassing the Amazon Rainforest as well as South and Southeast Asian countries where land and environmental issues are prevalent. But it’s important to remember that we’re seeing these threats everywhere, including the United States: 10 journalists were arrested in North Dakota in 2017 as they covered the protests against the Dakota access pipeline. An incident like this could easily happen in the near future.  

Unfortunately, as the climate worsens, we expect more regions to be affected by these issues. With the research conducted through this initiative, CPJ will have a better ability to detect these global hotspots and safety trends, map journalists’ needs, and conduct preventative outreach.  

Nina: In addition to providing immediate protections, one of the goals of this initiative is to increase awareness of the threats climate journalists face. Talk to me about effective strategies to engage the public and policy makers. What about the current narrative needs to change? 

An NBC News journalist covers a fire in Lake County, California, on August 23, 2020. (Reuters/Adrees Latif)
An NBC News journalist covers a fire in Lake County, California, on August 23, 2020. (Reuters/Adrees Latif)

Jodie: One challenge we face when engaging the public is to not only communicate the urgency of action to address the climate crisis but also the pervasiveness of it in our day-to-day lives. For many, climate change remains a separate and distinct problem disassociated from the topics covered in their local and national news. Yet the dramatic shift in weather patterns, record-setting temperatures and natural disasters are now the context for most, if not all, news stories. As outlined by Jill Hopke in her feature, “Everyone Is a Climate Reporter Now”: “Transportation reporters need to understand how climate change affects infrastructure and contributes to delays, for example. Housing reporters need to explain the intersection of flood zones and insurance rates. Even sports reporters will need to make the connection between record temperatures and game cancellations, lost practices, and heat-related injuries.”  

The fight against the climate emergency is fought with information, and that information is brought to us by journalists, who put themselves at great risk to share stories from their communities. Yet, we often take for granted just how risky this work is, and across the board, we don’t see the safety of journalists who work on the environment prioritized by funders and policymakers alike in discussions about climate change and the threats it poses.

Nina: What does success look like for this initiative? 

Jodie: To us, success always means that journalists are safer and freer to conduct the important work that they do. We want to ensure that journalists doing this work receive the safety training and guidance that they need to cover their stories, and that they do not face barriers or reprisals from governments and the private sector for reporting on their role in the climate crisis. 

This work cannot happen without the research. Research and documentation is at the core of everything CPJ does to assist and advocate on behalf of journalists. By hiring a Climate Fellow under this initiative, we will be able to strengthen our work documenting whenever and wherever journalists working on climate issues are targeted for their work. This will create a body of evidence from which we will anchor our advocacy efforts, both on behalf of individuals as well as on systemic issues, as well as inform our assistance work so that we can better help journalists under threat.  

Nina: What do you want your funding peers to know about your work, or about the urgency with which we need to protect journalists and the work they produce? 

Jodie: In the funding community, media development and journalist protection work are traditionally thought of as two distinct categories, and supporting media and journalism means choosing one or the other. In my experience as a journalist and at CPJ, the reality is that they are inextricably linked and ultimately, complementary to each other.  

The MIF network is here because we know that in the United States, and around the world, media and journalism is in trouble, and we all want to save it. We’ve seen fantastic initiatives, from Press Forward, the International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM) and others to ensure the survival of local journalism, address news deserts, and find solutions to failing media financial models, but media and journalism also cannot survive without protection mechanisms and measures in place. Financial and physical precarity go hand in hand.  

When we invest in anything valuable, we also invest in insurance for it. If we value journalists and journalism, we must invest in their protection. Invest in your grantees and provide flexible funding for needs like personal protective equipment (PPE), psychological support, and digital security, and invest in organizations that they can turn to when they are in need.

Are you a journalist curious about CPJ’s safety resources? Check them out here.

About the Author
Nina Sachdev

Nina Sachdev

Director of Communications

Nina Sachdev brings more than 20 years of journalism, news editing and marketing experience to her role as a communications director for Media Impact Funders (MIF). Since joining MIF in 2016, Nina has been leading efforts to showcase the power of media, journalism and storytelling to the philanthropic community. Through strategic communications, member engagement strategies, research initiatives and high-profile speaking events, Nina works to educate and inspire funders to make more strategic decisions about their media funding. Nina’s experience as a senior leader in a philanthropy serving organization (PSO)—combined with her unique perspective of a grantseeker and a grantmaker—enables her to effectively advocate for the mission and vision of MIF and build strong relationships with donors and key stakeholders in the field of media philanthropy. Nina also brings with her from her journalism days a special focus on sexual assault and reproductive health, and is a tireless advocate for the importance of quality, impactful storytelling and journalism around these topics.
Nina cut her teeth in journalism at The Dallas Morning News, where—as an intern on the copy desk—she was tasked with editing the obituaries of famous people who hadn’t yet died. Since then, Nina has worked at The Santa Rosa Press Democrat, The Philadelphia Daily News and The Philadelphia Weekly in almost every editorial capacity imaginable, including senior editor, A1 editor (when that used to be a thing) and slot (does anyone remember that being a thing?).
Nina is the creator and editor of the award-winning The Survivors Project: Telling the Truth About Life After Sexual Abuse, which exposes the reality of healing from the effects of sexual abuse. Nina holds an M.A. in journalism from Temple University. She lives in Philadelphia with her family.