Stay up-to-date on the latest news, trends and perspectives in media and philanthropy.

After seven years of tracking the field of media impact assessment, we're pleased to announce the release of our latest report, Decoding Media Impact: Insights, Advice & Recommendations, which provides an examination of the current state of the field. Read More

From our earliest days, the Pulitzer Center has been committed to the notion that, for quality news to continue to be relevant in the United States, we must commit in equal measure to supporting more of the best work but also to building the audience for that work.  Read More

Editor's note: Co-founded by The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review, Covering Climate Now is a collaboration of more than 390 news outlets around the world boasting a combined audience of well over 1 billion people, all dedicated to strengthening news coverage of the climate story. Written by Mark Hertsgaard, the executive director of Covering Climate Now and environmental correspondent at The Nation, and Columbia Journalism Review Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope, the report below chronicles the week of high-profile climate coverage that the collaboration organized around the United Nations Climate Action Summit in September. Hertsgaard was one of the attendees at our recent gathering on media and the environment. There, we asked Hertsgaard how Covering Climate Now got started. Here’s his answer: "In October of 2018, the scientists at the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a landmark report that concluded that humanity had 12 years to slash heat trapping emissions in half—on the way to net zero by 2050—or face extreme, perhaps irreversible climate destabilization. The scientists added that achieving this very ambitious goal would require rapid, “transformational" changes in the world economy’s energy sector, agricultural sector, transport, construction, finance and others. It struck me that the scientists neglected to mention the media sector, and that this was a crucial oversight. For unless the media sector is transformed, none of those other sectors will be transformed, because without much better media coverage of the climate crisis, there will not be the public awareness and public pressure necessary to make governments, corporations and others do what’s needed. That’s what led The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review to co-found Covering Climate Now: We want to help our colleagues throughout the news media transform our approach to the climate crisis and “tell the story so people get it,” as the iconic TV newsman Bill Moyers said at the April 30 conference at Columbia that launched Covering Climate Now." Read More

Question: Let’s say you’re at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, watching the premiere of a documentary about the power and promise of veganism. “A shocking new documentary that will change the way you look at meat,” reads one of the reviews. Immediately after exiting the film, do you: Read More

SIMA Studios is a global curator of social impact media with multiple arms: SIMA Awards, which honor high-quality social impact media across the globe; SIMA X, a community film screening and distribution initiative; and SIMA Classroom, an educational program designed to “provide first-class visual storytelling resources to education forums worldwide.” Recently, we chatted with SIMA’s founder and executive director, Daniela Kon, and global partnerships director Viri Pittaro about SIMA Classroom, their new impact assessment tool for measuring empathy, and the power of storytelling through film. Here’s what we learned. Read More

“Scale"—too often this is the bane of a grantee’s or evaluator’s existence when it comes to assessing the social impact of media projects. Why are funders so stuck on this concept, and what other impact models might matter more? As we’ve been reviewing materials we’ve gathered on media impact over the past several years, these questions have popped up time and again. Read More

Over the past five years of researching media impact, it’s become clear to me that even those of us who spend our time researching the complexities of impact assessment sometimes rely on unwritten assumptions: that change is linear, and can be easily measured; that social media is an effective organizing tool; that conventional meetings and gatherings invariably lead to greater impact; and that the impact of isolated projects can be viewed outside of the larger systems of which they are a part.  Read More

Last week, in collaboration with Philanthropy New York and the Environmental Grantmakers Association, we held a special screening and discussion of the award-winning film Sea of Shadows, a new film by National Geographic that serves as a blueprint for how a conservation effort can come together in spite of widespread institutional corruption and dangerous cartels. In the Gulf of California, totoaba fish are being illegally overfished by Mexican cartels and Chinese traffickers because of a belief among some in China that their bladders possess healing powers. But the deadly methods of harvesting totoaba, also a critically endangered fish, are threatening to wipe out the vaquita—the world's smallest whale. In fact, it's estimated that fewer than 15 vaquitas remain. Sea of Shadows follows undercover investigators, environmentalists, journalists and the Mexican Navy in their efforts to rescue the vaquita from total extinction. Read More

Here at Media Impact Funders, we’ve been researching best practices in measuring media impact since 2013. In addition to curating impact-related tools, producing original analyses on impact trends, and publishing a monthly impact newsletter, we also convene funders to discuss impact, and conduct research on how funders are thinking about and assessing impact in the field. In early 2019, a full-scale website redesign allowed us to showcase these resources in a more streamlined, organized way. Read More

This week, media funders from across the country will gather at our annual Media Impact Forum to explore connections between radio and community, and how audio producers can spur civic conversations among audiences. We’re excited to showcase how one of media’s oldest forms of communications is reaching new audiences in creative ways—and garnering more funder support than ever before. Read More

The combination of increased news coverage of sexual violence and the #MeToo movement has made it easier for survivors of all kinds of abuse to come forward and tell their stories. Their bravery has shed light on a taboo issue that’s incredibly difficult to understand. The effects of sexual abuse manifest in so many ways—in the form of PTSD, depression, anxiety, the inability to have meaningful relationships later in life, and much more. But even as society is starting to comprehend what the aftermath of sexual abuse looks like, the culture that allows for such violence to occur in the first place steadfastly persists. Rape culture excuses, normalizes and tolerates sexual violence—and it is all around us. And never before has a film so expertly captured these complicated and nuanced dynamics as Nancy Schwartzman’s Roll Red Roll, which pieces together the assault of a teenage girl at a party in small-town Ohio. You won’t see or hear the victim in this film; what makes Roll Red Roll special and important is that it is focused on—and exposes—the collusion of teen bystanders, teachers, parents and coaches to protect the assailants. It digs into the deep-seated “boys will be boys” culture that’s… Read More

While the media and tech landscapes are changing rapidly—requiring nimble and adaptive business practices and new models—the larger social sector funding landscape can be stuck in model for a previous age, planning out discrete interventions and then collecting metrics to examine how many people were touched by them. And media funders—despite often being at the cutting edge of impact evaluation—still struggle with these tensions. Read More