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

Next week, several hundred people from national, community, and place-based foundations, as well as newsrooms and other nonprofits, will come together at the Knight Media Forum in Miami. The conference focuses on philanthropy’s role in strengthening local news and information, which is essential for healthy communities and a vibrant democracy. We believe there’s an important conversation missing from the conference schedule: a discussion of the power imbalance inherent in funder-grantee relationships, and what we can do about it. Read More

As you may have noticed, a few weeks ago we completely overhauled our website in an effort to better serve the rapidly changing fields of media and philanthropy. (Here's an overview of what you can now find.) And with our shiny new website comes shiny new impact assessment resources, which we're eager to showcase. Read More

Editor's note: Earlier this month, Media Impact Funders brought funders together at Philanthropy New York with organizers and presenters from the first VR for Change summit to explore how immersive platforms offer new ways to engage and mobilize users around social issues. Because this is a new and quickly evolving medium, attendees had many questions. The lively conversation ranged across definitions of new technologies, ways to match funders’ goals to VR productions, emerging research on impact, and the costs of supporting such projects as platforms continue to roll out. Diana Barrett of the Fledgling Fund has thought through many of these questions in her own practice. In this post adapted from a piece published in the online publication Immerse, she shares what she’s learned about the impact of VR, and how Fledgling chooses the projects they support.  Read More

By Meghan Ventura | Community & Operations Manager, Games for Change With VR’s promise to help us see the world from someone else’s point of view, one word has become nearly synonymous with virtual reality projects on real-world issues—empathy. Read More

Since 2014, Media Impact Funders has been showcasing the work of producers dedicated to creating documentaries in the public interest through our annual Media Impact Festival. This year’s Media Impact Festival is a partnership with the AFI DOCS Film Festival in Washington, D.C., which took place from June 14-18. Our festival celebrates the following 10 media projects, which were selected to participate in AFI’s 2017 Impact Lab. See the case statements below to learn more about their outreach goals and impact. 2017 Selections ACORN and the Firestorm by Reuben Atlas and Sam Pollard (DOCUMENTARY FILM) This film documents the controversies surrounding ACORN, America’s largest grassroots community organizing group,  which became a major player in the 2008 presidential election that resulted in Barack Obama’s victory. Big businesses, Republicans and right­-wing activists took issue with the group, firing accusations of voter fraud and government waste at the left­-leaning organization. The conservative opposition found unexpected allies in a pair of amateur journalists who posed as a pimp and prostitute hoping to expose ACORN via hidden ­camera. The ensuing political drama spawned the now-omnipresent Breitbart Media, and served as a prescient foreshadowing of today’s political climate. Read the case… Read More

Editor's note: Last week, following the shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and then five police officers at the tail end of a peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration, Grant Oliphant, president of The Heinz Endowments in Pittsburgh, wrote a poignant piece about the responsibility we have in our field to bear witness to these unspeakably tragic events. He wrote: "This is what I have to give: To say on behalf of our institution, yes, yes, we see it. We see it and it is not ok. To say, we will do our part. To protest, along with you, 'Enough, stop it, no more.'"  Read More

Media Impact Funders and Foundation Center Announce New Mapping Tool for Media and Philanthropy Read More

Since 2014, Media Impact Funders has been showcasing the work of producers dedicated to creating documentaries in the public interest through our annual Media Impact Festival. This year, we are celebrating the power of interactive technologies to deepen the relationship between news and documentary projects and their audiences. Our 2016 selections — celebrated at our annual Media Impact Forum — span a range of interactive techniques, including virtual reality, participatory reporting, physical installations, and personalized digital experiences. A signature goal for our festival is to illuminate creative engagement strategies invented by producers and outreach teams. We hope to demonstrate fresh ways for funders and makers to connect users and influencers with pressing social issues. Download all five case studies for the projects to learn more about the selected teams’ goals, lessons learned, and outcomes, or find individual case studies below. Throughout the year we will also be hosting face-to-face and online conversations with our festival teams in order to spread knowledge about how such projects can help to fulfill philanthropic goals. Keep an eye on our events section for more details. Congratulations to the teams who produced this year’s projects: Across the Line This immersive virtual reality experience puts the… Read More

Several nonprofit news organizations—including past winners and new entrants—are celebrating this week with the announcement of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists. Read More

By Diane Wachtell, Executive Director of The New Press Books and films offer their creators entrée into a range of media — and access to new audiences — that are not available to those without such platforms. Read More

On November 20, 2014, as the world waited for the Grand Jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri, Media Impact Funders and The Atlantic Philanthropies hosted a conversation on race, justice and media with philanthropic leaders and media makers. The event was designed to explore how media is changing public opinion and policy on multiple criminal justice issues — from the school-to-prison pipeline, to racial profiling, to wrongful prosecution and beyond. Now, with another grand jury deciding not to indict another police office in the killing of yet another unarmed black man, Eric Garner, protests are erupting around the country. This makes it more crucial than ever for funders and producers to consider how the narratives around people of color have played out in mainstream media, and how that correlates to representation, judicial policy and policing. Our event laid out high-impact examples in three core areas — documentary and narrative film, journalism and social and advocacy campaigns — and examined how these forms intersect. We learned how journalism from FRONTLINE informed the creation of the action movie Snitch, which spawned an advocacy campaign on mandatory sentencing minimums. In the same vein, the best-selling book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in… Read More

“Soon the television cameras will get packed up,” reflected Alex Altman for Time the day after Michael Brown’s funeral, “leaving a town that has become the latest shorthand for America’s racial divide to figure out how to translate the energy, intensity and anger of the past two weeks into concrete change.” Read More