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Last week at the Grantmakers In Health conference in Baltimore, I brought something to life that I’ve been thinking about for nearly a decade: Media Impact Funders’ first-ever Media Grantmaking 101 workshop. For years, we’ve made the case that strong public-interest media is essential to achieving philanthropic goals. You know the refrain by now: Whatever your first issue is, media should be your second. But what happened in this room felt different. The 50+ health funders who joined us weren’t asking whether media belongs in their strategies. They were asking how. That shift feels significant. To help kick off the workshop, I asked two experienced media funders—Kate Shatzkin at Annie E. Casey Foundation and Taryn Fort (she/her) at The Colorado Health Foundation— to share their “why media funding” journeys, what the internal conversations looked like at their respective organizations, and the advice they’d give to a peer who was just starting out. Then, Marisol Bello from Housing Narrative Lab brought the practitioner perspective, talking about the impact philanthropic support can have on narrative storytelling. Participants worked through a hands-on exercise that took them from identifying a health challenge and the information gap making it worse, to choosing… Read More

In advance of this year’s Media Impact Forum, our staff has compiled a list of reports, articles and recorded programs to help prepare attendees for the event. These are some of the articles and tools that our programming team had in mind when putting together the conference, and also cover earlier conversations that we will build on at the Forum. We will be adding to this list in the lead-up to May 28. Not attending the Forum? The materials here speak to the dominant themes and ideas that will be presented on stage, but will also be key parts of the conversations and events funders can expect from MIF in the coming months. If you have any questions about the links included here, would like more information or have an item you think we should add to the list, please reach out to shannon@mediafunders.org. Media Infrastructure & Sustainability Rebuilding Local Journalism at Scale: A Field-Level Analysis of Infrastructure Needs. Published earlier this year by MIF, this report provides an analysis of the structural constraints shaping the future of local journalism What Comes Next? The Conversation Emerging Around “Rebuilding Local Journalism at Scale” – a follow-up piece… Read More