Funders turn fresh attention to diversity in media in troubling times

The recent violence in Charlottesville, Va., has thrust racist ideas into the national conversation in ways Americans haven't experienced before. Of course, tensions around race relations in the U.S. have been steadily building over the past few years, with high-profile protests around police shootings and a resurgence in hate groups. Intolerance in the streets has mirrored a spike in divisive rhetoric online, where trolls "drown out the voices of women, ethnic and religious minorities, gays—anyone who might feel vulnerable," observes Joel Stein in Time. But most disturbingly, these same sentiments can now be heard in the highest corridors of power. Read More

Editor’s note: This piece originally appeared Aug. 8, 2016, on PhilanTopic, the blog of Philanthropy News Digest. By Neill Coleman | Vice President of Global Communications, Rockefeller Foundation Read More

By Maria Teresa Ronderos | Program Director for Independent Journalism, Open Society Foundations Probably most people sort of knew off-shore havens were being used to hide taxable fortunes, to pillage national treasuries, or to receive bribes for sold consciences. However, when the Panama Papers stories connected names to bank accounts, and provided the hard evidence, everyone, from Beijing to Buenos Aires, wanted to read. A story with global impact: a reporter’s dream. Read More

At the Open Society Foundations' headquarters in Manhattan, philanthropic leaders and media makers gathered for Maladies and Miracles: Funding Media to Illuminate Health and Science, a day-long series of panels on health-related media coverage and storytelling projects. Read More

October was jam-packed with events examining how media can inspire creativity and catalyze change. From audio to visual, campaigns to games, virtual war stories to life-threatening investigations, this month offered insights on the impact of many different media forms. Read More

Tracking the impact of journalism is a bit like reporting a story. The first facts to establish on the ground are “Who, what, where, when?” — and even that’s not always easy. “How?” and “Why?” take quite a bit more digging, and the deadline pressure is always on. The hardest question to answer at all — Sunday magazine level hard — is “So what?” Methods for evaluating news were high on the docket at last week’s Online News Association Conference (ONA14), where nearly 2000 journalists gathered to discuss new practices, platforms, and tools. 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

“Photography has a special capacity to serve the public interest,” Media Impact Funders Executive Director Vince Stehle told attendees at the March 5 Media Impact Focus event, AIM and Shoot. And who could imagine a better venue to explore this topic than the Skylight Studios of the Annenberg Space for Photography? Read More

At our Media Impact Focus: AIM and Shoot event, we'll take a long look at the ways in which new technologies are opening up fresh opportunities for photographers to connect and collaborate with audiences. To shed light on these shifts, three of our speakers have assembled a shortlist of relevant readings—Amy Yenkin, the director of the Open Society Foundations Documentary Photography Project; Susan Meiselas, the president of the Magnum Cultural Foundation and a critically acclaimed photographer, and Sara Terry, the founder and artistic director of The Aftermath Project. Read More