Spring Research Roundup: Getting a Handle on Audience Habits

For funders and grantees avidly tracking journalism's evolution, the annual release of the Pew Research Center’s State of the News Media analysis sets the stage for strategy discussions and decisions in the months to follow. Last year’s much-quoted stat was 1% — the estimated percentage of "total news dollars" contributed by philanthropy, venture capital, and capital investments. The number to know from this year’s report is 39. That’s how many of the top 50 digital news websites now have more traffic from mobile devices than desktop computers — a shift Pew terms a “mobile majority." Read More

By Jon Funabiki On Monday morning (3/2), I joined hundreds of family members, friends, journalists and funders in mourning the death of Dori J. Maynard, the president of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and an unflinching critic of the news media’s treatment of African Americans and other minority groups. She passed away on Feb. 24 from lung cancer at the age of 56. 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

Media Impact Funders recently went to Camden, Maine for PopTech 18 — Rebellion. We convened a small group of funders and made our way to that very rainy and quaint coastal village for an exploration of media innovation, especially as it relates to the conference theme of rebellion and its place in social change. Before PopTech officially kicked off we were fortunate to hear from a terrific group of media innovators for a private discussion about new ways to think of media investments and their impacts. Leetha Filderman, President of PopTech; Beth Cohen, Director of Media at PopTech; Trent Gilliss Executive Editor and Chief Content Officer of On Being; Courtney Martin, Author and Co-Founder of the Solutions Journalism Network; and Sean Flynn, Director of the Points North Documentary Forum at the Camden International Film Festival got our funder group into the PopTech mindset and set the tone for an excellent few days ahead. We planned this special session as a time to explore the ways nonprofits are becoming trusted media makers and distributors, creating opportunities to communicate directly with their supporters; how innovative practice is transforming newsrooms and the way we engage with news; and how PopTech… 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

At our June 2014 Media Impact Forum we learned about innovative public media efforts surrounding local journalism (among many other topics). In follow-up to that conversation we chatted with Bruce Theriault, Senior Vice President, Journalism and Radio at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to get his take on local journalism efforts, and CPB’s work to support and advance local journalistic excellence. The data map on the Media Impact Funders’ website details grants of $10,000 and over made by more than 1,000 of the largest US foundations between 2009-2011. That covers a lot and highlights the growth in media-related funding (four times domestic giving in other areas) but it leaves out organizations like CPB, which aren’t foundations. Since CPB is a major funder in the public media space, can you tell me about some of the funding trends you’re seeing? CPB is funding numerous journalism initiatives at the local, regional, and national level, with special emphasis on collaborative models in TV and radio. Increasingly we are seeing public media stations collaborate with digital-first news organizations. The Rocky Mountain PBS and I-News merger is a good example. That combination allowed them to pull together a… Read More

Read our Storify covering our events in Chicago. We kicked off our Chicago visit with a celebration of the Henry Hampton Award winning film, DETROPIA,  featuring filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, with award presentation by director Ric Roman Waugh (Snitch). DETROPIA is a requiem for the death and rebirth of a great American city and explores resilience, hope, anger and change against the backdrop of staggering job and populations losses; a dramatic “downsizing” of an American city; and cuts to basic services. Following the award we had a lively discussion with the filmmakers, J. Mikel Ellcessor, General Manager of WDET, Rahsaan Harris, Executive Director of Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy, moderated by Cara Mertes, Director of the Sundance Documentary Film Program. Read More

Media Impact Funders, The Atlantic Philanthropies and Philanthropy New York convened a funder gathering and livestream to discuss the acclaimed Ken Burns Film, The Central Park Five, on June 15, 2013. Read More