WATCH: Funding environmental journalism—the landscape, best practices & new projects

This month’s journalism webinar marked the second in a series exploring innovative ways to fund reporting on science, health and the environment. This time, we looked at the field of environmental reporting and heard about successful partnerships and scalable models. 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

By Kristin Tracz | program officer, Walton Family Foundation Christine Schneider | senior communications officer, Walton Family Foundation Drew Jacobs |  strategy, learning and evaluation officer, Walton Family Foundation Although we at the Walton Family Foundation (WFF) wouldn’t characterize ourselves as media funders, in early 2017 we came to realize that we were making significant investments in media across all three of our program areas—K-12 education, the environment, and the Foundation’s home region of Northwest Arkansas and the Arkansas-Mississippi delta. While funding media writ large isn’t a goal of WFF, we do want to see more attention paid to our focus areas, whether it be about school choice or coastal restoration. Our team has come to view grantmaking to journalism organizations as a way to increase media coverage about the issues we care about in order to shine a spotlight and move the needle on these topics. But as we invested more in media organizations, we wanted to deepen our evaluation approach. After all, as an organization, we value continuous improvement and learning. We tend not to make general support grants; instead, we work with grantees to set a course and develop measures for success over the course of a… Read More