Minding the Gap: Funders Respond to the Decline in Mainstream Media Coverage of Development Policy

Join the Funders’ Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities 11th Annual Conference (March 22-24, 2010) for a session on media - Minding the Gap: Funders Respond to the Decline in Mainstream Media Coverage of Development Policy.  The mainstream print media – in the form of beat reporters, investigative journalists, state house bureaus, and editorial page editors – is a critical ally in elevating and advancing smart growth and urban redevelopment public policy reforms. However, as the fortunes of newspapers have steadily declined over recent years, there has been substantial reduction in the quality and quantity of reporting on these issues. More recently and perhaps most alarmingly, as major daily newspapers have gone out of business, entire metropolitan areas have lost important sources of public information and influential editorial voices are being silenced.

While a new, sustainable media business model has yet to emerge, to fill the widening coverage gap, funders across the country have stepped forward in a number of ways to provide direct support for public affairs journalism and to fund experiments in alternative media. This session will seek to study alternative media models created to support the dissemination of community information. The session will share the motivation and intentions of funders engaged in supporting public affairs journalism as well as the practical experience and learnings associated with such efforts.

• What are some of the options and models open to funders to support public affairs/public policy journalism?

• What are some of the organizational, operational, and financial challenges associated with starting a new journalism project?

• What are some of the unanticipated consequences, challenges, and opportunities associated with alternative media?

About the presenters:
Jan Shaffer, a former Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and a nationally-respected expert on new media. She is currently the executive director of the Institute for Interactive Journalism at American University and has been a key consultant to our foundation on our own emerging journalism initiative. Jan is really terrific and her presentation alone would be worth the price of admission. She will be able to effectively convey to funders the national context in terms of the decline in print journalism and present a wide range of new and emerging models that have been developed in response. She is very close to the national funding community so I am sure she could tailor her presentation to a specifically to a funder audience.

Heidi Williamson, Vice President for Communications and Executive Director of the Community Indicators Project.  Heidi is responsible for raising community awareness about the foundation and the ways in which planned giving and philanthropy can have a lasting, positive impact on the quality of life of the residents of Berks County. Heidi also serves as the Executive Director of the Community Indicators Project, which tracks key measurements of the community's overall health and vitality in a number of critical areas.

Learn more about the Funders’ Network annual conference here: http://www.fundersnetwork.org/index.php/events/annual-conference/