Abstract
Many journalism stakeholders have begun looking to philanthropic foundations to help newsrooms find economic sustainability. The rapidly expanding role of foundations as a revenue source for news publishers raises an important question: How do foundations exercise their influence over the newsrooms they fund? Using the hierarchy of influence model, this study utilizes more than 40 interviews with journalists at digitally native nonprofit news organizations and employees from foundations that fund nonprofit journalism to better understand the impact of foundation funding on journalistic practice. Drawing on previous scholarship exploring extra-media influence on the news industry, we argue that the impact of foundations on journalism parallels that of advertisers throughout the 20th century—with one important distinction: Journalism practitioners and researchers have long forbidden the influence from advertisers on editorial decisions, seeing the blurring of the two as inherently unethical. Outside funding from foundations, on the other hand, is often premised on editorial influence, complicating efforts by journalists to maintain the firewall between news revenue and production.
Highlights
Three decades since newspaper circulation first began dropping, the economic outlook for journalism remains dark
It became clear that foundation funding often went to news nonprofits pursuing three types of initiatives: specific, technology-driven projects; audience engagement projects; and projects intended to push journalists to expand their daily work beyond traditional routines
The most common theme to emerge from the data concerned foundation funding that came with an expectation of journalists using specific new technologies
Summary
Three decades since newspaper circulation first began dropping, the economic outlook for journalism remains dark. The news industry’s once-dependable revenue model, based on selling advertising and subscriptions, increasingly seems like an artifact from a different era (Konieczna, 2018). Despite the hopes of many news publishers, digital advertising (hereafter digital ad) revenue has not replaced print revenue losses, and while a number of news organizations have seen subscriptions climb since 2016, these tend to be the exception rather than the rule. It is against this backdrop that many journalism stakeholders have begun looking to alternative or diversified funding models for news. One model seen as a viable and exciting option is foundation-funded journalism (Benson, 2018; Scott, Bunce, & Wright, 2019)
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