The foundations will receive a total of $2.26 million in matching grants as part of the Knight Community Information Challenge. The annual contest engages North American place-based foundations in meeting local information needs.
SAN FRANCISCO—Sept. 21, 2011— To help ensure that communities are informed on key issues, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation today announced funding for 19 local foundations to support community news and information projects.
“If you care about what’s going on in local government, the local environment or any local issues, you need to know about it to make a difference,” said Trabian Shorters, vice president for communities, Knight Foundation. “These community and place-based foundations are stepping up to make sure that their communities get good information.”
As newspapers and other traditional media continue to struggle, community foundations and place-based foundations play an increasingly important role in helping groups provide local news and information.
The winning ideas, announced at the Council on Foundation’s fall conference for community foundations, are from organizations large and small throughout the country. They include:
Providing information about specific issues: Whether it is increasing the coverage of charter schools in New Orleans, encouraging healthy food and lifestyles in Lexington, Ky., or helping rural Puerto Ricans find and create jobs, foundations are helping to shine the light on critical topics.
Telling stories through data: In Denver and Atlanta, three foundations are finding ways to take advantage of increasingly available government data and put it to use for communities.
Strengthening local, professional journalism: Projects will connect rural journalists in South Dakota, hire beat reporters for a Vermont start-up and expand public radio in the Adirondacks region of New York State.
All the winners are listed below.
Through their news and information projects, community foundations are seeing their own organizations transformed, as they raise their visibility, engage residents and strengthen their leadership roles.
A new report, Opportunities for Leadership: Meeting Community Information Needs, details the stories of foundations and their projects. The report highlights organizations like NJ Spotlight, a start-up the Community Foundation of New Jersey began to fund when the local paper announced layoffs. The Spotlight has broken major statewide stories. In Western New York, the Community Foundation of Greater Buffalo is helping to bring the environmental movement together through an information hub. The report is available at http://www.informationneeds.org.
The Knight Community Information Challenge is part of the foundation’s Media Innovation Initiative, a $100 million plus effort to help meet America’s information needs.
Knight Foundation will again accept applications for the next round of the Knight Community Information Challenge beginning on Jan. 18, 2012. In addition, foundation leaders are invited to register for Knight’s fourth annual Media Learning Seminar, a gathering to discuss ways in which foundations can support news and information needs and opportunities. The seminar will take place Feb. 20-21, 2012 in Miami. Register at http://www.informationneeds.org.
About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. The foundation believes that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more, visit KnightFoundation.org.
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