Will Philanthropy Adjust its Role?
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Philanthropy often serves to fill the funding gap between the private and public sectors, but it is often insufficient. Philanthropists can still do a lot to advance independent media by supporting experimentation, funding issue-focused content, investing in trusteeship models and targeting areas such as distribution that can shift the system.
Many foundations dedicate much more funding to civic engagement and leadership programs than independent media. A big question is “How can they integrate these funding areas more strategically?”
Support Experimentation
Philanthropy has long served to identify innovations that can be scaled beyond the non-profit sector, and it turns out that some new philanthropic efforts are doing just this. For example:
- There’s a new breed of philanthropists—Fledgling Fund, Omidyar, Google.org, Skoll, etc.—very invested in triple-bottom-line strategies and media infrastructure investment.
- With urging from the Knight Foundation, community-based foundations are turning their attention to funding local media projects that support civic engagement and the information needs of underserved populations.
- J-Lab recently produced a useful database of funders supporting journalism projects.
The economic crisis curbed the resources of most funders. Meanwhile, demand rose from traditional journalism organizations, public broadcasting and universities in which they had a vested interest. In the current funding environment, independent media-makers might more likely find resources by partnering with these institutions.
Fund Issue-Focused Content
One of the defining characteristics of the philanthropic sector is its voluntary nature, which means that funding flows from the personal interests of donors and can promote important issues.
Foundations can reduce their risks by investing in an issue-specific media project once they see enough of it to make a well-informed decision.
Smarter Capital Can Shift the System
Two systemic ways in which philanthropists can shift the system to support independent media:
- Improving impact measurement. Foundations can help build the ecosystem by standardizing social impact measurement in new media so that it is more reliable and consistent as described on page 24 in the New Value Chain of Journalism section of Vol. 3. (Download Vol. 3 for more information.)
- Social enterprise debt financing. Funders can improve the long-term sustainability of independent media organizations with low-cost debt financing.
Despite improvements in social capital investment (e.g. venture philanthropy and social enterprise) over the past five years, financing is still fragmented and insufficient, particularly for business development loans that can help media companies become more self-sustaining.
As philanthropists use their capital in smart ways to improve social capital markets, they can build a stronger ecosystem to grow independent media.
This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.
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