This is one in a series of excerpts from our new booklet “Journalism and Media Grant Making,” a primer for foundations that want to get started.

Five Things You Need to Know: 3. You can start without a lot of money

You don’t have to spend a lot of dollars to dip a toe in the water.

You can fund coverage by an existing media outlet, as The George Gund Foundation does with grants of $40,000-$50,000 a year to support news coverage of the Great Lakes region on National Public Radio.

Or you can help put local news start-ups on a path to sustainability by expanding their audiences, as The Chicago Community Trust has done with grants of $30,000 to $60,000 to emergent local news organizations.

Foundation investments in media come in all shapes and sizes. For example, the West Anniston Foundation in Alabama hosts a weekly radio call-in show devoted to industrial pollution at a cost of $15,000 a year. The Park City Foundation in Utah, invested $80,000 (plus ongoing costs) to create parkcitygreen.org, which enables residents to calculate their carbon footprint and figure out ways to conserve.

ACT for Alexandria foundation is creating an online forum for community problem solving for $35,000.

In the digital age, news and information involve a wide variety of sources and partners that go well beyond traditional news organizations. Today, community news and information providers include traditional media, public media, nonprofits, universities, government, libraries, schools, businesses and citizens themselves.

The Black Hills Area Community Foundation in South Dakota, for example, is working with local libraries to create a “knowledge network” to help keep citizens informed. “Healthy communities depend on formal and informal information networks to enable citizens to learn what they need to know in a timely way. Focusing on local libraries as community information hubs, the Black Hills Knowledge Network aggregates content from local governments, media, nonprofits and citizen journalists to create a reliable information hub for ‘everything local.’”

– Eric Abrahamson, Board Member, Black Hills Area Community Foundation

Creating an independent professional journalism site can be at the multimillion-dollar end of the cost spectrum. (Happily, the best of such sites are finding ways to bring in operating revenue so they don’t rely solely on grants.)

Regardless of the size of your investment, you must plan for the project’s sustainability from the outset. That means helping build connections among the content, its curators and the community – connections that will bring in cash.

Having diverse revenue sources may be critical to success in the long term. Help your staff or your partner plan and organize donor or memberships drives. Consider advertising or sponsorships by local businesses. Think about revenue from memberships, like the public broadcasting fund-raising model, or organizing events or training for local businesses and community organizations that need help with digital media themselves. Ask your partner if it has the right kind of donation-soliciting software. Remember: Local media live on local support. Foundations can start media; communities sustain media.

“We created NJ Spotlight as a separate entity because we wanted to inculcate a small- business culture among the principals and employees. We think it is important to approach the effort as an entrepreneurial one rather than as a ‘foundation program.’ It was vital to bake the for-profit goals of profit sharing and ownership into the DNA of the effort from the beginning.”

– Hans Dekker, President, Community Foundation of New Jersey

Tomorrow: 4. Good journalism requires independence

Previously:

Five things you need to know

1. This is everyone’s issue

2. You can build on what you’re already doing

Stay tuned for more ideas. The full booklet will be available as a pdf on this site next week and in print in April at the annual conference of the Council on Foundations. The booklet is sponsored by the Knight Foundation and the William Penn Foundation.

Has your foundation invested in news and information efforts? Do you have questions about media grant making? Please tell us about them in the comments.