This is part of a series of excerpts from our new booklet “Journalism and Media Grant Making.”

Five things you need to know: 4. Journalism requires independence

If your foundation decides to pursue a traditional journalism project, do your homework to understand the values that shape journalism and distinguish it within the larger field of media. It’s a good idea to have people or organizations involved who have a strong journalism background. Accuracy, fairness, independence – these things matter to journalists. You can fund their news organizations, but you can’t dictate their stories. A good journalism code of ethics can be found on the website of the Society of Professional Journalists. It calls upon journalists to resist special interests “and their pressure to influence news coverage.”

Community foundations doing special news and information projects face the same decisions of how independent their work should be. The Pittsburgh Foundation, for example, is creating a new news organization that will produce investigative journalism. In order to underscore editorial independence, the foundation will fund a separate organization rather than creating a project within the foundation.

“We recognized early in the process that the independence of our journalism project was critical to our success, and we decided that our project would operate within an independent nonprofit organization rather than as part of The Pittsburgh Foundation. In order to build the trust necessary to allow the public to rely upon the information provided by the project’s investigative journalists, there has to be the appearance and reality of objectivity and independence. The community foundation agenda, however well intentioned and noble, is still an agenda.”

– Jeanne Pearlman, Senior Vice President for Program and Policy, The Pittsburgh Foundation

Tomorrow: 5. Digital media must be targeted to produce impact

Previously:

Five things you need to know

1. This is everyone’s issue

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

3. You can start without a lot of money

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.