What The Gates Foundation’s Learned About Funding Education Journalism
By Alexander Russo
The Gates Foundation spends about $7 million a year in grants to education journalism organizations, and has done so for the past five years or so, according to an interview with deputy director for global media partnerships Manami Kano last week.
These “media partnerships” include well-known examples like NPR’s expanded education team as well as EWA, Hechinger, Chalkbeat, and EdWeek and are designed to be a supplement to the foundation’s programmatic and policy work. See them here.
During the phone call, held on the eve of the foundation’s conference celebrating its 15th anniversary working in education, Kano talked about both well-known media efforts and less well-known ones (with Univision, for example), and both perceived successes (NPR Education) and efforts that might best be described as valiant efforts (Marketplace’s Learning Curve).
Gates isn’t the only foundation involved in this kind of funding. Other examples include Carnegie, Ford, Spencer, and MacArthur. Outlets that have worked with foundations include the LA Times and the PBS NewsHour.
The main motivation for getting involved, according to Kano, is to help keep the public informed about what’s going on in schools during a time when journalism is downsizing especially at the local level. “The gap in information continues to be a major issue,” said Kano. “We’re trying to make sure the ecosystem is strong.”
This includes working with large national news outlets and smaller nonprofits and local organizations. The type and format of the grantmaking has evolved over time, says Kano, in terms of figuring out which kinds of organizations benefit most and what kinds of support make the most difference. “It hasn’t been a straight path for us.”
With a national outlet like NPR, the goal was to do more than just add staff to the effort. “We’re not just going to subsidize your reporters to do news of the day that would already be covered,” said Kano. Instead, the goal of the funding was to help NPR “make education interesting and compelling with in-depth coverage of what’s happening it the classroom to both existing listeners and those that you might not have gotten yet through digital and social.”
The foundation also wanted NPR to “go deep on a few key areas, develop a voice, and test some new things” like integrating broadcast, digital, and interactive. According to Kano, the effort has been really successful. “The numbers have been increasing since they launched, and a lot of their traffic coming through Facebook.”
Just this week, NPR’s education team launched a new effort focused on innovation.
Another successful partnership from the foundation’s point of view is Univision, with whom the foundation has been working for a while now both supporting the website and the broadcast division. Some efforts include quarterly broadcast specials and longer in-depth features. The foundation’s 2014 grant to Univision wasjust over $2 million
This includes working with large national news outlets and smaller nonprofits and local organizations. The type and format of the grantmaking has evolved over time, says Kano, in terms of figuring out which kinds of organizations benefit most and what kinds of support make the most difference. “It hasn’t been a straight path for us.”
With a national outlet like NPR, the goal was to do more than just add staff to the effort. “We’re not just going to subsidize your reporters to do news of the day that would already be covered,” said Kano. Instead, the goal of the funding was to help NPR “make education interesting and compelling with in-depth coverage of what’s happening it the classroom to both existing listeners and those that you might not have gotten yet through digital and social.”
The foundation also wanted NPR to “go deep on a few key areas, develop a voice, and test some new things” like integrating broadcast, digital, and interactive. According to Kano, the effort has been really successful. “The numbers have been increasing since they launched, and a lot of their traffic coming through Facebook.”
Just this week, NPR’s education team launched a new effort focused on innovation.
Another successful partnership from the foundation’s point of view is Univision, with whom the foundation has been working for a while now both supporting the website and the broadcast division. Some efforts include quarterly broadcast specials and longer in-depth features. The foundation’s 2014 grant to Univision wasjust over $2 million
A smaller, time-limited pilot project called Learning Curve launched in partnership with Marketplace and American Public Media didn’t turn out quite as successfully as had been hoped. The effort — linking the economy, technology, and learning — made a lot of sense on paper, especially given the success of other efforts at telling connecting stories in entertaining ways such as Planet Money. But the effort was much more broadcast-driven.
The team at Marketplace “produced a lot of good digital content but it never quite built an audience,” noted Kano. The station wasn’t as aggressive with social media as NPR has been - which may have been a factor. The grant was also much smaller.
The foundation and Marketplace parted ways earlier this year, both sides agreeing that the experiment hadn’t worked as we had hoped. They are, however, continuing conversations about other projects they could do on higher ed, which might be a better fit.
Other grants that ran their course include NBC News’ Education Nation, which included both an annual conference in New York City that was considered successful and a year-round platform for education coverage that did not thrive as What The Gates Foundation’s Learned About Funding Education Journalism | The Grade | The Washington Monthly: