A reckoning comes for journalism philanthropy

For decades, philanthropy has reinforced a media landscape that favors the biggest (and whitest) news organizations, whether they be nonprofit, for-profit, or startups, while chronically underinvesting in ethnic and community media. I predict that 2026 will see one or more failures of newsrooms conceived of or propped up by funders, forcing a reckoning about how we support journalism in America.

The disastrous closing in less than two years of the Houston Landing — which had been funded to the tune of $21 million — should have sparked intense and open reflection by the self-appointed guardians of American news, but instead has largely been met with silence.

Why was a new outlet needed in a city with so many existing newsrooms, many of which are facing financial headwinds? Might some of that $21 million been better spent supporting the Houston Defender, the city’s legacy Black newsroom, or Houston Public Media? While the Defender received grant funding of $20,000 from the Knight Foundation in 2021, that’s a far cry from the eight figures Houston Landing took in. (The Defender also received funding from the Borealis Foundation.)

An op-ed I co-wrote noted that “from 2013 to 2017, $1.1 billion in grants were awarded to the flagging journalism industry — but just 8.1% was given to outlets that serve so-called ‘ethnic’ communities, women, and LGBTQIA+ communities.”

In one example of this structural inequality, in 2020 The New York Times Company trumpeted that it had raised “$4 million to launch Headway, a journalism initiative to investigate global and national challenges” with support coming from “Ford Foundation ($1.5 million), the Stavros Niarchos Foundation ($1.5 million) and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation ($1 million).” That same year the publicly traded company reported operating profits of $176 million.

I’m an avid reader of the Times and a big fan of its work, but for a highly profitable company to be able to raise millions from journalism philanthropy — which is always telling supplicants about how limited its funds are — to support work it can already afford to do should have all of us loudly questioning why and how these foundations choose to fund newsrooms they support.

These funders — including the American Journalism Project, which drove the creation of Houston Landing — have increasingly been picking the winners and losers in American journalism, with no consequences when their calls go badly wrong.

During my fellowship at Stanford, I’m working on building a framework to expand investigative capacity at newsrooms that serve communities of color. In my experience founding Blacklight, the first investigative unit at a legacy Black newspaper, I found that potential funders were often dismissive of our requests for support and ignorant of the vital role that the Black press and ethnic media have played in preserving American democracy.

Accountable and justice-oriented journalism philanthropy is essential to ensuring that news deserts do not continue to grow in communities of color, as legacy ethnic media outlets wither on the vine from a lack of support by funders.

It is far past time that journalism funders commit themselves in a systematic way to addressing the harms that they have caused in the past, as well as to creating a more equitable system of funding moving forward. The creation of the Press Forward initiative and the work of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund are important steps in the direction of justice, but are still outliers in the philanthropic landscape.

I predict that only the continued failure of the status quo approach to journalism funding will incite enough anger in the news community and enough shame on the part of funders to force a reconsideration of how our society supports journalism. With all the threats our democracy faces, we need to be bold in how we reimagine philanthropy’s relationship to news media.