• Public Policy and Funding the News

    David Westphal
    January 28, 2010

    This is a guest post by David Westphal, senior fellow at the Center on Communication Leadership and Policy at the University of Southern California. He is the author, along with Geoffrey Cowan, of Public Policy and Funding the News, published this week by the University of Southern California’s Center on Communication Leadership and Policy.

    For most of American history, the government has helped sustain commercial news businesses in two significant ways. It has offered steeply discounted mailing rates to newspaper and magazine publishers, and it has required government agencies and commercial businesses alike to publish paid notices in newspapers.

  • The Growing Trend of Foundation-Funded Journalism

    David Westphal
    September 3, 2009

    This post is part of our week-long forum on foundation-funded journalism. Join us this Thursday at 8 p.m. ET to chat live with these writers.

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    I was fairly sure, based on anecdotal evidence, that something new was happening in the world of foundation-funded journalism. Too many new nonprofit news organizations were springing up, most of them sporting foundation funding. But the real clincher came in a conversation I had with Bill Buzenberg, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity. Bill told me that suddenly, he was getting cold calls from foundations offering up to seven figures’ worth of help in funding the center's investigative reporting work. "The demise of media is happening so quickly," he said, "that it does have the attention of funders... New funders have come to us -- in part because they see what's happening."