A most positive sign
In New Hampshire, two foundations have invested in solutions-driven reporting to support local newsrooms and improve public understanding of key issues.
(For more information on this subject, watch the Solutions Journalism Network’s January 28th 2021 “Funding Solutions Journalism” panel discussion here.)
To stay afloat and support quality journalism, nonprofit and for-profit newsrooms are increasingly seeking grants to supplement what they earn from advertising and subscriptions. Usually, the newsrooms knock on philanthropy’s door. But sometimes foundations approach the news organizations, too. In this piece we look at two funders who took it upon themselves to support solutions journalism in New Hampshire — the Endowment for Health and the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation.
Between them, the two organizations have provided grants ranging from $5,000 to $130,000 to the New Hampshire Union Leader, The Laconia Daily Sun and the Granite State News Collaborative. For each project, the funding covered the costs of paying reporters and freelancers, travel and administrative support. The Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications acted as the fiscal sponsor for the Union Leader (the for-profit newsroom that the school owns) as well as The Laconia Daily Sun.
We spoke to leaders at both institutions to understand why they chose to support local news, why solutions journalism resonated with them, and what insights they have for other funders looking to give grants.
Below are the key takeaways from our conversations, followed by the story of how the New Hampshire projects came about.
The takeaways:
- If the goal is to spark systems change, invest in solutions-focused, not just problem-driven, reporting.
- Educate your board and staff on what to expect from working with newsrooms. They’re not going to like every headline. They might not like the choices a newsroom makes on what to investigate. They can’t dictate coverage.
- Tell your grant-making colleagues about your efforts to improve your community through solutions journalism. Funding begets funding.
- Establish relationships with news organizations to help you decide which ones you want to support.
- Funding shouldn’t last forever, but it needs to be sustained for several years to generate long-term change in the news industry.
The story:
EfH discovered solutions journalism and brought it home
In 2014, the Endowment for Health, a nonprofit foundation focused on improving the health of vulnerable people in New Hampshire, was preparing a new strategic plan. Karen Ager, the Endowment for Health’s communications director, knew it couldn’t raise awareness about key issues facing the state on its own.
After receiving approval from the board of directors, Ager considered ways to partner with local newsrooms.
She first encountered solutions journalism at the conference of the Communications Network, a national affinity group for communications professionals working in philanthropy, and thought news organizations in New Hampshire might be open to it as a type of investigative journalism that was gaining traction across the country.
She knew solutions-focused coverage — reporting on responses to social problems — would foster what the foundation sought as well. Ager knew she did not want her organization to support journalism that would simply rehash well-known problems. “Sometimes the problem-based coverage does more damage,” Ager told SJN. “It doesn’t leave any room for ‘What is the way forward?’ It makes people tune out.”
Ager asked SJN if it would give a workshop to New Hampshire reporters and editors. Sixty media professionals showed up to listen to a panel of reporters from around the country talk about the rigorous and evidence-based nature of solutions journalism. That led to an agreement between the foundation and the Union Leader, a statewide newspaper based in Manchester, for a project about healthy aging called Silver Linings that kicked off in July 2016.
Ager knew she needed to work with staff at the foundation as well as at the Union Leader. “I wanted to make sure our board understood what a media partnership was — and wasn’t,” she said. “We can’t dictate coverage. … Sometimes you won’t like the headline.” She made it clear that the journalists’ independence needed to be paramount.
New Hampshire Charitable Foundation doubles down
After seeing how well the Union Leader’s solutions journalism project was received and how it improved coverage of a sensitive issue, the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation followed in EfH’s footsteps.
Kristen Oliveri, vice president for communication and marketing, had attended the first solutions journalism training for New Hampshire journalists. She left interested and, after the Union Leader project was published, reached out to Ager to learn more.
In 2018, NHCF supported a Union Leader series called “Beyond the Stigma,” which it hoped would dismantle some of the misconceptions around addiction at a time when New Hampshire was heavily impacted by the opioid epidemic.
Oliveri said a lot of the coverage had been focusing on the death count and the tragedies of the epidemic. “There was a lot of sensationalism that wasn’t helping the issue at hand,” she said. “Our hope was we could get people to understand the complexity of the issue.”
The foundation also wanted to raise awareness around services available to people living with addiction — and about some innovations being tried in New Hampshire.
NHCF funded this project with money earmarked for the prevention of substance-use disorders.
Its leaders also saw value in supporting the journalism industry when the COVID-19 pandemic hit newsrooms’ bottom lines, leading to furloughs and layoffs.
In pandemic-ridden 2020, the Granite State News Collaborative, which publishes solutions journalism (also supported through SJN’s Local Media Project, funded by the Knight Foundation), was another logical investment because the collaborative’s work covers many communities at once, instead of only one.
After making an initial capacity building grant in 2019, NHCF continued to fund the collaborative because its director, Melanie Plenda, had been keeping the foundation up to date about its work.
Oliveri said the foundation’s mandate to assist the community allows it to support media projects that align with its mission. “We want to make sure our communities have what they need to thrive,” she said. Part of the foundation’s mission, she said, is “making sure people have the information they need to make informed decisions about public health, and about other critical issues in their communities.”
Assessing impact
In 2019, both the endowment and the charitable foundation funded the Laconia Daily Sun’s Sunshine Project, which looks at civic discourse and social determinants of health. The early feedback is compelling.
Interviews with community leaders in Laconia show that they are more aware of responses and resources to address the city’s problems. They have more confidence in the Daily Sun. More people discuss the issues and take action.
After a series on lead paint in old houses, including one story examining how Claremont, New Hampshire, became the only city in the state to require lead testing for children entering kindergarten, a local lead paint specialist was invited to speak at a school in the Laconia region. The specialist said the series raised awareness of the issue and likely contributed to increased interest in federal funds available to support cleanup from the people impacted.
That was just the kind of impact Ager hoped solutions journalism could yield. The community, she said, might not know the term “solutions journalism” but can see the shift in reporting and its increased depth. It contributes to a sense of ‘This is what my community is capable of,’ she said.
Ager sees investing in solutions journalism as a way to “hold public officials to account for solutions they haven’t tried” and foster “a systems change for the news.” Due to the slow pace of change within journalism and politics, she is adamant that funding needs to be sustained over time in order to help change the reporting on large and complex issues.
“Foundations never fund anything forever,” she said. But at the same time, “you can’t just fund for a year or two, because system change takes a long time.”
Leah Todd Lin, SJN’s region manager for New England, contributed to this blog post.
The Solutions Journalism Network previously covered the work of newsrooms that raised money to support their solutions journalism projects and gathered insights on how to get there.
Find all solutions journalism stories from New Hampshire in our Story tracker.
Watch SJN’s January 28th 2021 “Funding Solutions Journalism” panel discussion here.
