Opinion: Foundations Should Help Support Journalism

During a time of “messy media transition,” community foundations can play an important role in preserving local journalism and “helping to encourage innovation and sustainable business models — especially creating partnerships that explain local problems and generate communitywide efforts to solve them,” says Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media, in an opinion article in The San Francisco Chronicle.

“In community after community, newspapers are shedding editorial staff at a rate that spells trouble for a well-informed citizenry, a foundation of a free society,” he writes. “Ensuring a vibrant press is a questionable role for government, when a key role of journalism is to question power and hold it to account. Nor, as we are seeing, can it be the sole responsibility of the private sector, not when an eroding business model for community journalism leads private owners to favor the bottom line above all other values.”

Mr. Gillmor suggests several ways foundations can step in to strengthen journalism, including supporting media-literacy education, sponsoring a network of local blogs, or paying the salary of an investigative journalist at a newspaper.

“As traditional journalism’s business model crumbles, we’re already seeing major losses,” he concludes. “Let’s hope the nonprofit sector sees the opportunity, and runs with it.”