Frontline investigations fund
To pay the extra cost of probing
Blessed with more ideas than resources for its globe-trotting reports, Frontline is creating a new mechanism to help finance ambitious investigations.
The Frontline Journalism Fund, launched this year, will seek donations from foundations and well-heeled individuals to help underwrite especially expensive or involved reports.
The first investigation backed by the fund comes to air Oct. 21: Heat, an “ominous” two-hour account of major corporations’ response to climate change “despite increasing talk about ‘going green,’” according to the news release from the producing station, WGBH.
Buoyed by gifts from the Grantham Foundation, WGBH lay leaders and at least one celebrity philanthropist, the fund contributed more than $1 million, or 65 percent of Heat's total $2.5-$3 million project costs, which include advertising and outreach.
WGBH will administer the pool in much the same way it handles the program venture funds used since the late 1980s to fuel special project development, says Winifred Lenihan, v.p. for development.
“We always have more great ideas than we have resources for,” she says. The journalism pool is designed to finance large-scale investigations such as Heat that “require funding beyond the usual budget for our documentaries,” she says.
The Boston producing station envisions the fund as an invested endowment that some day will throw off earnings to supplement the doc series’ traditional funding streams. For now, however, “it’s been a spend-down fund,” Lenihan says. “We’re spending it as quickly as we’re raising it.”
The approach makes Frontline part of a growing cohort of independent, nonprofit news organizations raising their own cash for investigative journalism. Such reporting is expensive and time-consuming. For Heat, correspondent Martin Smith traveled to West Virginia coal mines, Chinese power plants and many other sites, touching down in a total of 12 countries on four continents.
Groups such as the recently launched ProPublica and the Saint Louis Beacon seek to ensure that hard-hitting investigations continue as for-profit newspapers decline in revenues and staffing.
For example, the Beacon is working with St. Louis’ KETC on Facing the Mortgage Crisis, an ongoing multiplatform project surveying the subprime fallout. ProPublica partnered with New York’s WNYC on a report, released last week, that detailed the environmental impact of proposed natural-gas drilling projects.
Frontline is also talking with the New York-based ProPublica, along with the Center for Investigative Reporting, the New York Times and others, about partnering on projects, says Jim Bracciale, series manager. Frontline just announced that it will also team with Newsweek on a post-election review of the presidential campaigns, set to air Nov. 11.
The resource-sharing is another way for Frontline to defray production costs as well as “expand the scope” of its reporting, Bracciale says.
Producers also want the fund to help them start more of “the kind of research and investigations that take time and money before any commitment to a broadcast” is made, he says.
The first donation to Frontline’s fund came from Paul Newman, now almost as famous for his philanthropy as his acting, who gave an unsolicited $50,000 gift. Other donations came from the Grantham Foundation and from Laura DeBonis and Scott Nathan, a couple who have served as community advisors for WGBH.
WGBH fundraisers hope to solicit unrestricted gifts to the journalism fund, Lenihan says, but she notes that donors increasingly prefer to give to specific projects. “Major philanthropists, and certainly those considering large gifts, have specific areas of focus in which they want to have an impact.”
This can be tricky with gifts that underwrite journalism, because the same dovetailing interests that motivate targeted giving can also raise thorny questions about funder influence. The Grantham Foundation, for example, is an environmental nonprofit that helped finance Heat, an environmentally focused investigation.
While the foundation’s interest in environmental issues is what led WGBH fundraisers to approach it in this case, Lenihan says, “The gift in no way dictated the story.”
Editorial firewall discussions are “front and center” in all fundraising conversations and, besides, jeopardizing Frontline’s nearly unmatched journalistic standing makes no sense to fundraisers or producers, she says.
“The coin of the realm is trust and integrity,” she says. “If we mess up on that, I’ve got nothing left to sell.”
Web page posted July 28, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC
