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April 21, 2010

Dear Colleagues,

In January, most of you participated in a meeting with Jan Schaffer from J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, where she presented early findings of her research on the state of public affairs journalism in Philadelphia. We appreciated the feedback that came during and after that presentation and we are pleased to announce that Jan has released her final report at this link.

We funded J-Lab’s study because we believe in the role that high quality journalism plays in making our region a better place to live. We see robust public affairs coverage as critical to having an engaged, informed public and accountable public institutions, and like many of you, we are concerned about our region’s ongoing capacity for that type of journalism.

William Penn Foundation President Feather Houstoun

Based on what we’ve learned from J-Lab’s recommendations, substantial dialogue with key professional journalists (including many of you), and our analysis of other regions’ approaches to the shifting landscape of metro journalism, we have decided on a basic approach for an initial investment.

What We Hope to Create

While we’re not ready to brand the project at this point, it is fair to characterize what we have in mind as an independent journalism collaborative. Our approach to this work is based on the following principles:

• We are concerned with strengthening professional journalism that chronicles civic issues in our region and advances the public interest.
• We will encourage collaboration that capitalizes on the collective strength of our region’s excellent, but diffuse, journalism assets.
• The infrastructure of a collaborative must respect the independence and identity of established projects and provide value to its members. At the same time, for the project to succeed, members will need to buy in to a vision that creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
• The infrastructure should be flexible and scalable so that it can support experimentation, evolve, and take advantage of new opportunities for coverage.
• It is imperative that the collaborative develop business strategies for long-term sustainability; however, we believe that imposing the requirement of a fully-developed business plan is too much weight for a nascent project to bear. For at least a few years, we expect that philanthropic support will needed to subsidize the collaborative. Nevertheless, members must aggressively plan for a day when their work can flourish with limited grant support.
• The collaborative must help its members to capitalize on the opportunities presented by technology. It should help journalists to experiment with content delivery, engage audiences, and find new and constructive ways to analyze and present data.
• We seek to support a collaborative that features work by professional journalists, broadly defined. Citizen journalism and youth media have value and may play some role in the project, but we are primarily interested in the craft of professional news gathering.

Next Steps

To initiate this effort, we will make three grants in the coming weeks to support project design and early action projects. These grants are intended to lead to a more substantial investment in the near future.

Designing a Journalism Collaborative

We have made a grant to the OMG Center for Collaborative Learning to hire a project manager who will be tasked with staffing a small team of stakeholders who will do the hard work of designing the collaborative. This includes the editorial model, governance structures, and business operations, as well as identification of key partners and potential leaders.

OMG is a trusted partner of WPF and has been a facilitator for many of our major initiatives. Working under OMG’s auspices, Michael Greenle, formerly of PennPraxis, will serve as project manager for this phase of the work. Mike’s track record as one of the architects of PlanPhilly, his familiarity with the work that most of you do, and his knowledge of the field makes him an ideal choice for this role and we are delighted that he has agreed to take it on. Mike will help to formulate and launch the collaborative, including assisting in identifying management and a permanent home for the effort. OMG’s Gerri Spilka and Emily Byrne will play key roles in the strategic planning process.

The expected deliverable for this phase is an implementation plan that we can propose to our board for a significant investment later this year. Along the way, we have asked Mike to be as open and transparent as possible about the team’s progress through a blog/web portal. The site has very little content at the moment, but it will eventually become the primary repository for information and materials related to the project.

Early Action Projects

We will make two additional grants in the coming weeks to fund precursors to the type of support that we hope a collaborative will ultimately offer to its members.

• We will fund a tech-savvy organization to help journalists experiment with content delivery, audience engagement, and analysis and presentation of data significant to the public interest.

• We will establish a program with an intermediary organization to award micro-grants for enterprise and investigative reporting and collaborative projects between news organizations.

More information about these opportunities will be made public as soon as details are finalized, most likely by Mike once he begins his work.

Finally, we’d like to thank Jan Schaffer and her team at J-Lab for the excellent work they did to help us understand the current environment, and all of you for your participation in her research and the subsequent dialogue.

We’re excited to embark on this path, and we’re hopeful that many of you will remain involved in the process and the collaborative when it is launched.

Sincerely,

Feather O. Houstoun

President