With readers’ support, funds from a new national funding initiative may help us “achieve escape velocity” at last
Since Chris Faraone, John Loftus, and I founded the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism in 2015, we’ve been clear that if our organization was going to last long enough to help revive the fortunes of local and regional journalism in Massachusetts then we’d have to get past merely surviving and start thriving economically. A tall order in an era when journalism in the service of democracy is in crisis nationwide.
Because of my long interest in (and criticism of) human spaceflight, I came up with a phrase that encapsulated our aspirations. My partners liked it. So we started telling ourselves and anyone who would listen that BINJ needs to “achieve escape velocity.” That is, raise enough money that we can afford the community outreach, development, and additional editorial staff we require to ensure our long-term success.
Now, nearly 10 years later, we may finally have scraped by long enough to see that possibility materializing. Because it was announced today that we will be receiving $100,000 over the next two years from Press Forward—a national coalition of foundations aiming to invest at least $500 million into shoring up local and regional journalism. We’re extremely grateful to the staff, management committee, and application reviewers of Press Forward and its constituent foundations for choosing BINJ as one of the 205 news outlets receiving grants as part of its Open Call on Closing Local Coverage Gaps, especially given that nearly 1,000 nonprofit and commercial organizations applied. And we look forward to participating in the various networking opportunities our selection as a grantee will now afford us.
We received this highly competitive grant in recognition of our ground-breaking, hard-hitting investigative journalism, our commitment to providing coverage of marginalized communities and under-reported issues, our efforts to train the next generation of professional journalists, and our effectiveness in building regional and national coalitions of independent local newsrooms.
We want our readers to understand what the new two-year grant will do for BINJ. It will not ensure our financial stability. But it will give us enough money, together with the other $150,000 to $260,000 we’ve been raising every year for the last few years—much of it from the Reva and David Logan Foundation, which has been instrumental in keeping us going—to start accelerating our operation “skywards” in hope of breaking free of the gravity-like economic forces that have been keeping us stuck on the budgetary “ground” with woefully insufficient funds to do the critical work we’ve been doing.
And the biggest thing the Press Forward grant will do for BINJ is help improve the outreach work we do to communicate to you, our audience, about why your support (ideally monthly) is so critical to our survival as a news organization and the key to our becoming a larger, more economically stable institution.
That’s why the timing of this new grant couldn’t be better. We’re about to start our annual November and December fundraiser in tandem with the NewsMatch program organized by the Institute for Nonprofit News and the Miami Foundation. We’ve done well with it since we started participating in 2021—raising $52,000 last year alone. But we believe we need to raise over $70,000 in this year’s NewsMatch to have a chance at significantly growing BINJ’s staff next year, while paying the current staff something more like a living wage going forward. And we feel that our chances of reaching that goal have just been buoyed in several ways, tangible and intangible, by the infusion of Press Forward funds.
So, I don’t think we’re in the “orbit” of financial security just yet, but at least we’re on the launchpad, our fuel tanks are reasonably full, we’ve pressed the big red button, and the countdown has started.
Let’s see how high BINJ can fly in the coming year.
Otherwise, congratulations to our fellow Press Forward grantee organizations around Massachusetts and the US. And my BINJ partners and I would be remiss if we did not commiserate with the vast majority of news outlets, both nonprofit and commercial, that applied to Press Forward but did not get funded. All we can say is that we definitely have standing critiques of how journalism foundations do their grantmaking that we’ve developed with our colleagues in the Alliance of Nonprofit News Outlets over the last year plus … and we will continue to propound those critiques in articles over the coming weeks and months. But today, we celebrate!
