You’d think I wouldn’t be in fundraising mode in mid-February. At the moment, by our modest standards at least, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism is doing fine. We raised $100,000 during our annual year-end fundraiser. Our new website and new database system are helping all our output from our articles to our newsletters look better and more professional than ever before—which my colleagues and I believe is driving a constant stream of small and medium donations at a level we could have only dreamed of a couple of years back. Even currently in Q1, typically a slow time for fundraising.
However, the core of my job as BINJ executive director is to always be looking to our future. Three months, six months, a year ahead. Trying to figure out how we’re going to keep our budget on an even keel … and maybe even finally figure out a way to grow our $200,000 per year operation into the $500,000 or $1 million per year operation we need to become to ensure our long-term survival.
I process all kinds of signals in my prognostications and in the last several weeks, I’ve been seeing some signs and portents I didn’t expect.
In particular, another positive signal like our increased week-by-week donations: We continue to get unprecedented numbers of applicants to our now-truly large internship program. We still have people trying to apply for our spring intern cohort even though we have taken 29 young journalists from a wildly diverse array of backgrounds already and simply can’t handle any more (except the other two candidates we accepted and are waiting to hear back from). Understanding that I interviewed over 50 applicants and didn’t interview a couple of dozen more to get the best of the best. And that we’re also working with two journalism classes who will be getting us more articles to run by May. This is epic craziness here.
So this week, I started putting the word out that we’re no longer taking spring interns and will open our application process up for our summer cohort on April 15. But we’re still getting a steady stream of applicants.
And you might think “that’s a great problem to have, BINJ must be doing something right to shatter its previous record of 21 interns in the fall 2025 cohort.” And, sure, I’d be inclined to agree—keeping in mind that one reason for the large number of applications to the internship program of a small organization like ours is the terminal collapse of the journalism industry and the fact that there are fewer and fewer places for young journalists to find internships every year.
But both our growing success in pulling in small and medium donations on the regular and the growing numbers of young journalists applying to our internship program expose the big crisis BINJ faces: We don’t have enough high donors. And we’re swiftly approaching a “funding cliff.” Right now, we have enough money to pay our staff and professional reporters until late June (and our spring interns until late May). Then we face a $75,000 to $90,000 budget shortfall that will not be made up by small and medium donations.
So we need more supporters who can donate $10,000, $20,000, $50,000 each … and ideally even larger sums. You all can help with that. Maybe you’ve got a few bucks and can swing a large annual donation that we can count on. Maybe you have friends or family with that kind of money. Or maybe you know some company or foundation that could be convinced to start donating to BINJ. Anything like that would get us through the second half of this year and likely beyond.
Chris Faraone, John Loftus, Linda Pinkow, and I have been through too many tough spots like this over the past nearly 11 years and made it through, true. And I’m not saying we won’t make it past this difficult period, too. We still have four months of ceaseless fundraising to go, after all. For example, we’re looking hard for money to specifically fund our intern program for the first time … something else readers can potentially help us connect with.
Yet this week, I had to start telling potential summer interns “you must understand that we don’t have enough money to make it through the summer term; so, if you intern with us, we cannot promise the $150 stipend we’ve been paying interns for every short feature article they write for us. Oh, and by the way, we can’t pay ourselves past June either and we want you to go into our internship program with eyes wide open if you still want to do it. This is what the journalism industry is like now.”
I do not want to have to say this stuff to the extremely talented young people who are going out of their way to work with us. It’s bad enough we’ve never been able to afford proper intern stipends for them—a thousand bucks a month for part-time work or some such. Now, while we train them to always ask to get paid and to avoid working for free, we have to tell them we can’t even afford bare minimum stipends for each article they produce.
Fellow BINJ staff and I are doing everything we can to prevent that outcome of course. But there are limits to what a staff of 3.25 can do. We need your help and we need it now. You believe in the importance of independent journalism in the Massachusetts of 2026? You like what we do? You have a good chunk of change or lines to others who might? We’re happy to talk things over with you anytime. Drop us an email at info [at] binj.news. That’s it. And thanks very much for your consideration.
This editorial was produced for BINJ.News, the independent weekly magazine of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and is syndicated by BINJ’s MassWire news service.
