#Poynter-Koch

[strangebiology]

How Funding Affected my Journalism Jobs

The different places I’ve worked as a journalist, and in related fields, have all had different funding. Here are my experiences at different places–and it seems to me that grant-funded stuff is the best. 

Internship at Nat Geo

Grants sponsored both of the other interns, but not me. Nat Geo makes a lot of its money through things like books at TV.

Mine was low-paid, but probably normal for an internship in 2016? LOVED the experience. Freelance at Nat Geo afterward was MUCH better paid. $14/hour part-time. IDK how much the grant-funded interns made. 2016.

Fellowship at PBS Newshour

A grant from the National Science Foundation funded me, but PBS is state-sponsored media. Interestingly, that’s a huge red flag in China and Russia, but I found the US-funded Public Broadcasting Service very fair to its subjects. Good experience, but even worse pay, at $13/hour full-time. 2016-2017

Job at Newsweek 

Their funding is from clicks. This place was crazy bad and paid garbage. Everyone hated it and almost everyone quit, unless they were being fired for making a living wage. Some people even got fired for accurately reporting on the company itself on assignment from their editors–there was no obscuring it, that was cited as their reason for termitation. Newsweek is Hellfire and damnation. I suspect the nonsense demand for 5 stories/day/person and silly demand that we make them go viral stemmed from the following: the fact that the company primarily made its money from clicks and higher-ups didn’t appear to care about the long-term reputation of the company or its reporters, and perhaps an ego-fueled refusal to try to understand what actually got clicks. $39k/year. 2017-2018

Freelance at VOX 

Funded by clicks/ads and grants at the time, but halfway through they started a contribution campaign. The difference I noticed between VOX and Newsweek was that VOX practices were smarter and they actually paid attention to analytics and sane business practices. Also, it's much easier to qualify for and get grants if you're actually doing good journalism, so I don't believe that Newsweek's policy of "lots of garbage" was actually business-savvy in any way.

Vox was a good experience, even though I wasn’t working as a journalist, but doing SEO/social media for journalists. $35/hour, then $50/hour part-time. Then I was laid off due to the pandemic. 2019-2020

Freelance at Alzheimer's Association 

Remote, not really journalism, but I liked it anyway. Nonprofit, so, funded by donations and grants. $65/hour part-time. 2021

Job at Bay Nature

My job was entirely funded by a grant. Odd situation–I got the grant and I could bring it to any legit journalism employer. Bay Nature was supposed to contribute 40% of my salary but flexibility happened and they just paid health insurance and such. They got basically no money at all from clicks, like, pennies a year. Not much from subscriptions. They have fundraisers, and at the time, there were 3 writers/editors and 2 fundraisers on staff. Later they hired another writer whose entire salary was paid by a philanthropist, and then I’m told they got another salary funded by a UC Berkeley journalism grant program. So, like half of their editorial staff was grant-funded.

Great experience, but low pay for the Bay Area. $50k/year, all from Poynter-Koch, 2021-2022.

Freelance at Politifact

A nonprofit and they probably get lots of grants. My particular position was also funded by a grant entirely. Loved it. $250/article fact check. 2022. 

Book

REALLY love it. $50k is from MIT Press, which is a not-for-profit, and it gets some grants and endowments. Then I got $56k from a grant from the Sloan Foundation on top. 

Future? 

I also got $500 (plus gas and hotels) to attend a day of learning with a program called Investing in Wyoming’s Creative Economy, and that means I’m one of 100 people eligible to apply for 10 $25k grants for future projects. The idea is to support creatives to stay in Wyoming and have sustainable businesses here. Maybe do some art that will bring in tourists. 

_____________________

Note that a grant sort of does, and sort of doesn’t, mean free money. It means money to support a project that usually has to have a mission and a public good, like educating the public. You don’t pay these back, and the org giving the grants doesn’t require a percentage of the profits or anything. But, for instance, the $50k grant from Poynter-Koch was more like a gift to Bay Nature, so they could pay me, and I worked for a year to actually have the funds. 

However, I’m not yet convinced that there is any objectively good funding model to ensure the most fair and accurate journalism. In theory, the capitalistic ones would be the best, but the public desire to read inflammatory stories about how their political enemies are evil, or a different generation is full of idiots, adversely affected the accuracy of headlines at Newsweek IMO.

You might think that the worst funding source would be Poynter-Koch, which is a program run by Poynter and funded by the Charles Koch Institute. But neither Poynter nor Koch even asked me to tell them what I was writing, let alone try to stop me from writing it. (Poynter hosted mentor-led auxiliary groups to talk about our careers/lives and such, so the topics of our articles came up sometimes if we chose to share that.) 

Anyway, I’m thinking of writing an article on how funding models affect journalism, for better and worse. There are some high-profile examples of grant funding causing harm. But for now, the above is my experience–pretty much all good, except not enough funding sometimes. 

[aboriginalnewswire]

Irony Is Dead: Charles Koch Is Funding a Journalism Fellowship with Poynter Poynter has been through this before. Last year, they had to write a post titled “What we do with money from the Koch Foundation.” <p>Source: Irony Is Dead: Charles Koch Is Funding a Journalism Fellowship with Poynter

[creeping-shadow-heralds-storms]

LAST AUGUST, NPR PROFILED A HARVARD-LED EXPERIMENT to help low-income families find housing in wealthier neighborhoods, giving their children access to better schools and an opportunity to “break the cycle of poverty.” According to researchers cited in the article, these children could see $183,000 greater earnings over their lifetimes—a striking forecast for a housing program still in its experimental stage.

If you squint as you read the story, you’ll notice that every quoted expert is connected to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which helps fund the project. And if you’re really paying attention, you’ll also see the editor’s note at the end of the story, which reveals that NPR itself receives funding from Gates.

NPR’s funding from Gates “was not a factor in why or how we did the story,” reporter Pam Fessler says, adding that her reporting went beyond the voices quoted in her article. The story, nevertheless, is one of hundreds NPR has reported about the Gates Foundation or the work it funds, including myriad favorable pieces written from the perspective of Gates or its grantees.

And that speaks to a larger trend—and ethical issue—with billionaire philanthropists’ bankrolling the news. The Broad Foundation, whose philanthropic agenda includes promoting charter schools, at one point funded part of the LA Times’ reporting on education. Charles Koch has made charitable donations to journalistic institutions such as the Poynter Institute, as well as to news organizations such as the Daily Caller News Foundation, that support his conservative politics. And the Rockefeller Foundation funds Vox’s Future Perfect, a reporting project that examines the world “through the lens of effective altruism”—often looking at philanthropy.

"...I recently examined nearly twenty thousand charitable grants the Gates Foundation had made through the end of June and found more than $250 million going toward journalism. Recipients included news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting; charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, like BBC Media Action and the New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund; media companies such as Participant, whose documentary Waiting for “Superman” supports Gates’s agenda on charter schools; journalistic organizations such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, and the International Center for Journalists; and a variety of other groups creating news content or working on journalism, such as the Leo Burnett Company, an ad agency that Gates commissioned to create a “news site” to promote the success of aid groups. In some cases, recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations—which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates’s funding into the fourth estate...."

[mathewingram]

Facebook gets flak for partnering with Daily Caller on fact-checking

Note: This is something I originally published on the New Gatekeepers blog at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Facebook’s third-party fact-checking project, which was launched with much fanfare in December of 2016, has come under fire a number of times over the past year or so. And it came in for some more this week, after the social network announced a list of partners that included Check Your Fact, a site owned by The Daily Caller. A right-leaning website co-founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, The Daily Caller has been criticized for a number of journalistic transgressions, including running articles by a white supremacist who helped organize the Charlottesville alt-right march.

Sleeping Giants, a Twitter account that has been running an advertising boycott aimed at Breitbart News, The Daily Caller, and other prominent right-wing media outlets, responded to the news of Check Your Fact’s participation with an angry tweet, saying “Poynter, as the people who run fact-checking for Facebook, can you please help me understand how you chose Daily Caller as a reliable source for this? This site is directly responsible for death threats to me and my family.”

Hello, @Poynter & @barbara_allen_. As the people who run fact-checking for @Facebook, can you please help me understand how you chose Daily Caller as a reliable source for this? This site is directly responsible for death threats to me and my family. https://t.co/Be09bpCkao

— Sleeping Giants (@slpng_giants) April 18, 2019

Baybars Orsek, director of the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network, stepped in to respond to Sleeping Giant, pointing out the IFCN and Poynter don’t run Facebook’s fact-checking program, they merely apply certain principles to fact-checking sites that want to be accredited by the network. If a site passes the assessment test, then it can be part of the network, Orsek said, and Facebook’s third-party partners have all passed that assessment. The criteria applied only to Check Your Fact, which The Daily Caller said is editorially independent from the news site.

“I’d be happy to put our track record up against anyone else’s,” David Sivak, who runs Check Your Fact, told CJR. “If you comb through the articles we’ve published over the last two years, you’ll quickly see that our fact checks are fair, in-depth and hold figures on both sides of the political aisle accountable, including Trump.” The site’s fact-checks include more than 20 checks of Trump facts, including his recent statement that windmills cause cancer (which was declared to be false).

As independent as it might be, the history of how Check Your Fact came to be part of the Facebook project is a little more complicated, and shows the site has some powerful friends at the social network. In December, the Wall Street Journal reported that Joel Kaplan, the former Bush administration official who is now the VP of public policy at Facebook, had blocked an effort aimed at bursting news filter bubbles, arguing that this would inevitably be perceived as anti-conservative. He also reportedly pressed the company to include Breitbart News as part of its quality news plans, and suggested that The Daily Caller should be included in the fact-checking program.

This effort was sidelined, however, after The Daily Caller’s fact-checking site initially failed the accreditation process set up by the IFCN. According to Alexios Mantzarlis, who was the director of the IFCN at the time, the site didn’t meet the standards set for transparency about funding and other disclosures. It later reapplied with updated disclosure, which mentioned that the majority of its funding comes from The Daily Caller, with some from The Daily Caller News Foundation, a separate entity that is funded by donations from a number of groups, including the Charles Koch Foundation. After these disclosures, it was accredited by the IFCN.

The furor over Check Your Fact is similar to a previous battle over a fact-check published by The Weekly Standard, another conservative news site. Holmes Lybrand, who was running the Standard’s fact-checking unit at the time (and is now at CNN) flagged as false a claim by the left-leaning site Think Progress that Brett Kavanaugh, then a candidate for the Supreme Court, “said he would repeal Roe vs. Wade if elected.” Lybrand noted that Kavanaugh had not said anything of the sort, which was accurate (although it could be argued that he suggested it strongly).

Think Progress founder Judd Legum said the incident called into question the validity of the entire Facebook fact-checking program, but Mantzarlis pointed out that The Weekly Standard’s fact-checking unit had passed the accreditation process, and that their fact-checking approach was as fair as anyone else’s. What the incident made clear was that Facebook was determined to add right-leaning sites to its network, in an attempt at achieving some kind of ideological balance, and the inclusion of The Daily Caller’s fact-checking unit is another example. A spokesperson for Facebook said the company “believes in having a diverse set of fact-checking partners,” but the reality is that it has gone out of its way to try to prove that it is not biased against conservatives.

These aren’t the only bumps the Facebook fact-checking effort has experienced either. Snopes, one of the leading online fact-checking organizations and also one of the oldest, quit the fact-checking project earlier this year, after two years as a partner, saying it wasn’t worth the cost and effort. And former Snopes managing editor Brooke Binkowski, who now runs her own fact-checking site called Truth or Fiction (which is not affiliated with Facebook), has said the program was essentially “just used for crisis PR,” to make it look as though the company was doing something. The social network “was more interested in making themselves look good and passing the buck,” she told The Guardian in an interview last year.

Facebook gets flak for partnering with Daily Caller on fact-checking was originally published on mathewingram.com/work

[agreenroad]

Journalism’s Gates keepers - Columbia Journalism Review

Journalism’s Gates keepers – Columbia Journalism Review

And that speaks to a larger trend—and ethical issue—with billionaire philanthropists’ bankrolling the news. The Broad Foundation, whose philanthropic agenda includes promoting charter schools, at one point funded part of the LA Times’ reporting on education. Charles Koch has made charitable donations to journalistic institutions such as the Poynter Institute, as well as to news organizations such…

[usp-rp]

mwm?

Theo James, Alexander Koch, Chay Suede, Caio Castro, Glen Powell,David Solans, Miguel Herrán, Dylan O’Brien, Tyler Posey, Daniel Sharman, Dylan Sprayberry,Michael Johnston, Froy Gutierrez, Khylin Rhambo, Bob Morley, Jeremy Jordan, MehcadBrooks, JesseRrath, Tyler Blackburn, Diego Boneta, Cody Christian, John Karna, DougiePoynter, Tom Maden, Tom Holland, Connor Weil, Santiago Segura, Freddie Highmore,Kim Jong-in, Do Kyung-soo, Park Jimin, Min Yoon-gi, Andrew Garfield, Luke Hemmings,Avan Jogia, Colin Ford, Garret Hedlund, Keith Powers, Luke Grimes, Lucas Till, MaxThieriot, William Moseley, John Boyega, Kendrick Sampson, Marlon Teixeira,Rahul Kohli, Jaden Smith, Rami Malek, Dev Patel, Charlie Weber, Chiwetel Ejiofor,Hugh Jackman, Jared Padalecki, Lenny Kravitz, Keanu Reeves.

[strangebiology]

Staff Journalists, Get this Fellowship

The fellowship I did is open for its next round of applicants! I STRONGLY recommend this for any staff/seriously applying to be staff journalist.

Your chance of getting accepted are VERY high. They accept like 50+ people per year and no one seems to know about this fellowship. Between me and the one person who took my advice to apply last year, the acceptance rate is 100%

You get free training, a professional group, a paid mentor of your choosing, job references, etc. You can even ask for more (conference funding, classes.)

Depending on how you swing it you could literally get $50k tacked onto your salary. At the very least your host institution will get a big financial break. Bay Nature got them to pay my entire salary. So, if you're applying to jobs, you can tell them "Hey guess what, you can get an $83k journalist for $33k, I'm your most cost-effective candidate."

You can work at any real journalism outlet.

[strangebiology]

I’m halfway through my fellowship and they just opened applications for the next batch of fellows! If you’re an early-career journalist I highly recommend applying. It’s functionally a bunch of free training plus they cover 60% of your salary up to $50k. You can work at any real news outlet in the US.

That means you could probably ask for a raise at your current job or you could more easily get a new job, because a news outlet with a $33,333 budget can get an $83,3333 journalist with the stimulus money. The only catch is you have to spend about 4 hours a week learning about journalism/talking with mentors/doing a project/going to 3 conferences (all fully paid for and organized!)

The other catch is it’s funded by the Charles Koch Institute, but Poynter is the operator and very well-respected. No one has asked to review my writing before publication or anything, if that’s what you’re wondering. No one has even asked what I’m writing, just how they can help me accomplish my career goals while my actual boss is Bay Nature magazine.

Happy to answer questions about it, just read the link first! 

[strangebiology]

My journalism employer pays $0 for my full-time salary - let me explain

I’ve worked at several different news outlets with different funding models. National Geographic makes money from the non-magazine parts of the business, like books and movies and some grants. PBS Newshour is funded by the government and Viewers Like You. Newsweek is funded by ad revenue from clicks, subscriptions, and exploiting writers.

Bay Nature, where I work now, is a nonprofit with a mission statement: to provide valuable, educational content about nature in the SF Bay Area. The articles are long, in-depth, carefully fact-checked, provide info you can’t find in other outlets, and sometimes written by freelancers who get around $1/word. That’s about the rate Nat Geo pays, so we can get writers of Nat Geo levels of talent and experience. I’ll never forget what I learned in this article about ticks and how biodiversity affects the spread of diseases like Lyme.

This type of journalism, as you might have guessed, is not very profitable. We get basically nothing from clicks. It’s pretty much just donations and grants that support us. Because of our mission statement, we don’t do a paywall, everything online is free for all to read. So, if you would like to help, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, sign up for the newsletter, get a subscription, contribute to our fundraiser (tax-deductible), or share the fundraiser. Of course, the fundraiser helps the most!

Of course, full disclosure, I am going to be biased towards this place because I work here...does this count as an ad? But, if it helps, none of the fundraising money goes to me because I already took care of my salary myself. Last year when I was on unemployment, I spent my time applying to fellowships, grants, jobs and gigs. I earned a fellowship from Poynter-Koch which includes continuing education, mentorship, and a grant - which pays 100% of my salary! 

[strangebiology]

How did you go about getting a job as a science journalist? I’m finishing up my masters in biology and trying to think of potential jobs outside of just field work or data analysis (love the science process, but man academia is not the vibe). My apologies if you answered this before!

Yeah! My current job I got after applying to a lot of things, getting accepted to the Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship, then applying to a bunch of places and getting into Bay Nature Magazine. The fellowship actually pays my salary, which isn't unheard of - when I was at PBS Newshour, the National Science Foundation paid.

My route to science journalism:

>Like writing and nature

>Major in journalism

>Futz around with different beats

>Remember that obviously I like animals the most and should be writing about them!

>Make a Tumblr about biology, oh people actually do want to read about science? Because I'm gaining traction here!

>Maybe this is a real career, oh look the author of this book Frankenstein's Cat went to a grad program, maybe I should do that

>BU Master's program in science journalism (RIP)

>Nat Geo internship, PBS Newshour fellowship in science/social media, Newsweek job as a science writer, mess around a bit with other jobs like social media, SEO, video making, nonprofit content, and now I'm at Bay Nature.

I've got some science journalism stuff on my FAQ. Here are some selects:

My science journalism tag

How much does a science journalist make?

Very basic intro to science journalism grad programs

How to get an internship at National Geographic 

What a science journalist does External: The Open Notebook has lots of professional answers Training Scientists to be Journalists (John Wilkes) Resources on How to be a Science Journalist (Knight Science Journalism at MIT) Carl Zimmer’s advice on beginning science writing Free Science Journalism Master Class (The Open Notebook)