News
How a Landscape Analysis Builds Journalism from the Ground Up
June 27, 2024
At a luncheon last month in Atlanta, The Pivot Fund team showcased its innovative approach to supporting community-centered news outlets and the tangible impact of investing in nontraditional newsrooms. The event drew a diverse audience of philanthropists and publishers.
Jean Marie Brown, Director of Research, Learning, and Evaluation, provided an insightful presentation on journalism’s evolution and The Pivot Fund’s groundbreaking, audience-driven landscape analysis strategy.
“We wanted to understand where people were getting information,” Brown said. “Once you start asking that – if you stop assuming that if I’m not getting it from the newspaper, that they’re not getting it – and you start asking people where they are getting it, you start to find these emerging media outlets that are grassroots, run by people who may or may not have gone to school to study journalism, and who may or may not speak English as their first language. There’s just a wealth of people out there who are producing what by any definition is journalism for their local communities, and that’s what we started to look for as we began our landscape analysis.”
Attendees learned how this methodology unearthed local news platforms across Georgia’s Black Belt. Media entrepreneurs cultivate a deep trust in communities long neglected by mainstream media. Despite this, they remain under the radar of local and national funders. The Pivot Fund invested in eight of those outlets, underscoring its commitment to bridging gaps in journalism philanthropy by identifying and funding often-overlooked voices.
Joined by two of those grantees – April Ross, CEO of BEE TV Network in LaGrange, Ga., and Sophia Qureshi, Founder and Publisher of 285 South in Atlanta – Pivot Fund Founder Tracie Powell delved into the outcomes—expanded newsrooms, larger audiences, increased visibility, awards and more. She echoed her vision for a journalism landscape that champions diversity, community, and essential news.
Ross and Qureshi shared how Pivot’s grants have empowered their respective outlets to serve their communities more effectively. Each spoke of journalism’s critical role in fostering community resilience and civic engagement.
“I found out actually because I wanted to focus on community media and realized that hyper-local news is really about building community,” said Qureshi. “It’s like being a community member almost first before anything else.”
Also joining the discussion was Tim Murphy of the Minneapolis-based McKnight Foundation, a lead funder of The Pivot Fund’s expansion into the Midwest. He also underlined how important journalism is in informing and engaging citizens in a democracy. He said commissioning a Pivot landscape analysis was a way to ensure journalism funding reaches communities that may have been overlooked,
“We made an intentional shift in thinking about investing more strategically and doubly in the resilience of our democracy, in closing long-standing racial and wealth gaps in Minnesota,” Murphy said. “We took an explicit shift to center racial equity in our strategic framework,” said Murphy. “One of the ways to embody the new mission and direction of the Foundation was to refine and basically, tear down to the studs our approach to funding media and journalism.”