Giving Tuesday And NewsMatch Are The Real Spirit Of The Season

November 23, 2018 David Bloom

Black Friday and its consumption-minded spinoffs Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday make it easy to forget that the holidays are supposed to be about giving, especially to those less fortunate than ourselves. That's why it's great to see the rise of Giving Tuesday, and NewsMatch, a part of Giving Tuesday that benefits dozens of non-profit journalism groups doing impactful, in-depth, investigative projects that seem beyond the resources of many struggling for-profit newspapers, broadcasters and other outlets.Giving Tuesday is next week, on Nov. 27, and now is observed by organizations in at least 55 countries and every continent. Created in 2012, it's the brainchild of 92Y and 92Y's Belfer Center for Innovation and Social Impact, but has grown far beyond its roots, said Asha Curran, 92Y's chief innovation officer and the Belfer Center's executive director. International groups such as the United Nations Development Programme and TechSoup Global also support the effort.Giving Tuesday's real power – last year it raised more than $300 million for what Curran calls "countless" non-profits – comes both from the focus it provides and from the matching dollars it generates from foundations and corporations. Give a buck, and the matching doubles it, making it particularly attractive to people with a giving spirit perhaps bigger than their pocketbooks."Giving Tuesday is really a celebration of what we call everyday givers," Curran said. "You know, $300 million in gifts last Giving Tuesday was made up of gifts of barely $100."Though all kinds of organizations, focused on all kinds of worth causes, take part, NewsMatch has become a particularly notable exercise, bringing together multiple matching sources to benefit 155 non-profit news groups working in just about every corner of the country and beyondNewsMatch is being organized by the Institute for Nonprofit News and the News Revenue Hub, and bolstered by $3 million in matching funds chiefly from the Democracy Fund, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Other contributors to the matching fund include the Gates Family Foundation, the Facebook Journalism Project, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, the Miami Foundation, and the Wyncote Foundation.Importantly, though the campaign kicks off on Giving Tuesday (or Giving Newsday, as participants call it), donations through the end of the year to participating news organizations will be matched."What I love about this campaign, I'm on board of The Guardian’s new non-profit arm, and I'm really thrilled to see this," Curran said. "I also love the collaborative aspect. It's really broken new ground to get non-profits to work together."Each participating news organization can receive up to $25,000 in matching funds for each donation of up to $1,000. In the initiative's first two years, it raised $7.5 million to help increase giving to local and investigative reporting while strengthening non-profit newsrooms through training and shared resources.“Now more than ever, nonprofit newsrooms across the country are filling information gaps in communities,” said Sue Cross, Executive Director and CEO of the Institute for Nonprofit News, in a statement. “This year’s NewsMatch campaign will enable organizations to raise critical support, which will ensure they have the resources necessary to continue to provide fact-based, local quality journalism for years to come.” Participating news groups range from high-profile organizations such as Pro Publica to the tiny and tucked-away, such as the Alabama Initiative for Independent Journalism, South Dakota News Watch, WyoFile, Honolulu Civil Beat and Searchlight New Mexico. Nearly 50 national and international news non-profits – including the Center for Investigative Reporting, Energy News Network, Mother Jones, Washington Monthly, Grist, Public Radio International and Youth Radio – also benefit.Pro Publica, the first non-profit news organization to win a Pulitzer Prize (it since has won another), received the full $25,000 in matching funds last year, part of $99,000 the organization raised on what it calls "Giving Newsday," said President Richard Tofel. The day's fundraising was part of nearly $5 million the group brought in online and through smaller donations in 2017, money largely spent on its newsroom of more than 100 journalists.The funding from NewsMatch was valuable, but even more, Tofel said, the joint campaign creates a much higher profile for the work of non-profit news organizations of all kinds. That is vital.

"Here’s the thing, for us and other people trying to do the kind of work we’re trying to do," Tofel said. "There’s still only a limited awareness in the country of that as a philanthropic option. Everyone knows you can give to schools, places of worship, art museums and symphonies. The idea of non-profit journalism is a relatively new thing. Giving Newsday makes people more aware of journalism as a philanthropic option (in a time) that makes non-profit journalism increasingly necessary. In the last couple of years, a lot of people have been reminded of the importance of accountability journalism to democracy."

The organization counts its successes by the changes that its stories help cause, Tofel said. Notable recent projects included work by its Illinois local team uncovering abuses in the state's tax assessment system that led to the election defeat of the Cook County Assessor. Pro Publica was also the first organization to publish audio and video of a young immigrant girl being separated from her parents by ICE officers at the U.S.-Mexico border, which led to changes in a border-control system that was essentially isolating and imprisoning young children. Pro Publica also is paying the salaries for a year for eight journalists working on special projects in newsrooms around the country.

It's worth noting that as extraordinarily worthwhile as the work by NewsMatch's beneficiaries, it's not the only effort to give journalism a better chance to survive and thrive. As part of Facebook's new Community News Project — an olive branch of sorts to the journalism industry — the company is donating $5.8 million to subsidize training of 80 new reporters at local UK papers.

There's even a nifty new service called Shoeleather, essentially a database of local reporters around the country for editors trying to find local talent on a story.

Even the game business has gotten into the Giving Newsday spirit, sort of. Take Two Interactive's vast new Western-themed role-playing title, Red Dead Redemption 2, has a number of cheat codes built in that only are activated after your character has bought one of the newspapers in the game. It's not quite NewsMatch, but a) I recommend the sprawling game as a great way to while away the winter months and b) I strongly commend anything that makes newspapers the gateway to a better (albeit virtual) life.The mutating media landscape has challenged just about every organization that's part of it, especially as companies try to reacquaint customers with the value of paying for good journalism. NewsMatch gives them a chance to help finance the most difficult, expensive and impactful journalism out there. For that, we should be truly thankful.