Summer 2020 Funds for Journalists
Journalism isn’t easy at the best of times, let alone with the onset of the pandemic. Freelance journalists are hardest hit without the backing of furlough schemes or the assurance that income streams will stabilise soon. For those wishing to get back to work or to report on the pandemic’s impact specifically, we have compiled a list of eligible funding sources. Photo: Geraldine Lewa
by Claire Davenport
New applicants to the Pulitzer Center’s International Reporting Grant are advised that applications surrounding the pandemic will be prioritised at this point in time. Funding has spanned from $5,000 to $10,000 and is paid in two installments, the latter upon submission. Importantly applicants must have the verifiable support of a reputable media outlet in order to apply.
The Fund for Investigative Journalism has set a deadline for Sep. 14, 2020 for its next batch of applications. It accepts applications three to four times a year and, like the Pulitzer Center, a letter of approval from a news outlet is also expected to ensure the piece of work has potential to run, in print or on air. Funding can also reach up to USD $10,000.
The International Women’s Media Foundation is extending its funding to journalists of all genders who find themselves in need of emergency support such as medical or legal aid, replacing destroyed equipment among other lifelines. The fund will also cover those struggling to report in the “highly charged political unrest and polarization in the U.S., including but not limited to elections, civil movements and other challenging environments.” This particular fund is called the United States Journalism Emergency Fund and is eligible to those residing stateside.
Separately funding exclusively for female journalists continues under the rolling IWMF Emergency Fund, but another fund set up for those who have lost work during the Covid-19 pandemic appears to have been exhausted for the time being.
“If you are submitting an application to the Journalism Relief Fund, please know that we have exhausted the available funding and are unable to meet new requests at this time.”
If you would like some reassurance that your query will be answered in a reasonable amount of time, then the National Geographic’s Covid-19 Emergency Fund offers a hopeful two-week turnover.
The funding is aimed at local journalists trying to reach local communities on the Covid-19 pandemic and prioritises places with an underserved populace. The application expresses interest in “local or even hyper-local distribution models,” and funding can run from USD $1,000 to $8,000. The criteria welcomes a slew of storytellers from cartographers to filmmakers.
“Narratives around the Pandemic necessarily include facts and numbers, but ultimately, must also go deeper—telling the stories of inequities that COVID-19 has brought to light.”
Any reporters who feel unsafe as a result of their reporting can approach Reporters Respond, a funding tool set up by Free Press Unlimited for an outlet or journalist suffering from “harassment, intimidation or violence.” The criteria includes online harassment and the funding can cover a swathe of needs from medical to psychological assistance.
If life’s administration has reached a tipping point such as falling behind on payments for housing, medical assistance or your children’s needs the Journalists’ Charity located in Surrey provides near immediate support to eligible candidates.
The Charity’s webpage also links to a selection of other funding resources that prioritise the promotion of diversity for instance or journalists who are writing about violence against women.
The Society of Authors also provides emergency funding up to £2,000 to those hardest hit by the pandemic including writers, illustrators, literary translators, scriptwriters, poets, journalists. Applicants must reside in the UK and must show that a substantial amount of their annual income relates to their writing and/or illustration activities.
The Society of Environmental Journalists is awarding grants for stories on “climate or conservation in North America, water quality and availability in the United States Mississippi River Basin, including agriculture, food, water and sustainability, oceans and coasts globally, including fisheries, sea-level rise and coastal restoration.”
There is no deadline and funding can be up to $,2500 per individual or $5,000 for “team or news outlet projects.”
And while the NUJ also provides discretionary funding, it appears that funding is not granted until all other potential pots have been exhausted and is ineligible to non-card carrying members or recipients of state benefit.
The IJ4EU (Investigative Journalism for Europe) fund launched a new call for applications to its Investigation Support Scheme on August 10, with around €400,000 available to assist cross-border journalistic projects in the European Union and EU candidate countries.
Journalismfund.eu is another valuable organisation which has for over 20 years linked journalists to different grants. On their website you can find a list of grants as well as projects they have supported in the past. Visit journalismfund.eu to find out more about how they connect donors and journalists in order to facilitate cross-border investigative journalism.
Isobel Cockerell on What is Next for the Uyghur Minority
The reporting of human rights abuses against minorities struggles for audiences among today’s rolling news coverage. Here’s how reporter and European Press Prize winner Isobel Cockerell plans to ensure that the oppression of China’s Uyghurs doesn’t get left behind.
by Claire Davenport
Isobel Cockerell had plenty of early journalism training. Both her parents are journalists. As a result she grew up on a diet of newspapers and BBC News at Ten.
When Isobel’s own career in journalism took off, she recognised that her place was not necessarily in the ‘turbo’ news diet she grew up on, but rather providing deep-dive long-form narrative journalism.
In 2018 Isobel had a fateful meeting with Coda co-founder Natalia Antelava whose interest in long-form granular reporting matched her own. Coda Story, an online crisis reporting platform, grew out of its founders’ frustration with reporters chasing the news cycle; parachuting into unfamiliar territories and leaving them behind with barely a follow-up.
This year Isobel was awarded the European Press Prize for a forensic and highly informative take on the oppression of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang province, China, where the local administration employ draconian measures such as internment camps, facial recognition technology and more recently mandatory contraception as tools of oppression.
The so-called “vocational training centers” have been dressed up as “boarding schools” intended to wipe out extremism. But a report by Amnesty collating interviews from former detainees found they had suffered inhumane levels of torture and surveillance.
“Xinjiang is the most highly surveilled region in the world. It is like nothing else on earth,” Cockerell said in an interview on how she plans to follow up on the Uyghur story.
“Stay on the story” is in fact the Coda motto, and like all stories of oppression there are endless angles to pursue.
In her research Isobel also discovered that some of the tech vendors helping China spy on the Uyghurs are also selling their products at trade fairs in global commercial centres such as London.
“Companies who operate in Xinjiang routinely sell huge contracts to democracies,” she said. “One such company is watching Londoners’ every move.”
Isobel only cautiously welcomes the move from the U.S. Congress to sanction Chinese officials involved in Uyghur oppression but warns that we are yet to see if it has a tangible impact on the situation on the ground.
In Turkey she caught up with many Uyghur women who have fled there and now live in a state of limbo, unable to see their families again, potentially forever. She feels their stories deserve to be told to inform both the political and social narrative.
“There is this choice all of these women have to face which is what do I do about this life I have left behind,” Cockerell said. “It feels impossible to move on from that life, and there is an ongoing sense of trauma and paralysis for many of the women.”
During her reporting, Isobel also discovered that three-quarters of the Uyghurs who managed to flee to Turkey are women.
“Men have been more heavily targeted in the detention system and for diverse reasons it was marginally easier for women to get out of Xinjiang before 2017, when it became almost impossible for any Uyghur to leave the region.”
Today the authorities are cracking down even harder and those who have fled did so during a tight window before state security began confiscating passports.
Currently Isobel is preparing a follow-up to her prize-winning piece focussing on the activities inside the internment camps.
Coda Story is also one of few media who attempt to unpack fake news. A dedicated team of reporters monitor fake news narratives doing the rounds on social media.
In its exploration of fake news, Coda journalists like Isobel have also uncovered a striking and underwhelming dichotomy.
“The most clumsy and crude disinformation campaigns have the highest impact and as soon as they are out the damage is done,” she said. “Unfortunately, fact-checking and debunking doesn’t undo that harm.”
Coda’s disinformation newsletter the Infodemic can be subscribed to here (https://www.codastory.com/coda-newsletters/).