The Pew Center for Civic Journalism is inviting news organizations to apply for funding to experiment with innovative ways to help involve citizens in reporting on public issues. Eligible to apply are on-line and print newspapers and magazines, and television and radio stations. The Pew Center is particularly interested this year in on-line initiatives and in multi-media partnerships.

The center helped to support 16 efforts in 2001. Funded activities have included creative uses of the Internet, sampling citizen issues through polling or focus groups, fostering discussion and debate of issues in town meetings or other forums and using coordinators for community outreach.

Deadline for 2002 Proposals: June 29, 2001

Guidelines for Funding

The Pew Center provides modest funding to news organizations to help offset some of the ancillary costs of civic journalism experiments.

The funding is not available to cover the ordinary costs of operating a news organization, such as hiring reporters or producers, paying for news space or air time or buying hardware. It can be used, for example, for such expenses as research surveys, polling or focus groups to help report on citizens' concerns, community coordinators to help with project logistics, extraordinary production cost to televise town meetings or hold community forums, and for entirely new journalism ideas.

The participating news organizations are expected to bear the primary costs of news gathering and dissemination.

Multi-media partnerships are encouraged. Your media alliance can be an agreement with other news organizations, such as a daily newspaper or commercial television station, public television and radio, community newspapers, city and regional magazines, on-line community networks, or local universities.

The Pew Center believes it is in the best interest of the public to encourage the broadest practical participation in any media partnerships it helps to fund, consistent with high journalistic principles and sound practices.

Pew Center funding is disbursed through subcontracts. The Pew Center does not pay for administrative overhead.

To Qualify:

1. Your proposal must entail doing journalism, that is, reporting news and information. Funding is not available for community organizations, block parties, or newspapers in education projects.

2. You must have a plan to obtain citizen input on issues, determine the citizens' agenda in your community, or invite citizen participation. Techniques for doing this can include polling, focus groups, survey research or working with existing public opinion data; convening task forces of citizens, study circles, or action teams; or soliciting input via newspaper coupons, on the air, or on-line.

3. You must include a training plan for your newsroom that will help reporters, editors, news directors, and producers deepen their understanding of your efforts and let them contribute their creative ideas.

4. You must include a budget showing how you expect to spend any funding.

5. You should propose how you might evaluate your efforts, in terms of trying to measure what impact, if any, they had on your community. Tracking letters, e-mail, faxes, computer visits, attendance at town meetings, voter results, circulation results, etc.

6. All proposals should be presented via three to five-page memo or letter, on letterhead and should be accompanied by a completed funding application.

Pew Center for Civic Journalism
1101 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite 420
Washington, DC 20036-4303