How I Would—and Wouldn’t—Give Away Millions

Do's and don'ts for journalism philanthropy

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

As the next step in her independent career as a philanthropist, Melinda French Gates recently announced a billion dollars in new gifts to help women and girls. It was great to see her give millions of that to my friends at The 19^th, but I was particularly struck by an unusual element in French Gates’s announcement: She is giving $20 million each to a dozen leaders in various fields—from filmmaker Ava DuVernay to former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern—to dispense as they see fit to benefit the larger cause. Maybe someone has done something like this at such a scale before, but, if so, I’ve never heard of it.

Anyway, it got me to thinking about what I would do if someone gave me $20 million to re-gift in aid of American journalism. I don’t think it would be helpful, or even appropriate, for me to name individual grantees (I have too many interests and conflicts), but this week I want to share some ground rules—do’s and don’ts—I think someone with such an enviable task should follow.

Not as easy as it may seem

Perhaps the first thing to say is that it would be challenging. When I got a job many years ago at the Rockefeller Foundation, we talked about it at dinner with our kids. My son, then 14, asked what Rockefeller does, and I started out by saying that they give away money. His immediate reaction: “Jeez, Dad, that’s the easiest job in the world.” Well, I responded, maybe, but the trick is to figure out how to do the most possible good with the money. My son was silent for a long moment, then conceded, “Wow, that’s hard.” It remains one of the wisest observations I have ever heard about philanthropy.

My ground rules would begin with a bunch of points about process:

• Go fast. Sure, think carefully, but the value of money shrinks over time, as everyone in finance knows, while needs only grow, as every potential grantee can tell you. Moreover, as so many have now said for so long, the business crisis of the press represents a democratic emergency. So taking years to craft a strategy, as some foundations do (and then do again when they get new leadership), is simply inexcusable. This is why so many of us are frustrated with Press Forward, which won’t have made any significant grants from its roughly $65 million pooled fund for almost a year from its splashy announcement last September.

• Try to give general support grants whenever possible. This is conventional wisdom, but it’s often observed in the breach. Why is it important? For two big reasons, I think: First, because when you give money to organizations, you are ultimately betting on leaders, and you strengthen those leaders to the extent you increase their freedom of action. Second, and relatedly, specifying how an organization should spend the money often implicitly assumes you know their business better than they do. If you are in the business of philanthropy, and they are in the business of journalism, you don’t.

• Align the duration of grants with the work you hope will result. If you are funding the building of something new and you hope enduring, a one- or even two-year grant is very likely inadequate. More grants should have durations of five years or even longer. If you lack confidence in the durability of the grantee or the its leadership, that ought to lead you to question the grant in the first place.

• Make fewer, bigger grants. This is also commonplace advice, but again it’s less common in practice. In my experience, the largest reason for institutional foundations giving out lots of small grants is to avoid disappointing the many potential recipients, a reluctance to make the choices that grantmaking necessarily entails. The candid characterization of that is cowardice. One of the costs of the privilege of engaging in professional philanthropy should be the willingness to risk being seen in retrospect to have failed, to have made poor judgments when others might have made better ones. If you don’t have the stomach for that, you should forego the privilege.

• For similar reasons, behave transparently. Announce grants promptly and in detail (amounts, duration, restrictions if any, etc.). Be open about who’s making the decisions. If you are giving money to a for-profit publisher, insist that they disclose the grant to their audience, and indicate why you are convinced of their need and what steps you have taken to avoid simply enriching their shareholders.

For journalism specifically

Moving beyond process, there are also substantive principles I would apply in such a happy endeavor. Here are a few:

• The need remains across the board. I know that local journalism funding is in vogue, and there is no question that is an area of great need, but important realms of national coverage remain importantly dependent on philanthropic support—and will indefinitely—including investigative reporting and vertical efforts in priority news beats from climate to criminal justice to inequality in many of its guises. Philanthropists should put special emphasis, I think, on filling coverage gaps. Thus, for instance, beyond supporting local news wherever they are themselves located, places with little money should be a particular priority.

• In vertical areas, it may make sense for general funders to focus where the market seems especially to be failing to meet reader needs, from investigative generally to subjects to which the press as a whole gives short shrift—and conversely, not to the subjects of which coverage seems ample, i.e. the hot topics du jour.

• I have warned before about what I see as too great a concentration of philanthropic resources for journalism on intermediaries. I don’t mean by this, and never have, that it’s a mistake to create shared resources or facilitate bulk buying of goods or services, or for some donors to leave to others with greater expertise where their money should go. But efforts such as those should be closely scrutinized for their own cost— that is, for how much leaks out of their bucket before it can be poured into other vessels.

• And I would be strongly disinclined to deploy limited resources—even $20 million can disappear pretty quickly—on associations and other trade groups that have a track record of growing more quickly and prospering more significantly than the newsrooms they ostensibly represent.

I don’t expect to get offered millions to dispense anytime soon, although I am easy to reach if you want to surprise me. But lots of funders do have this chance every day, deploying their own money or that of others, and, happily, more of them each year are recognizing that journalism is a compelling philanthropic priority. Until my own phone rings, I hope some of them— even some of you— might find these ground rules helpful.

Second Rough Draft will be off next week. Happy Fourth. Remember what Benjamin Franklin said the Framers gave us on a later Philadelphia occasion: “A republic, if you can keep it.”