Looking Into Press Forward’s Mass Grant Process

Concerns about a lack of reporters in St. Louis and others’ presence in the Philippines

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 I noted briefly a couple of weeks ago, the Press Forward Pooled Fund made its first big move earlier this month with 205 grants of $100,000 each to smaller newsrooms (annual budget under $1 million), fully 60% of them for-profit. That’s a $20 million (plus attendant costs) series of bets, almost all of them likely one-time investments—as it’s hard to imagine where anything like another $20 million for the same purpose might come from.

There’s lots to say about whether this one-size-fits-most is a wise approach to philanthropy (I don’t think it is), but that’s not what this week’s column is about. Instead, it’s about issues that have arisen around the Press Forward grants process.

Trouble in St. Louis

Last Tuesday, St. Louis Magazine (SLM) reported that one of the $100,000 grants had gone to the St. Louis Argus. Unfortunately, as SLM reported, the Argus is not what it once was, a strong, original voice of the St. Louis Black community. It has no full-time journalists, hasn’t posted to Facebook in a decade, has no Twitter account and is now owned by a former state legislator who pleaded guilty to soliciting a bribe, served time in prison and was fined half a million dollars for campaign finance violations. (He took it over from his father-in-law, who went to prison for tax evasion.) It publishes little original content, according to SLM, and has published much of what it reprints without permission. Last Thursday, Press Forward told SLM it had “paused” the grant to the Argus. That pause, Press Forward tells me, is still in effect.

I had already inquired after the first SLM piece, and decided to look into the matter further. In addition to concerns about the grant process which I’ve detailed below, and without doing any review of the 205 grantees themselves (I simply didn’t have the time), I quickly turned up one other grant that raises serious questions. I don’t know at this point if there are others, as I’m deeply familiar with only about 20 of the grantees (all of which are quite worthy, by the way).

Reporting from 6500 miles and 15 time zones away

That questionable grant recipient is JOLT, a local news nonprofit centered on Olympia, Washington. JOLT employs eight paid editors and reporters. But somewhat to my amazement, as a source pointed out, the editor listed first on the masthead and all six reporters live and work out of the Philippines, more than 6500 miles and 15 time zones away. To its credit, JOLT makes no secret of this, and never has. It does not appear to have been noted on its Press Forward application, but JOLT’s publisher says he did tell the head of Press Forward about his staff in the Philippines back in July. JOLT’s Press Forward application says that it will use the $100,000 to hire a managing editor, and it tells me that person is relocating to the Olympia area and starts work in December. The regularly paid reporting staff will remain based in the Philippines.

Press Forward’s reaction, in an interview with me, is that “JOLT has shown that they have learned how to do local news” even though none of the regularly paid reporters report in person from the community. Press Forward says it is “trying to show the range of ways people operate,” and that JOLT is “being creative.” They said they are “not endorsing” the offshoring model—although they are funding it, and that “we are really proud of our grant recipients.” Press Forward points out that JOLT is an Institute for Nonprofit News member, and has won an INN award for visual journalism (although not for the work of those based in the Philippines). Press Forward says that it knows of no other grant recipients who employ “local” reporters based outside the US.

JOLT itself points out that it, and many of its readers, consider its work of high quality. They freely acknowledge that they hired local reporters based in the Philippines because it costs one quarter of what it would to employ reporters locally. Its publisher, based in the local community, says he collaborates on about one story per week, and that the site also has eight local volunteer or minimally paid news contributors.

Even at this distance, it’s hard to get Washington State and the Philippines in the same frame

In a piece published last year, the publisher wrote, “Some have suggested that non-local reporters can't possibly understand how things work around here well enough to write accurate news stories. Our discovery: They certainly can, and do!” I can’t dispute that narrow point, but I do think something critical is lost when “local” reporters are based so far from the locale they cover that they can never physically be there. I’m very surprised that Press Forward would support such an offshoring model as even part of the future it envisions for local news in this country.

Looking hard at the process

Beyond the specifics about the Argus and JOLT, the closer you look at the Press Forward grant process, the less you should be surprised at the issues that have arisen. For this column, I talked to or emailed with eight grant reviewers, studied what’s been posted publicly, and posed questions to Press Forward staff. Here are some noteworthy findings:

• Three outside reviewers (out of the 113 reviewers involved)  looked at each of the 931 applications. That means that the average reviewer looked at 25 applications. The fee was $1000 (raised from an initial $500), so each reviewer was being paid an average of $40 for each application they reviewed. For this fee, they also attended at least one training session, and were offered another on DEI. With these low fees for a significant time commitment, it could hardly be a surprise that, while reviewers were told they could look beyond the applications themselves, at least some did not take the time to do so. One reviewer told me they considered the process, “a McDonald’s production line exercise.” Another said, “the tone of [the training] was don't worry about doing deep dives outside of the application materials.” At the same time, a third noted that, “it was hard to get a sense of places if you only looked at the application questions.”

• Another reviewer told me they assumed Press Forward staff had done an initial vetting of each applicant for possible worthiness. That is not how the process worked; in fact, Press Forward staff did their own work later, in narrowing the field from the 400 applications (again, out of 931) most highly rated by reviewers to the final 205 awardees. By Press Forward’s own description, this process focused on balance and equity, including representation from every state, Puerto Rico and Guam; robust representation of BIPOC-led newsrooms (40% of grantees) and those from rural areas (25%); and regional balance across the country. Staff may have mistakenly thus made the same assumption of basic worthiness. Even beyond this, the fact that reviewers could see the scores of other reviewers before responding themselves may, as one of my correspondents noted, have caused some evaluators to rely on the conclusions of others. Press Forward told me, “We are confident in the process we designed, that it was fair to applicants and helped Press Forward choose the right newsrooms. We intentionally designed the open call and the process with an expectation that not all of our grantees might look like traditional newsrooms.”

• Multiple reviewers noted that the quality of journalism seemed a low priority in the review process. Each reviewer was required to rate each applicant on a 20-point scale on five dimensions: diversity of audience; community listening; partnerships; sustainability and leadership vision. No doubt these are all important aspects of running a news organization, but so is the quality of output, and it was not even formally a rated factor. The closest the guidelines come is this: “Without the organization, the audience would not have consistent or reliable local news." One reviewer told me, “the core tenets of journalism (e.g., reporting) weren’t part of the judging criteria. It seemed like a very deliberate decision.” Another said the process “didn’t seem to focus on journalism at all.” Press Forward’s leader told me, “often community journalists aren’t operating in the same realities as big city newsrooms. We expect all of our grantees to offer original reporting and to abide by journalism ethics and standards of quality. But there’s nuance in each community context. Unfortunately, most are operating in a place of scarcity at the moment.”

• The choice of reviewers seemed to reflect similar priorities. At least a few reviewers have never worked in a newsroom. Of the eight Press Forward staff who narrowed the final choices from 400 to the 205 awardees, three have never worked in a newsroom; one had a newsroom internship many years ago and another worked for two and half years on the business side of a local nonprofit. Press Forward says that each of the 400 semi-finalist applications were seen by at least two of their own staff. So some applications may never have been reviewed by anyone with actual newsroom experience. Press Forward says, “We also committed to a rigorous evaluation process, where at least five people - experts in journalism and philanthropy - reviewed each newsroom before they were selected to receive funds. We are incredibly proud of these small newsrooms that received funding and that are working hard to bring essential news to their communities.”

Correction: This column originally said that the JOLT reporters in the Philippines were all full-time; five of the six are part-time. The post also referred to the editor listed first on the masthead as the “top editor;” that editor (who is in the Philippines) is full-time, but the publisher now tells me that he is also the “top editor,” and that all stories are edited either by himself or the other (part-time) editor based locally.