The Knight Foundation formally announced $2.26 million in matching grant awards for the Knight Community Information Challenge in San Francisco last week.
Nineteen grants were awarded for a variety of online news sites, including a $104,000 community challenge grant for VTDigger.org. The award, which will be spread out over three years, is supported locally by the Vermont Community Foundation, and will be used primarily to hire an investigative reporter to cover Vermont’s energy and health reform issues. Both of these evolving issues have the potential to become national stories.
“If you care about what’s going on in local government, the local environment or any local issues,” said Trabian Shorters, Knight Foundation’s vice president for communities, “you need to know about it to make a difference. These community and place-based foundations are stepping up to make sure that their communities get good information.”
VTDigger.org was also mentioned in several stories posted on Poynter.org, the Poynter Institute blog. Each article made the broader point that when it comes to local crisis management, there’s nothing quite like a local initiative.
The crisis that VTDigger.org and other news Web sites around the country are attempting to address are the widening gaps in news coverage left by the upheaval of the media landscape—fewer newspapers and reporters, less investigative reporting, less public accountability.
VTDigger.org, and its publisher, the nonprofit Vermont Journalism Trust, represent one of many such grassroots efforts nationally that are designed to help fill those news gaps with Web-based journalism.
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Bill Schubart, president of the Vermont Journalism Trust, gave the keynote address for the Online News Association entrepreneurship workshop. He explained how the Trust board is working to make VTDigger.org a sustainable in-depth news resource for Vermont. Watch the video from Schubart’s talk.
Poynter’s reporter Mark Briggs mentioned VTDigger.org as one of many journalism models that were highlighted in the ONA entrepreneurship program. “The best sign that entrepreneurial journalism endeavors are moving in the right direction is that so many of them are heading in different directions,” Briggs wrote.
In a related article, Poynter Associate Editor Mallary Jean Tenore wrote about VTDigger.org in the context of national investigative journalism trends. Tenore pointed to similar web startups in Colorado, Texas, New Jersey and California that are focused on in-depth coverage of public policy issues.
Lastly, a story we wrote about the Shumlin administration’s short-term financial bail outs for storm-ravaged communities was featured on the Reuters web site last week.
Nick Monsarrat is an editor for VTDigger.org.
