March 26, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
In her foundation’s most recent newsletter, Susan King of the Carnegie Corporation has done something that foundation employees rarely do: share information about a grant that failed.
Ms. King, vice president of external affairs who leads the foundation’s support of journalism programs, discusses a $354,000 grant made in 2000 to the American Communications Foundation, a nonprofit news organization. The grant was designed to expand news-media coverage of the foundation’s grantees who seek to improve education and promote democracy.
“I must admit that an honest analysis of my first grant leads me to conclude that I was naive in making it, sensitive as a former broadcast journalist to news media needs more than issue impact,” she writes, “and unsuccessful in really improving the coverage of nonprofit organizations and priorities that were the twin goals of the grant.”
Writing on his blog Tactical Philanthropy, Sean Stannard-Stockton says that Ms. King and Carnegie are doing a service for the nonprofit world by sharing information about the failed grant. And he says that sharing that kind of information is even more valuable than the organization’s financial investments.
“Carnegie gives roughly $120-million a year,” he writes. “But their knowledge, if effectively and broadly distributed, has the power to influence the $300-billion given to charity each year.”
Mr. Stannard-Stockton, who writes a column for The Chronicle, says: “Let’s make this behavior status quo.”
Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, says on his blog
that Ms. King’s discussion sheds light on how foundations and journalism operations can work together.
Mr. Benton writes that the piece shows that “the demands of free-market journalism don’t always align with the interests of foundations.” Carnegie wanted stories on public education and problems with the ampaign-finance system. The grant maker got them, writes Mr. Benton, but they were too “thin” and “cute” to meet the foundation’s objectives.
He also says that foundations and journalists measure success in different ways. Journalists frequently define success in terms of how many people read or listen to a story, where foundations expect tangible results: fired officials, new laws, shifts in policy. Mr. Benton says that shift in focus could be a good thing for investigative journalism.
What do you think? How important are efforts like that of Ms. King to publicize and analyze failed grants? And what lessons are there for how foundations and journalists can work together?
