Foundations Move to Fill Reporting Gap Left by Shrinking Newsrooms

As daily newspapers across the country continue to retrench, a growing number of foundations are stepping in to fill what they see as a void in public-interest reporting. One example: the California Endowment, which in recent months awarded grants to two start-up news operations to help keep state residents informed about policies that affect their health.

The foundation started making journalism grants in 2004, when it created a fellowship program at the University of Southern California. But its recent spending has taken a new turn.

“Due to the contraction and consolidation of newsrooms across the country, there is a growing need to support reporting on critical issues that will be overlooked due to lack of newsroom staff,” says Jeff Okey, an endowment spokesman.

The foundation, which supports projects to create healthier environments in 14 California towns, provided a two-year grant of $748,000 to allow a veteran California journalist, Daniel Weintraub, to start a new online publication, HealthyCal.org, in February.

A former public-affairs columnist and political blogger for The Sacramento Bee, Mr. Weintraub had for a long time wanted to do something entrepreneurial—something “Web-based and interactive,” he says.

The foundation money gave him an incentive to leave the Bee, where he says he had a fantastic job, but the “shrinkage and pressures on the newspaper industry were weighing on us all.”

Mr. Weintraub continues to report on activities at the state capitol and now puts his findings into a blog called California Health Watch. He is using the grant money to build up a network of freelance writers and video contributors to gather news from across the state. Visitors to HealthyCal.org will now find articles about San Francisco’s program to provide nearly universal health care, efforts by San Diego tenants to get the city council to regulate mold and vermin infestation, and a rise in homicide rates in Richmond.

Mary Lou Fulton, a former newspaper and digital-media journalist who manages the California Endowment’s communications and media grants, says the foundation wants to promote reporting that looks beyond just health insurance or illness and examines issues like the environment, land use, and housing. Those, she says, are “key factors in determining your health that are related to where you live.”

To get more of that kind of journalism, the endowment has also just awarded a two-year grant of $440,000 to California Watch, an investigative-reporting project that made its debut in January. California Watch was started by the Center for Investigative Reporting with $3.7-million in grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Robert Rosenthal, the center’s executive director, says California Watch will use the endowment’s grant to hire a reporter and a “community liaison manager”—“a combination reporter and social-networking person” who will develop relationships with people who can help dig up stories in their neighborhoods. Reporting will focus on issues like public safety, transportation, and water quality, he says: “Our definition of health is not if somebody has a cough.”

California Watch offers its reports to online, broadcast, and print news media, usually for a fee, and so far more than 50 outlets have carried its articles and broadcast segments.

Mr. Rosenthal, a longtime journalist whose previous jobs include executive editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, says he was drawn to the Center for Investigative Reporting in 2008 because he was “frustrated by the collapse of the business model for media.”

In one sense, that collapse has helped California Watch, however: When it advertised 11 jobs in the first round of hiring last summer, it drew 700 applications.