An organization that works with GlobalPost, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting also focuses on international reporting and “under-reported topics,” according to its Web site — http://www.pulitzercenter.org/ (Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, n.d.).
It was established in 2006, and has been described as a leading proponent of the journalist as entrepreneur (Westphal, 2009). What that means, in part, is that being a grantee of the Pulitzer Center doesn’t mean you’re in the money; the center only covers travel expenses for its reporters. On the other hand, it works with its reporters to find quality outlets for their work and put the spotlight on their reporting. It solicits international reporting projects that cover under-reported issues and tell the stories through the use of multiple platforms.
Associate Director Nathalie Applewhite said that the center receives about 20 proposals per month, a number that has remained fairly steady since the organization’s launch (N. Applewhite, personal communication, October 20, 2009). What has changed, though, is the quality of the proposals.
I think when we started out we just weren’t on people’s radars much, and also experienced journalists had opportunities and they could still get their stories funded, whereas the younger freelancers couldn’t so they needed our help more so than the Pulitzer Prize winners. But I think since we started the organization we’ve certainly seen an increase in very high quality proposals from journalists who you would think people would be throwing money at to do their stories, and so that is making it harder for the younger journalists. (N. Applewhite, personal communication, October 20, 2009)
For 2009, the center expects to fund a total of 51 projects, Applewhite said, a number that is determined strictly by the amount of funding available. Qualities the center looks for in proposals include compelling stories; smart, tight budgets; a strong track record in the field for the journalist(s) included; and a solid distribution plan for the end product with demonstrable interest from editors or producers at U.S. media outlets. The Web site also stipulates that the target media outlets be “wide-reaching,” meaning they have audiences of 50,000 or more. Having an education outreach component to the proposal also could help its chances.
Most accepted proposals earn funding of $2,000 to $10,000, according to the center’s Web site, but funding could go as high as $20,000 for a project depending on its needs. Reporting supported by the center has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, The Christian Science Monitor, GlobalPost, NPR, PBS and Smithsonian Magazine.
Applewhite said that although there have been instances where it was a struggle to get a strong story placed, the center finds many media outlets are eager for the content produced by Pulitzer Center journalists. “I think a lot of the outlets just because of their own financial constraints are really happy to have something that’s been vetted, that this isn’t just some random person or a think tank sending them stories that they want,” she said.
Young journalists with little experience might not prove too competitive in seeking project funding from the center, but they might get a leg up through the center’s Campus Consortium program. Through that initiative, the center works with a consortium of universities, which provide $10,000 each to fund the program. The center, in turn, provides two campus visits per year by Pulitzer Center journalists, funds up to $2,000 for one student’s reporting project at each of the participating universities, and offers the student support and mentoring from the Pulitzer Center staff.
The center is an independent division of the think tank the World Security Institute, with a separate funding stream provided by primary donors Emily Rauh Pulitzer, the Emily Rauh Pulitzer Foundation, David Moore, and the David and Katherine Moore Family Foundation. It also has received funding from the MAC AIDS Fund for a series of HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean; from the Stanley Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York for work on fragile states and states at risk; and from the Educational Foundation of America and the McCormick Foundation for the center’s educational activities.
Those educational activities include its Global Gateway, an online offering for teachers and students that uses center-supported reporting projects as part of issue-based lesson plans for classrooms, bringing journalists to classrooms to discuss their experiences, and facilitating online question-and-answer sessions on the issue, and in some cases linking students in the United States with students in the country where the reporting originated.
“We realized it wasn’t enough to be funding the reporting itself and that the bigger problem here, to break it into economic terms, was both supply and demand,” Applewhite said of the origins of Global Gateway. “If we wanted to see more quality reporting in the world in the years ahead we had to make sure that our youth were growing up with a curiosity about the rest of the world.” Many of the center’s reporting projects lend themselves to classrooms particularly because most have at least some short video component that works well as an introduction to the topic.
That video component is part of the center’s preference for multimedia reporting projects that combine print, photography, video and audio elements. The center encourages journalists to work in teams on the projects in order to achieve a quality product in each medium, Applewhite said.
The Center also partners with YouTube, with funding from Sony VAIO and Intel, to offer an annual video reporting contest, Project: Report. The contest is designed for nonprofessional journalists who produce reports of five minutes or less that “tell stories that might not otherwise be told,” according to the contest Web site, http://www.youtube.com/user/projectreport. The site also offers tips on video reporting.
Works Cited
Westphal, D. (2009, May). Foreign reporting, the entrepreneurial and multimedia way. Online Journalism Review. Retrieved from http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/davidwestphal/200905/1724/
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