Thank You for Submitting Your Ideas

Thank you to all of those who submitted a letter of inquiry (LOI) this May. We received many stellar, forward-thinking projects. Some of the exciting trends that we’ve seen this year include:

•    Investigative projects around topics such as racial profiling, clean energy and carbon cap trading;
•   Organizing innovation camps in various cities, bringing together journalists, IT experts and community-based groups;
•    Photographic initiatives to document ways in which America is changing;
•    Creation of databases to help reporters in various fields, and cross-outlet coverage of issues such as homelessness;
•    Creation of phone applications to help reporters cover various issues, as well as initiatives harness mobile phones for citizen reporters;
•    Fellowships for reporters to help improve their coverage of environmental issues, how families are changing, and other issues;
•    Various initiatives to help feed young people’s curiosity around world issues;
•    Initiatives to help everyday people – as well as ‘news junkies’ – to rate the news they read online;
•    After-school programs encouraging young people to write about the world of sports;
•    Awards contest to stimulate IT programmers to create Apps to further a city’s efforts at transparency;
•    Surveys to determine in what ways reporters of all stripes – mainstream, ethnic media, weekly, writers and photographers alike – are prevented from accessing information, data and people they need to carry out their work  

With our new guidelines, we’ll be able to move forward on some. Others – despite how outstanding they are and how much we’ve learned from their sheer creativity – we won’t be able to partner around at this time. We encourage everyone to continue innovating in the name of journalism.

To learn more about our grantmaking process click here.