At the OPC annual meeting on August 22, Executive Director Sonya Fry announced that the Ford Foundation has given the OPC a two-year grant of $150,000, with $100,000 to be used to help OPC expand its horizons by working with press clubs and media organizations to discuss freedom of the press and safety issues. The grant will enable the OPC to make a bigger impact on a broader audience about the journalism challenges of the day, Fry said.
The remaining $50,000 is slated for Global Parachute, the OPC website that connects journalists around the globe through an exchange of on-the-ground insight and information. Previous Ford funding was instrumental in launching Global Parachute and the new grant assures its continued growth.
The Ford Foundation has been generous to journalism through an initiative to experiment with “approaches to preserve and advance high-quality journalism.” In May, the Los Angeles Times received the foundation’s first grant to a for-profit newspaper: the paper is using its two-year, $1.04-million grant to hire five beat reporters to cover prisons, immigrant communities, the area along the Mexican border and Brazil.
In July, The Washington Post was given a one-year $500,000 grant to strengthen reporting on government accountability. Both grants are renewable. The grants fall under a Ford initiative that will be giving out $10 million a year, mostly to public media, but a spokesman said other for-profit news outlets may receive awards.