Articles

Jonathan Heawood, Executive Director of the Public Interest News Foundation, explains how the organisation is tackling the current crisis in public interest journalism and its focus on regenerating local news in the UK. He outlines their three pillars, shares insights into how they support news media, and reflects on the balance between vision and reality in supporting journalism.

Why was it important to establish the Public Interest News Foundation? What is your mission?

 It was important to establish the foundation back in 2019-2020, for the simple reason that there was a crisis in public interest journalism. In the UK, there had been a government-backed review of public interest journalism, which simply said there is a huge market failure, applied both at national and local levels, and in relation to investigative journalism. We established the foundation to address that whole crisis in all its forms.

But the mission has evolved over the five years. Now we are much more tightly focused on the crisis in local news, because we feel like that’s where the crisis is sharpest, and also there are the most exciting opportunities to build something new. Our mission is now to regenerate local news in the UK and we have set ourselves a deadline: we want to do that by 2035.

How do you define “public interest news”? Who is eligible for your support?

 We actually have a definition in our constitution. It really boils down to ethical, accurate, impartial news that informs and empowers people on matters that are relevant to us as citizens or as members of our community. That is the broad definition.

The one part of this which is sometimes controversial is where we stay impartial. Certainly in the UK there is a tradition of quite vigorous partisan journalism, some of which I think is undeniably in the public interest. But for our purposes as a charity, we had to narrow the definition slightly so we can only legally support outlets which are impartial.

And now, do you focus only on local media?

In practice. That’s a shift and we have been around for five years doing a range of activities, and we have a little bit of carryover, so some of our activities still apply to non-local media, but the vast majority is now local in practice.

In what forms do you support journalism?

 The simplest element is the financial, but actually it is a quite small part of what we do. We are technically an intermediary foundation, so we do not have an endowment or a living donor providing us with unrestricted funding. We have to fundraise in order to fund. So, what we can then do with the money depends a little bit on the motivation of the people funding us.

In the UK there is only a small number of funders who have given us money. In order for us to make grants directly to news organisations, we are still working at that. It is growing, and we are aiming to build a much more significant, multimillion pound fund to invest in capacity building for local journalism.

That’s still the dream. But in practice, quite a large part of what we do is not financial. It is more about advocacy. We work to try to change the law or with big stakeholders like the BBC or Google, Facebook, et cetera, to try to create a more enabling environment for public interest, local journalism. That’s working with news providers to understand their needs and challenges and aims, but it is not directly providing them with money. It is trying to use other tools at our disposal to create an environment in which they can thrive.

Then we also have our Local News Futures programme, which is more about bringing local news providers and other people together to really imagine what the future might look like and to celebrate innovation, to explore completely different ways of doing journalism, to think about in-person journalism and live journalism: anything which seems to put the needs of the local community first and foremost. So essentially, we have three pillars of activity. One is financial support, one is advocacy, and one is what we call futures, which is mainly about convening, networking, and imagining.

When it comes to financial support, what do you fund? Can organisations come to you directly for grants, or do you have calls?

Again, it varies, because in each case it depends on our relationship with whoever is providing us with the funding. One example is that we now run an annual programme, the Tenacious Journalist Award, where there is an open call every year and we invite news providers to come to us with a vision for a really impactful piece of journalism that they otherwise can’t afford to produce. We select up to 10 people to win the financial award. That’s very tight project funding that we then give them, and we work quite closely with them to provide non-financial support, to keep them focused on how to achieve the greatest impact.

But we also have a very different type of support where we can act as a fiscal host or a fiscal sponsor to a news provider. In this case, we can provide much more unrestricted operating support. We play a much more hands-off role. We have taken an administration fee like any other fiscal host and then let the news organisation do what they want to do. So we can really operate in very different ways, depending on the relationship.

What is the most important lesson you have learned from supporting journalism?

 I think it’s the constant negotiation between the ideal and the real, between what you want to do and what’s actually possible right now. That applies in so many different ways. We can go to conferences, and we are inspired by amazing visions of the future of journalism. People want to turn journalism on its head and do it in new, amazing ways. We come away thinking that this is fantastic. And then we meet some actual journalists, who are actually doing it day by day, and they do not have time or head space to think about these big, amazing new visions.

It is not how they were trained or how they have worked, if they have been in the industry for 10, 20, or 30 years or more. So you have to negotiate. You don’t want go to them and say, throw out everything you know, and explore this new, innovative, exciting model of journalism. You need to work with them where they are now and just try to create capacity for them to start to lift their heads up and look around, be inspired, and think about what’s possible.

But it is the same with the funders. As I said, we are an intermediary. We have relationships on one side with newsrooms, on the other side with funders. In the UK, very few funders have ever funded journalism. It is still a very small and very new field. We think that any funder who cares about democracy, community justice, the environment should fund journalism as part of their portfolios. We think they should be funding it with large, unrestricted capacity building grants. We absolutely believe that is the right thing for them to do, but they are not there yet. So we have to work with them slowly.

If they are curious but would rather work with a small project-based initiative, then we will do that to try to build trust and familiarity, and then over time we try to move towards something bigger and bolder. This is the constant negotiation between what we want to do, what we think is ideal, and what is actually possible in the real world.

What were the main challenges you have had to face so far?

Fundraising. For us as an intermediary foundation, simply the fact that journalism is a new, embryonic field in the UK. Intermediary foundations sit in a strange place in the ecosystem, in some ways a really wonderful place. We get the best of both worlds, but sometimes it can also be slightly awkward. Are we a funder or aren’t we? Are we in the room with other funders sharing our experience as a funder or are we in the room as a fundraiser, in which case the funders feel more cautious about being open with us?

Again, just navigating some of those tensions and trying to build the trust that we are here primarily to support funders, to support journalism, and that we think we can add value to that. But it takes time to change a culture.

How do you assess the success of your programmes? Can you share a particular success story?

We don’t have a single overarching impact framework. We would like to manage a multimillion-pound capacity building fund, and then we would have much clearer success measures. But at present, because we work in so many different ways, it does not feel right to try to create a unified theory of change.

But, as an example, there is the Tenacious Journalist Award, where we have given ten grants to ten different newsrooms to pursue ten different investigations. It has led to some really great journalism. I was talking to one of the journalists the other day who has been investigating the use of synthetic opioids in East London, where a particularly toxic type of synthetic opioid has hit the streets. It seems from her investigation that it has led to a very large number of deaths. But also, as a result of her investigation – and because she was talking to the local authority, local charities, and the local medical providers – there is an increase in the availability of the antidote, which could actually save people’s lives. The antidote was not widely available because the problem was not well known. This has changed. So I genuinely think that the journalist saved lives. It is an amazing impact.

Do you have any special advice for organisations that have not funded or supported journalism yet, but are thinking about doing so?

 The advice is really simple. It is the advice you would give to funders in any context: Go and find an organisation that you really like, that you think is well led, that has a good, clear vision and is making a difference, and give them as much money as you can afford with as much freedom as you can allow, and sit back and see what happens. I guarantee that it will at least be interesting.