The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana) and The Advocate (Baton Rouge) will receive a $1 million gift from the Ford Foundation, one of the nation's largest philanthropic funds, to double the size of the newspapers' investigative team and expand the geographic reach of the papers' reporting.
The three-year grant will be made to the Greater New Orleans Foundation for its Louisiana Investigative Journalism Fund, developed in partnership with the news organization. It is the largest donation made to date toward the effort, unveiled in December 2020.
Contributions from individual donors and foundations have already produced the first hire: longtime city politics reporter Jeff Adelson will move into a new role as a data journalist for the team. The Ford Foundation grant will allow the newspaper to quickly hire two additional reporters and a deputy editor.
To date, the newspaper has raised nearly $1.4 million of its $1.5 million goal, estimated to cover the cost of the new positions for three years.
The unit is headed by Gordon Russell, managing editor for investigations.
"I'm beyond thrilled the Ford Foundation saw fit to help us grow our investigative team," Russell said. "I'm confident this generous gift will allow us to report and write stories that will shine a light on the problems that plague Louisiana — and maybe even help us solve some of them."
The unrestricted gift is part of a recent commitment by the Ford Foundation to contribute an additional $75 million to nonprofit and advocacy institutions across the Deep South in an effort advance justice at a moment of historic opportunity.
The effort includes supporting the work of media organizations that are committed to exploring issues of justice, fairness and racial equity, among other social goods.
In 2019, The Times-Picayune and The Advocate won a Pulitzer Prize in local reporting for "Tilting the Scales," a series that analyzed Louisiana’s unusual law allowing nonunanimous jury verdicts in felony cases. The painstaking investigation, which required reporters to hand-assemble a database of trials from courthouses around the state, found that the law was forged in racism and continued to exert racist effects on Black Louisianans into the 21st century. It prompted Louisiana voters to change the state constitution and in April 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court, citing the newspaper's work, declared nonunanimous juries unconstitutional.
Ford Foundation President Darren Walker, who was born in a charity hospital in Lafayette and raised in East Texas, and said growing up in the South taught him "how to make sense of America’s — and humanity’s — most profound contradictions."
"Indeed, I inherited these contradictions and ironies as my own birthright. My hometown, Ames, was the Black community; the white town down the road was called “Liberty,” he wrote in June essay on the foundation's increased funding to the Deep South. "And yet, I also inherited something beautiful and powerful from the South: a
sense of pride and purpose that comes from a long legacy of raising “good trouble”; from a long history that affirms — inch by inch and acre by acre, ballot by ballot and law by law — we, the people, can narrow the gap between the perniciousness of inequality and the power of our values."
The Times-Picayune and The Advocate are among the many newspapers that have partnered with community foundations to solicit tax-deductible donations from national foundations and civic-minded local donors. The model grew out of the need for legacy news organizations to find ways to maintain their reporting strength in a punishing
business environment.
In preparation for its inaugural campaign, the newspapers applied for and were selected to participate in a six-month fundraising training program sponsored by the Local Media Association and the Google News Initiative.
The number of newsroom employees at American newspapers dropped by 51% between 2008 and 2019, from about 71,000 workers to 35,000, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Those trends did not spare Louisiana.
“Ford’s generous investment in our partnership represents an incredible endorsement of this initiative,” said Andy Kopplin, president and CEO of the Greater New Orleans Foundation. “The doubling of the investigative team at The Times Picayune and The Advocate will serve the people of our region and advance our democracy by dramatically increasing the level of accountability given to public and private institutions in our state.”
Investigative reporting, in particular, requires a sizable commitment of time and money. Reporters and editors can spend months on a single story, tracking down key sources, fighting for public records and synthesizing complex information.
While the news organization is primarily focused on the three metro areas in south Louisiana that it serves — New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Lafayette — it intends to bring its watchdog reporting into other areas of the state where news coverage has diminished.
“Louisiana needs traditional, investigative journalism more than any other state, and we’re so pleased to see that Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation, along with dozens of local supporters, believe in our vision," said editor Peter Kovacs. "Thanks to their confidence, we’re ready to get to work.”
The Ford Foundation announced in June 2020 that it had issued a social bond — the first ever by a foundation on the U.S. taxable corporate bond market — so it could double its grantmaking from approximately $550 million per year to more than $1 billion.
More than $22 million of the social bond funding is being directed specifically to organizations in Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee and more than $14 million will go to organizations in rural areas, where nonprofits have been historically under-resourced despite a rich history of effective organizing.
"We are thrilled to work with the Greater New Orleans Foundation and support The Times-Picayune and The Advocate," said Margaret Morton, director of Creativity and Free Expression at the Ford Foundation. "Journalism is a central pillar to our democracy; it has the power to shape narratives and shed critical light on the issues that matter
the most. We look forward to seeing how they continue to build on their rich traditions of insightful and impactful reporting."
The newspapers' current owners, John and Dathel Georges, purchased The Advocate in Baton Rouge in 2013, in part to start a competing newspaper in New Orleans after The Times-Picayune announced massive layoffs and the end of daily delivery.
The New Orleans Advocate went head-to-head with The Times-Picayune until 2019, when the couple purchased the Picayune and its website, NOLA.com. In Lafayette, the The Acadiana Advocate recently expanded its news staff.
All three newsrooms are led by publisher Judi Terzotis and editor Peter Kovacs.
The Times-Picayune and The Advocate will maintain full editorial control over the stories and other content financed by the Louisiana Investigative Journalism Fund. To learn more, visit investigate.nola.com
