Environment Reporting Grants

• Eligibility Criteria:
  – This opportunity is open to U.S. residents and journalists around the world.
  – They are open to proposals from freelance data journalists, staff journalists, or groups of newsrooms working in collaboration with a data project idea.
  – They want to make sure that people from many backgrounds and perspectives are empowered to produce data journalism.
  – They strongly encourage proposals from journalists and newsrooms who represent a broad array of social, racial, ethnic, underrepresented groups, and economic backgrounds.
• Type of funding: Programmatic
• Target countries: Global
• Application language: English

The Pulitzer Center is now accepting applications for a new reporting grant focused on climate change and its effects on workers and work. As the world heats up, what jobs and employment sectors, what factory practices, what sorts of manufacturing–from computer chips to batteries to food production to fast-fashion–are threatened or must change? 

They encourage freelance and staff journalists with ambitious enterprise and strong in-depth reporting ideas to apply for Pulitzer Center support to cover the intersection of labor and climate in their communities. They are particularly interested in reporting from regions in Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America. All types of formats are welcome: print, digital, broadcast TV, radio, and film projects, as well as data and computer-assisted journalism. They encourage vivid, innovative storytelling that can be shared across platforms and in multiple languages.

Aim

• They aim to support teams that reflect the communities they report on. They hope this grant can help their partner organizations advance their diversity, equity, and inclusion goals and commitments.

Guidelines

Make it your own

• Potential applicants often ask them what topics they’re interested in seeing and they always turn the question back to them. They want the ideas to be generated by the journalists because they are passionate about them—not because there might be funding available to report on them.

Go deep

• The only broad parameter they have is that projects address global systemic crises. And by crises they do not mean simply headline-breaking conflicts.
• A crisis can be a conflict. They support reporting that digs beneath the surface to address the root causes of such crises, as well as possible responses to them.

Surprise them

• They’re not just looking for appropriate topics, they’re looking for story ideas that are surprising—that reveal something new, or will help readers see an issue in a different light. Ebola is an appropriate reporting topic; a profile of a prominent doctor working in the midst of an Ebola outbreak is a story idea; a story about one or more Ebola doctors who have surprising insights on how best to battle the epidemic is a better idea.

Think beyond one story

• They encourage applicants to work across multiple platforms. Sometimes this means creating partnerships with others—writers working together with photographers or videographers or newsrooms joining forces to tackle a complex story, for instance—to maximize impact.

See here to learn more and apply.

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