Science Misinformation: Truth Decay Grant Initiative

• Eligibility Criteria:
  – This opportunity is open to U.S. residents and journalists around the world.
  – Grants are open to all journalists: writers, photographers, radio producers, and filmmakers; staff journalists as well as freelancers.
  – They want to make sure that people from many backgrounds and perspectives are empowered to produce journalism.
  – They strongly encourage proposals from journalists and newsrooms who represent a broad array of social, racial, ethnic, underrepresented groups, and economic backgrounds.
  – They support veteran reporters who have been widely published, but also back younger applicants who are looking for help to jumpstart their careers. A diversity of voices— gender, ethnicities, backgrounds and nationalities—is important to them.
  – They also encourage potential grantees to bring them proposals with their most creative and innovative solutions for reaching new audiences with small, targeted packages of their reporting on a variety of platforms such as Instagram or TikTok, or anywhere your audience exists.
• Type of funding: Programmatic
• Target countries: Global
• Application language: English

The Pulitzer Center is seeking applications for in-depth and investigative stories that tackle science denial and the spread of science misinformation and disinformation for its new Truth Decay grant initiative.

This opportunity is open to all newsroom staff and independent journalists in the United States and abroad.

The goal of this new initiative is two-fold: 

• To expose the purveyors and platforms that spread science misinformation and disinformation with accountability journalism;
• To support newsrooms and journalists to develop their own innovative responses to the spread of mistruths in their communities or countries.

They are eager to receive proposals that explore

• How and why scientific misinformation and pseudoscience spreads and the role journalists play in exposing and countering it;
• The challenges of reporting on science with non-stop news cycles, science disinformation campaigns, and increasingly fragmented and siloed audiences;
• Who is creating the science misinformation and who is benefiting from its creation, and what forces or organizations are enabling the flows of anti-science “studies” and misinformation to circulate;
• Unique and different perspectives on pseudoscience and misinformation in mass media and society;

Funding Information

• They do not have a budget range. They will consider projects of any scope and size and are open to supporting multiple projects each year.

See here to learn more and apply.

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