 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the ninth episode of Inform and Engage. My name is Paul Chan. I'm the director of journalism and technology innovation at the Knight Foundation. Today, we're going to talk about investment in journalism entrepreneurship. And we're going to have a great conversation with Farai Shandeyer. She is with the Ford Foundation focusing on journalism. And before joining the Ford Foundation, Farai was a reporter, political and cultural analyst. For many news outlets, including Newsweek, CNN, ABC News, NPR and the Intercept. Also joining us, we have Yvonne Lau. Yvonne wears multiple hats. Right now, she's the columnist for the Reynolds Journalism Institute out in University of Missouri. She's also a startup CEO for Bewilder, an outdoor startup that plans personalized outdoor adventure with no fuss. And prior to that, she was the Snapchat editor at Vox, video editor at Digital First and the AP, and also the former president for the Asian American Journalist Association. Thank you, Yvonne and Farai for joining us. Thanks, Paul. So why don't you just get right into it. Farai, recently the Ford Foundation have worked on a landscape analysis called Reconstructing American Media. The report takes on the question of how we as a nation need to innovate in service of media equity. What were some of your top findings? Well, the number one thing and I want to give credit where credit is due to Katie Donnelly and Jessica Clark of Dot Connector Studio for doing the main report and also to a team at Transform Finance for doing the report on investing. Basically, we wanted to ask if news is not equitable, which it isn't, in terms of who it reaches, who gets funded, who can run an organization, who gets promoted. What are the people processes and systems that change things. And so innovation has often been framed as technology or financial efficiency. And those are very important. But we are really getting to these core mission questions of how do we have inclusive news that doesn't get us into these cultural and political blind spots. Whether it was in the era of the Kerner Commission or the the era today, you know, news is supposed to be informative and to a certain degree transformative, transformative of our ability to live in a just society, a democracy, a place where you can earn a living equitably, a place that is not kleptocratic oligarchic authoritarian. You know, I think these are questions of journalism acting to give people choices about how they act in their own lives around the economy and around democracy and around civil society. So I think that we're part of a whole food chain. And this report is basically saying if you want to be an informed citizen, who can earn a living and be compensated fairly, what kind of news do you need and what kind of systems produce it. And the timing of this report sort of like why now Because the wheels are falling off the bus, or as I like to put it, I think of America as having been in a train crash and derailment where people who are lower income or undocumented immigrants or various other groups kind of hit a collision point many years ago and saw different failures of American society in terms of, you know, justice, you know, criminal justice as well as property justice in terms of, you know, who gets to earn, you know, legal rights and civil rights, all that and then people in the sort of middle tier working class Americans, lower middle class Americans already had their moment of impact and now even the wealthy, you know, it's like I have a friend who has a private plane, and she was hoping to go to Croatia, and she can't go to Croatia because our country failed the pandemic. And that's an example of failed public policy that impacts lower income and middle income people first now having a ripple effect the kids of the wealthy can't the world where the news has often been has often been normative to the needs of upper middle class Americans but has missed stories that now are having a ripple effect. And even so you also recently wrote a column for RJI on sort of the sustainability of local journalism and you also work on report for for night trying to answer the question, what are the greatest challenges in the US journalism startup ecosystem. What were some of your findings, as you talked to many of these, not just founders but also technologists and feces. Yeah, I mean talking about timing. The reason this report for the night foundation in particular was even kicked off was actually a reflection on just the lack of accelerated programs we were evaluating what the absence of matter. You know, are there gaps in the ecosystem that happened about three months prior to coven hitting, and then once it kind of hit the severity as far as talking about the wheels that fallen off the bus, started to become even more poignant. So some of the key takeaways that I've found in talking to program managers of accelerators media founders as well as funders like the night foundation is that journalism really needs to be able to redefine its purpose and metrics for success. I think that's one of them. The BBC News Labs David Caswell who's the executive product manager there really wrote this very eloquently which is, there's a difference between ordinary innovation and existential innovation journalism as an industry has heavily invested in ordinary innovation. Everything from podcasts to Snapchat to now tick tock I'm sure as a lot of media companies are trying to experiment on different channels, but we haven't really thought about what existential innovation means. And this has been an issue for the industry since the advent of the internet. What is essential innovation. Exactly. So what does it mean to live in a universe where content and information is infinite and immediate from almost everywhere. What does it mean for a journalist to operate in a society when everyone can tell their own version of the truth. So I don't know if the enough advances have been made on this front that was one key insight another key insight for our from our report was that there's an opportunity for funders to strengthen the news ecosystem in terms of being able to centralize a lot of the knowledge, the networks and capital to support founders across along their startup journey that doesn't currently exist. So, you know, for both of you, given the crisis and local journalism right now, is this even the right time for philanthropy or others to invest in journalism entrepreneurship. Right. Why are we not fortifying the existing players or even people who have that proven track record so why, why should we invest in something that's new that might not be proven. I kind of want to tee up to Yvonne, you know, I feel like in your report Yvonne you really talked about the ability for foundations to take risk, and that to me, you know, I would love to see and this is just me, my bosses are not on board yet one day. Yeah. Yeah, I'd love to see where you impact investing and mission related investing in media, but that requires a level of acceptance of failure. And I thought that, you know, one of the things you talked about a bit Yvonne was that we expect everything to pay off which means that we're not taking much risk. And I just wonder how you think about risk. Yeah, I mean to pause question, absolutely. I think now is the time for journalism philanthropists to double down on journalism, but I think what for I is speaking to in terms of what we found in the report is that there is no ecosystem that exists that would actually help to minimize and de risk some of these investments. Now I compare a lot of what I found in journalism to the tech industry. And that comes with its own set of pros and cons which I'm happy to discuss. But what I've seen in the tech industry is a very mature ecosystem. And what does that mean. So we have a group of founders a whole industry of founders that have, you know, understood the power of technology knows how it works, leveraging it from AI to cryptocurrency, they're experimenting with how technology can disrupt a lot of other legacy industries that pipeline of founders translates into accelerators incubators that they enter the YCs of the world the tech stars of the world, joining a community and almost an army of founders to support one another. And now there's like all different types of accelerator programs that exist now. Those accelerators are well connected also to investors, seed staged investors pre seed investors angel investors. Those investors also talk to one another. Those investors are keenly aware of like what the deal flow looks like for them. And those investors will find companies from that pre seed round to that seed round to that a round to that B round to that C round, creating a path for these startups to ultimately exit. And that exit is their definition of success. And we can talk about. Yeah, we can talk about whether or not that that's the best model but I think that's what's lacking in the journalism industry. And so to fry's point of like how do we handle risk. It shouldn't just come down to one foundation, creating that entire ecosystem, all these organizations all these funders really need to start talking to each other. So founders can take you and realize that there is a path for startups to follow in the news ecosystem. But right now there's a lot of these baby grants, which I'll call just like these initial seed grants that are being invested into these like startups into these local news players. But there's no path that's being laid out for them. Farai, do you agree? I feel like as funders we talk to each other constantly. Right. And so to sort of put in contrast of Yvonne's point, do you, you know, do you agree with her assessment that that we are not, you know, where the feasty will have this very linear path that in journalism philanthropy we don't. Yeah, I mean, but I would also say they're very different in terms of ethics and goals. I think that's something that's been coming up in the, you know, comment section a lot is that a lot of the traditional journals and players have not been playing for media equity. You know, that's something when I came into forward I've had to really assess the portfolio. And if you have a 20 person all white board, I have to ask you some questions about why you have the 20 person all white board. And I've had years of uncomfortable conversations and I think now that we have seen layers of uprising and civil unrest, economic distress, massive unemployment failure of public health systems. I understand that we were missing important clues about society. And that is the point of media equity is to tell the whole story of America like, you know, that's survival to me. And so I think that the question that keeps coming up in many different circles is what is innovation because again, when the Ford sponsored reports talk about innovation. Innovation in funding pipelines but also just innovation in people processes power structures. There's been a lot of anti collaborative. And in some ways anti competitive spirit in journalism where people just try to sort of big foot and win awards and I just think I'm all for winning awards but also like winning journalism requires it's going to require more collaboration between national outlets and regional outlets, more collaboration between. I mean I think that if you look at Wendy Thomas of MLK 50 collaborating with Pro Publica that was a very successful collaboration. She brought deep reporting expertise about Memphis about socio economics, and also, you know, an in depth understanding that journalism can be directly transformative to people's lives so in her case getting medical debt discharged as a result of essentially medical finance malpractice like I don't believe journalism has to be theoretical I mean, sometimes it's very theoretical and sometimes it's very practical like who's been stealing money from you, you know. And so I do, you know, I'm not looking at, you know, all old players are all new players I'm like what are you actually doing in a time where so many people are hurting. And we need different types of deal flow. Anyway, so this interesting when we talk about deal flow right like so what are the different types right I mean even and again just you know it's challenging you is with all the flaws of sort of like the feasty tech model. Why do you think journalism should follow that. Yeah, I don't think to follow tech. I think the way that tech has defined success is very clear but it's also based on financial expectations which is an IPO or a huge acquisition. And I do to for eyes point I think some of the role that roles that journalism sees itself playing in society is dealing with a lot of the social issues and ensuring that we have a fair and equitable society and that just fundamentally is different and maybe tech should follow journalism in that pursuit but I do think what we can learn from tech is that they have a very clear definition of success. Whatever that means for us, we have the opportunity to find, but the fact that we don't have that means that there's no clear path that can be created towards that endpoint. What we know now is when I hear about journalism and why we should support it is often to preserve democracy is to preserve the freedom of speech. And to ensure that there are free press exists in a democracy but what does that mean. Everyone might have like a shared understanding of that but if we drill down maybe two layers down. We all will have different definitions of what would preserve or support a thriving democracy and I think that is the fundamental challenge is that journalism has a very virtuous and, you know, important mission, but we can't get any more concrete than that and I think when we actually start translating that into how a nonprofit should operate or how a for profit company should operate. It really gets lost in translation and I think everything else follows suit. You, for right, you know, again, like collectively between night for democracy fund, you know, gates like Google Facebook, we have seen it like hundreds of, you know, journalism, you know, startups, do you think they, you know, and you want to as you talk to a lot of these founders, do they have a different interpretation than we do, in terms of what we see as vision of success. Like, do you do are they sort of like, do you really like that. You know how we see the mission alignment is so different than where they see it. I'll just say this, I don't think that our grantees at Ford have a common definition of success. And that to me is fine. It's like, we have a strategy, which is around media equity and social justice storytelling and storytelling communities and ensuring that generally underrepresented groups ranging from rural white Americans to indigenous Americans people of color, people with disabilities are both participating in and served by the news media. And I don't know that everyone's, you know, definition of success has to be the same as long as we have a shared goal and an overlap with our strategic plan. You know, I would like us to fund judiciously fund more for profits, because I believe that building equity allows founders to then seed other companies. So if we can create more for profit people of color founders who raise capital, we may be able to shift the investment market. That's pretty speculative though and I understand why we're not there yet but I think that definition of success could be, I'm best in category and my category is super small. I am best in category and I grow into a national organization. There's, you know, there's so many different types of success but I look for strategic alignment more than definition of success. Yvonne? With the original question, what founders are defining success as? Yeah, I mean I would agree with Fry that there are all different kinds of success. I think where I feel that there might be some more unity in terms of how the industry is defining success is to actually just create more of an ecosystem. I think what doesn't currently exist, as I mentioned earlier, is that there is no pipeline for these local news. Let's just focus on local news industry. There's no pipeline for local news outlets who are getting issued these grants from the Facebook, the Google, including the Knight foundations of the world. And they're kind of moving in incrementally into these accelerators. I think Facebook has an accelerator. Matter no longer exists. So there's also an opening for accelerators that are hyper news focused. And then what? I don't think they actually see a lot of levels of support. And the only reason why there might need to be a definition of success is for the industry to rally around it and create a system that actually paves some paths and some journeys for other startups and local news outfits to go down. Otherwise, what we will end up seeing is a lot of three to five year old local news organizations last for three to five years. They aren't the ones that are sustained. They aren't the ones that are going to leave a lasting impact and legacy on society. And as the two of you are talking, you know, again, what is it that you're hearing the need off from these entrepreneurs? Like what is it they actually need? Because again, I don't sometimes I hate using words like ecosystem because like what the hell does that actually need? Like what is the ecosystem you're talking about? I feel like in some ways, like we if we're providing money, we also funding some of the resources like, you know, the news revenue hub or with news match with nonprofit, right? We also fund people to go to sort of some of these executive education. Are this not part of this ecosystem? I'm happy to take that. So when I had the conversations with different founders, a lot of them were missing institutional support. So there were founders who are starting companies that kind of supported journalists, but they didn't come from the news industry. And why do I think that's a big gap in the ecosystem, so to speak, is because a lot of people journalism needs new ideas, bolder new ideas. Some of those ideas more likely will come outside from outside of the industry, but we are not creating a pipeline for even those outside of the industry to enter journalism and have an understanding of its mission, have an understanding of how it works, have an understanding of who to even talk to in order to have a conversation to even pitch a potential tech product, for instance. And that's just for companies that are supporting news and creating tools for journalism. There are other companies that are wanting to create content, wanting to diversify coverage. Very, could be very well supporting the mission of media equity, but they don't necessarily have a way in to more established news organizations. And I would just even broaden that and say that there are a lot, there's not an on ramp for starting news organizations as well as plugging into the news industry. And I think that's a key component that's also missing connections, brand reputation, I think any entrepreneur myself included who's tried to start a local news outfit or news outfit from the ground up, is that it's hard to just even establish credibility if you didn't come from like pretty privileged places to begin with. And so that is like a current condition of news entrepreneurs, particularly entrepreneurs of color. But I think be doing a better job and potentially founders could fill that gap or associations can fill that gap of just being able to leverage an existing connections existing making introductions, helping people hire for the right positions to even build a local news organization are some of the areas that I think can be improved from a founder's point of view. For right with you, you actually responded to some of that, in particular with the establishment of the Borealis fund right do you want to talk a little bit about how that fund is going, because it's been around for more than a year now. Sorry, I was waving someone out of the zoom or we would have had a cast of 1000s. Yeah, I mean, it's funny because one of the I think the important questions that had gone through the chat was about like, who gets to be a primary grantee and who gets to be a collaborator. And so in the case of MLK 50, which I just mentioned, which collaborated with ProPublica, the racial equity and journalism fund that was co founded by several different entities, including Ford, you know, Democracy Fund, Craig Newmark, Google News Initiative, you know, news integrity initiative. Trying to think of who our last initial thunder was I know I was going to forget someone anyway. And now there's more. But, you know, MLK 50 is a direct grantee of the racial equity and journalism fund, because Ford has been really thinking about like how basically how do we do our grant how do we have enough time to grant, but also not putting people of color in a position where we always have to be going around scraping up money from white partners, who can decide how much money we get. And so, I think that, you know, it's, I personally think that in both the nonprofit and the for profit world, we have to stop viewing people of color and other other groups that are underrepresented leadership as essentially being scraping off the plate, you know, we have to start asking. Oh, sorry, did I cut out. Yeah, I said, we have to stop viewing people of color led media organizations as better nations that get little scrapings off of the plate that somebody else gets to hold. And so, you know, I do think that we've done a good job of really assessing racial equity as part of our portfolio. You know, there was also another question about immigrant led media and yet another question about, you know, how do you earn enough to live on and the last one I think is really challenging like I think that some people will be able to be full time journalists but as we move ahead, a lot more people will be part time journalists and we have to figure out models for people who maybe are, you know, a teacher and a journalist or someone who's a a document or for city bureau or whatever and like what is it who who who can exist in a full time journalism job and who else can make a meaningful contribution in a way where they don't feel exploited right now basically there's so much exploitation and journalism with people being underpaid and asked to do too much so what is the ethical transaction that can happen in so many different ways within our field and that's important that's innovation in and of itself. And, you know, the thing the question I have with innovation around journalism is sort of the, the actual product right because I feel like we actually don't spend a whole lot of conversation about what is the product that we are funding and putting out. And so, you know, you want you do to, you know, in some of your columns and report you basically saying that, you know, it doesn't matter what we are funding, there is a sameness to it. I love to hear you talk a little bit more about the same this and for right to, to that point is, how are you sort of using the funding you have to really fund things that's truly innovative that is not yet and another sort of news website of sort like, you know, how, how is that important in terms of the funding priority you want first. Yeah, no innovations, a big term. We throw it around pretty willy nilly sometimes within the industry. And, you know, at some point in my career I thought I was innovating just by producing content for Snapchat. And what I've come to realize is that that's not the existential innovation that we need as an industry. I look at the local news industry as an example. So what previously local news was kind of like the hub for jobs, it was the hub for personal classifieds, it was the hub for everything related to buying house to also figuring out what's happening around in your neighborhood. When I look at the landscape today, it only seems like local news is purely focused on what's happening around in your neighborhood. And the reason I say that is because I actually feel like a lot of tech companies have kind of come into the local marketplace, and really started to pick up on different aspects of these roles that was once under the purview of local classically. So I've written about this in the Reynolds Journalism Institute op ed most recently, but examples would be Zillow, Zillow.com has created a platform for people to quickly find housing they even actually break headlines themselves when they are providing data to a lot of people who then write stories about the housing market. And I would also say LinkedIn has also, you know, been that service that everyone goes to in order to find jobs in a city, any particular local area. And I can go on, I would even mention Tinder as being a local news paper role in the sense that local newspapers used to be the place where you could post personal classifieds and maybe meet the love of your life. And that was kind of picked up on that responsibility or that jobs to be done. And I think, I think we can be facetious with them about this, but all seriousness, there's a lot of opportunity that's been left on the table because journalism is only being defined in one way. And so when I think of innovation, I think of how can we be creating glass door holding organizations accountable and creating good, you know, workplaces for its employees. That seems like something that fulfills journalism's mission but does not look like anything similar to a traditional education. And I think that's the problem right now. And when I think about existential innovation, a separate example very quickly was just like, let's think about how Walt Disney hopped from Mickey Mouse cartoons to creating Disneyland. That distance between those two concepts is very innovative, because no one told Walt Disney to go start an amusement park. That was something that he kind of imported that the mission, the values, the ideas behind the spirit behind Mickey Mouse, and then created a physical world around that. And what I'm asking and I'm hoping journalists do is think about what its mission is, its values and try and inject that into other spaces in an effort to serve local residents. We actually have a lot of comments. More comments and question I would say in the in the chat right now. So one of the questions you find you sort of elude to baby grants like what are these baby grants. I just thought of that on the fly. I don't mean to refer to them as baby grants. I meant them as like smaller grants, smaller grants ranging from the size of $50 to $100,000. And while that might sound very hefty in from like a particular person's point of view. In fact, when I started by the Bay which is a local media company in 2018, I would have thought that was huge. I also got a grant from the NY Foundation, ranging in that range. And what I'll say from experience and what I've seen from also trying to start a company now is that that is not enough. That might be enough to run an experiment. That's not enough to create a sustainable business. And that's what I mean by smaller grants is that if you're going to start with smaller grants, let's then point that entrepreneur to where they can get a bigger grant for the next stage of their growth if they hit certain milestones that are based on some path of success, some definition of success. Otherwise, it's very hard to know whether or not that company or that founder is ever ready to jump to that next stage. In the tech comp, tech knows that they have a model when they found product market fit. If that early stage incubation experiment with the $50,000 C grant, or actually let's just call it a small grant. If they've found product market fit, if they've created a product that knows that has a clear customer acquisition channel that can clearly generate some meaningful monthly revenue, then it might be ready to ask for more capital. And there's like a lot of different theories on this to Fry's point, there's a lot of foundations have different definitions of success, I'm sure including Ford, but that type of thinking, I think is necessary, starting out with the smaller grant but what's the next sized grant what's the next next next sized grant for each stage of the startups journey. And so we have a comment also question from map Thompson. He's been digging a lot into deep history of media from a century plus ago before local monopolies and national behemoth become the two models of profit for news. You know, he basically his question is how much do you think the imperative for business model that scale, rather than model that can serve a defined community, sustainably, sustainably, and well has contributed to the crisis we're in now. And is there any chance that philanthropists feasty and other funders start actively considering the problem of scale. Yeah, I personally think that the emphasis on scale has been very detrimental. I mean there are things it, you know, really have a great mechanism for doing things that are profitable and not at scale right now and appreciating them for what they are. If you think about the C Corp, which is just a corporate structure, increasingly legal rulings have basically made. You know, it's like the idea is that the kind of corporations have some of the same political rights as people, you know, not even getting there. I find that a little psycho. But also that to have shareholder value is the only thing that matters, whereas, and I'm getting kind of deep in the weeds here I think American capitalism I gave a speech yesterday that talked a little bit about the differences between capitalism and German capitalism, both in origin and in execution. So in German capitalism, you still have room for pay parental leave, you have a completely different system for supporting people who otherwise would be out of work during the pandemic by supporting their companies to keep them on as employees rather than forcing them onto unemployment insurance. Both of these are capitalist systems, but they're very different. And then I think that I give capitalism also flows to what does it mean to scale something. Oh, sorry. First of all, I'm going on too long but the long and short of it is our legal structure and additional legal rulings really seem to value a concept of shareholder value that also is tied to scale. The B Corp is, I think, very promising, but it has its own restrictions and I think it's a question of like what do we want enterprise to do. And I think for for profits and nonprofits are forms of enterprise. But I feel in some ways America's legal structure and fiscal structure is not very useful for understanding how civic media functions. I'll add to that very quickly. I think that's a really great question that often comes up and I don't want that this idea of scale to be I know I'm talking a lot about tech platforms and I think when people hear tech they think scale and then when they think scale they think like the ruthless need to pursue profit at the sacrifice of everything else like Uber style. And I would say that I think there are a lot of nonprofits who are doing incredible work, including the Red Cross including ACLU including Planned Parenthood. Just think about all the nonprofits that come out when you think of nonprofits that are operating at scale including governments, the US government operating at scale and providing a lot of meaningful services to people. I think the difference that in my mind of versus scale is not actually one of scale because I think a lot of different models and a lot of different situations it actually comes down to like the culture and the ethos of that organization. So you see a lot of these nonprofits scale, making millions of dollars in revenue every year, but their mission is just fundamentally different than what we tend to categorize as maybe a capitalistic for profit, Yeah, corporation and labels aside, I do think it comes down to like what is that company's mission is that companies mission, Uber's mission, which is to generate, you know, shareholder value as much as possible, or is the company's mission like the Red Cross. And I'm sure both of these organizations have numerous issues in their own way, but I would challenge the premise that it's all about scale I would actually go back and reframe it to a question about culture ethos who are the founders who are starting these organizations to begin with and what are their values. And so in some of the comments and question that there is a tension between the new and the existing right so you know we have a question from the muscle areas, eluding you know like should we focus on supporting the legacy organizations of color. Right and I would say, in many of the conversation not even just the organization of color but what about the family own newspaper that been around for centuries. Like, how do you, what do you guys think between the tension of the legacy versus new in these scenarios. Well, I can't be too specific about part of this because the grant hasn't been processed yet but we are making an investment that should help legacy black news organizations really grow in new ways of reaching audiences, including digital production and distribution. I feel like legacy black media and people of color like media is very important, and it's not to me and either or you know the racial equity and journalism fund as a mix of newer and legacy people of color lead and serving publications. And I think it's more about every news organization today, including some that think of themselves as relatively well off financially compared to others has to ask how do we continue to serve an audience that is beset by huge numbers of challenges. For example, not only are vast proportions of America not served by broadband, including 65% of homes on indigenous communities in the United States, which is affecting learning during the pandemic among everything else. We may actually see quite significant reversals in the access people have so you always have to be ready to learn and adapt and pivot and and also I think that gets into the overlap between journalism and public policy because I do believe we need a national broadband community both for educational purposes, financial purposes, journalistic purposes, and part of being a journalism funder today is looking intersectionally at questions of access. And I don't think it's an either or for the legacy question Paul. I agree with for I that, you know, there are many legacy organizations that are doing incredible work as a former president of AJ I'd like to believe that's the case. And, but I will say this, I am very concerned about founder funders who are essentially propping up legacy companies and not allowing them to be truly tested in the marketplace, based on real user demand and based on real value propositions. And what I mean by that is too often and I think this is happening, not just in journalism, but in every industry is that you do have like a legacy organization that basically gets to shift its weight around across the industry. And it's, it supports, it's supported and propped up because of its it's existing reputation because of its existing connections and existing networks. And what I would really like to see is more accountability for these legacy organizations. Being held accountable to the same standards at startups are which is being very responsive being very collaborative, being listening to their audiences in a user's first way. I don't necessarily think that always happens across the board and I do think a lot of legacy organizations do get more credibility, partly because they've earned it they've been around for so long they have earned those relationships with people in the industry. And I do think that's where there is an opportunity to invest in more new ventures and enterprises as a way to kind of balance out the scales because there's just a lot of inertia when it comes to a lot of these legacy news organizations and companies everywhere. And we have a question from drove and Kewkin and as well as Liliana or Spina is different, you know, first question he Joe has is this hyper local journalism dead. It seems like just five years ago where hyper local is sort of like the answer to everything and now there isn't. And the other question is like, it's really hard for, you know, to start a local news organization, especially for minorities, like who it's actually funding in this space right now, like is it truly dead or is there for profit people funding, you know, I think for night we have, you know, we work with INN and Institute of nonprofit news as well as lion, the local independent online news publishers and and we have vehicles like news match that will help these organizations to sort of get up to a certain place. But do you see much direct funding to these individual organizations. Well, I would say for Ford the racial equity and journalism fund funds a lot of very, very, very, very early stage people of color led and serving organizations. I wouldn't say like a pure startup like I have an idea give me money, you know, there has to be something that exists but some of them are very new and you know kind of really figuring out what their models are. I think for Ford, you know, obviously journalism grant making and all grant making goes through various phases but I think that for us right now during the pandemic we've been thinking a lot about how much sustained support do we give to organizations over perhaps a longer window of three or four years instead of two years. And that creates some resource questions around doing new things. I think we will continue to do both but I also feel like this is a time where we're being asked to make certain questions. One more thing I would say though is that looking around from what I can see of the journalism landscape smaller newer scrappier and more innovative and often people of color led and serving organizations are actually having fewer budget problems than larger white led organizations that tend to have bigger budgets and maybe bigger overhead. And I think it's something I would love to see a longitudinal study of, you know, what sorts of organizations are doing okay in this era. Yvonne, to your point, a question from Mia is, you know, some folks who are outside or adjacent to journalism, you know, are facing when they ask for funding because they're not sort of in the bubble. Do you think in terms of philanthropy, do we project the notion that you have to be a journalism insider to be funded? Is that the perception that you're hearing from some of these founders that if you're not part of this bubble then there's a lot of problems and there's no way you'll be able to access to capital? And do you see that change? I would love that to change. It's really funny because I have like a decade of experience in journalism. I was a night fellow at Stanford. And you know what, we had a lot of, I had a lot of trouble getting any type of grants for By the Bay when we started a local media outfit. So I don't know what is the problem. It could be me. I'm happy to accept that. Maybe just making a bunch of wrong first impressions all over the place with funders. It could have been our business. We didn't have necessarily the right business model that funders were looking to fund. I do think the answer is just like it's probably a very complicated matrix of all of these different factors. I do think that journalism is a very insular industry. As someone who's now building an outdoor company though, I know it's not unique to journalism. The outdoor industry is also equally insular. And so I think what funders need is to be able to trust that their investment is going to succeed. And sometimes those trust signals come from introductions to founders. You know, the founders reputation, the type of following they might have, what they've already built in the enterprise already. There are a lot of different signals that different investors and founders might have. Sometimes that translates into barriers. And I do think one question that's like an ongoing question, even like right now in the tech we see world is like, do you need a warm introduction to talk and pitch to an investor in tech right now? And some people are trying to abandon that. Some people are on board with the warm introductions because that's a very good signal for whether or not that founder has potential to succeed. And so you can start to see what's very problematic around any of this, like all this language of how you end up creating a lot of systemic barriers for different kinds of founders if they weren't plugged in already. But I would say that is part of the challenge for any entrepreneur, generally, as it exists right now. I think there are ways that we can improve it. Creating associations similar to how I mentioned, oh, I was a nightfellow at Stanford. That was a cue to everyone in the audience that somehow I have some credibility because Stanford gave me, or Night Foundation gave me a Stanford seal approval. So I do think the more associations can do that type of vetting before, you know, instead of just relying on funders, and that way founders can not only, you know, receive that network effect of that association, but also, you know, join a community of other founders that can continue to amplify their work is another way of kind of addressing this problem. And Farai, do you foresee in terms of like, you know, even philanthropy, you know, to me, sourcing of new funding project is almost like, you know, similar problem when media company, like hiring candidates right because it's sort of like there's this extensive referral system is so and so and, and do you ever see us going toward this sort of like blind resume, like, but instead of be like, you know, we're not going to, we just don't care about the referral we're just going to evaluate based on, you know, your idea and your ability to execute or whatever history that you have demonstrate when so much of that is subjective. You know, I think that all sorts of biases and privileges are built into pretty much every system that humans create because we ourselves bring those to the table. There are much better ways of operating than others in some cases but I know for me. I can't imagine not having any kind of referral input but I also take the time to push way outside of my circle of comfort and it takes a huge amount of time based on the amount of hours I have in a day. I spend a lot of time talking to people who I can't fund at all or I can't fund now so I understand don't pretend to have universal knowledge. I do think that, you know, the open competition model is an interesting one, but that can be gained too. So I guess what I would say is I try to be fair. I definitely take into account a bunch of different types of factors like geography. We're trying to basically move away from being as overweight on the coast and build up more and more grantees in the Midwest, the South, in Indian country, Texas, on and on and on. And so, you know, but I just think it's hard. It's hard. I don't know what to say. And, you know, we have, in the chat, we actually see a lot of great engagement here. I would say, okay, what would be your advice right now for entrepreneurs who try to assess capital, whether it is from philanthropy or from VC, or from Angel, you know, what are the two or three things that they have to get right to position themselves for this capital? I presume that's a correct question. What I would recommend founders to do right now is actually to join some type of community of other founders. There's some that's like a very easy thing to do, but to essentially just build that community of other entrepreneurs around you. There are some that already exist in the new ecosystem, INN, Lyon, one of them, but that network can be very powerful, particularly in the long run, not just to vet your initial ideas, but to eventually hopefully make more introductions to the people that you need in order to grow your business to the next phase. I would also recommend anyone interested in entrepreneurship to start delving into spaces outside of journalism, because I do think, again, journalism can feel like a very insular industry, and there are a lot of new experiments that are being tested in other verticals in other industries that could then translate back into journalism, but there's no one really filtering those ideas with like a journalism eye. So I do think there's just exposing yourself to different types of entrepreneurs, I think could also be an added benefit. Farai, will be your suggestion. Yeah, I mean, I've seen, yeah, I've seen some really good questions about, you know, if you are a newer immigrant lit publication or broadcast or how do you get funded. You know, well before I worked in journalism funding, I also ran a small nonprofit and I was a pretty terrible manager in terms of figuring out ways to raise enough money to cover what we did like I remember at one point. It was a it did journals and training for college students and I ended up working 15 hour days like eight hours a day for my regular job and then seven hours for the nonprofit. I think that the thing is to really to do your best to network yourself into spaces where people have information like people who were on this call but to also start thinking about like what could other types of partnerships look like. I know that Heather Chaplin of the journalism and design program has been looking at community colleges as potential new key players in information architecture like is there a community college newspaper or class or whatever that you don't have to merge with or share common resources and economies of scale. I don't think there's any single answer to what to do but I would definitely say networking networking networking but also who has stuff you can use for free, whether it's, you know, negotiating something to the community college or with a church, or other religious institution or a mosque, you know, a temple. There are all sorts of civic organizations that have different libraries, you know, someone was like libraries. And so, you know, I think that I think that that's always key is to look to look for ways to minimize cost as well as raise money and then in terms of raising money. I don't know that foundations are always the first place to go. You know, it's like the foundation game does tend to be a bit elitist and I think that having an idea doesn't always work well having a proof of concept does, or at least works better. Yeah, I mean my advice in terms of the network is if it doesn't exist one create one right so not only are there sort of established network again like I am in line but also think about if you're a member of ONA if you're a member of open news. If you're a member of NABJ if you want, if you sort of want to stop and be entrepreneurs also sort of like make that network work for you right. A lot of times I think, you know, especially for entrepreneurs of color, we don't really know what are the first few steps. And, you know, some sometimes is not even the money should be your first step right the first step is that you have a prototype. What signals are you getting from the audience to tell you that the idea that you have, you know, serve them. Right, I think as journalists we sort of go into these assumption base and and I would say very much so we need these assumptions to be validated in some way or shape before capital is even released. And I would say, you know, let sort of like rise from these network is what are the support system you're looking for right so how do we, you know, how do we help you minimize risk. And how do we help sort of expand your network. And again, we're not the only player in town that fund journalism there's actually quite a few from national to even local play space foundation as well as angel investors. So I think, you know, this is a conversation that's to be continued. And I don't think it's going to go away anytime soon. And with that, I want to thank for I and they've gone for sharing your insight with us, and we hope that we could get you guys back, maybe in a couple months to do a follow up because I could see that there's huge engagement in the chat about this topic. Thanks. Thanks everyone and thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks, Yvonne. Thanks, Mike foundation. Yeah, it was a pleasure joining us and please come back again next week at the same time the same place.