The Knight Foundation will be giving ProPublica a $1.9 million data journalism grant to support the News Applications team at ProPublica, among other things. According to Nieman Lab, the nonprofit already hired a full-time staffer for the team, named Lena Groeger, who first joined through a pilot fellowship program. The program is focused on tech-savvy journalists, and because of the grant money will now be a permanent fixture at ProPublica.
Scott Klein, the News Applications editor noted that the grant will primarily be used to increase the team’s “metabolism to execute data driven projects.” Klein told Nieman Lab that, “Obviously, we’re going to be doing a lot of news apps. “What’s important to me is that we continue to do great work that supports the mission of ProPublica, which is to have impact in the real world.” ProPublica got its start five years ago, but never envisioned its future to be data-driven journalism. Knight’s goal is to help lead the journalism industry into a new time of this data journalism. That is why another chunk of the grant money will go to the ProPublica Paired Programming Project, a job shadowing program also known as P5 that will invite one non-ProPublica journalist a month to work with Klein and his team.
Own a local business?