News & Events

The twin crises of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter uprisings have laid bare deeply rooted systemic inequities and racial inequalities that have long plagued our nation. In light of this unprecedented inflection point, Renaissance Journalism is launching the Equity and Health Reporting Initiative. The project’s goal is to stimulate news media coverage, storytelling projects and/or community engagement activities in the San Francisco Bay Area that explore and investigate the impact of systemic inequities—exposed by the twin crises of 2020—on the health and well-being of our region’s most vulnerable communities. We are currently soliciting proposals from Bay Area journalists and news organizations for ambitious, in-depth and community-centric health reporting projects.

Renaissance Journalism announced in May 2020 that it has created the Covid-19 Relief Grants for Local News Organizations and will award $185,000 to 20 nonprofit community, ethnic and university news organizations that are covering the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The goal of the project is to provide emergency funding relief to a select group of nonprofit news organizations that, at great risk to their own journalists, are struggling to cover the pandemic and its impact on our area’s diverse and most vulnerable communities. At the same time many of these local news outlets face financial difficulties as the accompanying downturn in the economy has led to lost advertising, donations and other revenues.

Renaissance Journalism is excited to introduce a new tool to help journalists cover the nation’s housing crisis. The guide, “Housing Reporting Rx: A Journalist’s Guide to Covering the Housing Crisis,” highlights our key findings and observations from a yearlong review of housing coverage. It also identifies major pitfalls to avoid and offers practical tips and real-life examples to journalists on how to improve and expand coverage of the housing crisis in all its complexity and nuance.