Renaissance Journalism has awarded a $10,000 reporting grant to San Francisco Public Press to investigate how the lingering digital divide might undermine Census 2020, the federal government’s massive effort to count every man, woman and child in the United States.
This year marks the first time that the U.S. Census Bureau will conduct the decennial count primarily online, creating a possible participation barrier for those without reliable access to the internet. Even in affluent and tech-savvy San Francisco, 10,000 people live in homes that lack internet access and 8,000 live on the streets or in temporary shelters.
After a decade working to improve the news media, Renaissance Journalism finds itself as a subject of a news story. It’s about our efforts to track down and recover more than $600,000 in foundation funds that went missing. So far, it’s a story without an ending.
The news article by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, "A Foundation Collapsed. Its Money Is Gone. What Happened Is Shrouded in Mystery," published on Sept. 12, 2019, focuses on the collapse of ZeroDivide, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that worked on health and technology issues. Reporter Marc Gunther’s story asks how and why ZeroDivide, which started as a $50 million grantmaking foundation in 1998, reinvented itself into a grant-seeking nonprofit that eventually went broke in 2016.
Renaissance Journalism became a part of the story because we had been operating as a fiscally sponsored project of ZeroDivide at the time.
Journalists from nine news outlets in Detroit have joined forces to tackle the trenchant issues of race, poverty and power that continue to hobble that city’s climb out of bankruptcy.
Launched last week, the ambitious, seven-part series will continue with in-depth investigations and special reports contributed by journalists in a unique multiracial media collaboration called the Detroit Journalism Cooperative (DJC), which Renaissance Journalism helped to organize more than two years ago.
