The Lenfest Institute announced Tuesday a second round of grant funding to help newsrooms listen to and build trust with their audiences.
About half of the 18 newsrooms receiving funding from the Community Listening and Engagement Fund are at nonprofits and public media outlets, according to a press release. CLEF is awarding more than $100,000 for newsrooms to use the engagement platforms Hearken and GroundSource to cover a range of topics.
The nonprofit and public broadcasters receiving funds include The Colorado Independent; Philadelphia’s WHYY; New Orleans’s WWNO; WKSU in Kent, Ohio; City Limits in New York City; Scalawag Magazine in Durham, N.C.; Ensia at The Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota; and Orb Media in Washington, D.C.
CLEF is funded by a consortium of foundations focused on journalism and furthering democratic values, including The News Integrity Initiative, the Democracy Fund, the Knight Foundation and Lenfest.
In CLEF’s first round of grant funding, more than a dozen nonprofit newsrooms and public broadcasters received grants ranging from $2,125 to $14,450, according to Lenfest.