AUGUSTA — Two national journalism foundations recently awarded $125,000 in grants to the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting.
The Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation gave the center a $100,000 grant for the second year in a row, while the Nicholas B. Ottaway Foundation gave a $25,000 grant for the third year in a row.
Both grants will support the center’s production of investigative journalism about Maine state government and elections.
The grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation was among $1.8 million in awards announced by the foundation.
“Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation is pleased to support such high quality, innovative grantees this cycle,” said Bob Ross, president and CEO of Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. “We are especially excited to provide critical funding to nonprofit investigative journalism organizations, each providing credible content while informing and engaging the communities they serve.”
Jay Davis, president of the center’s board of directors, said, “These most welcome grants demonstrate the faith and confidence of independent journalism funders in the work of the center. Their consistent support means that we can continue providing watchdog journalism to newspapers and other media across the state as a public service.”
The mission of the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation is to “invest in the future of journalism by building the ethics, skills and opportunities needed to advance principled, probing news and information now and for the future.”
The foundation was established by Edith Kinney Gaylord, a pioneering woman journalist whose father was the editor and publisher of The Oklahoman and The Oklahoma City Times. In recent years, the foundation has been a prominent supporter of nonprofit investigative news organizations across the country, most of which, like the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, are members of the Investigative News Network.
The Nicholas B. Ottaway Foundation was established by one of the country’s leading newspaper families. James Ottaway Jr. is the retired senior vice president of Dow Jones, publishers of the Wall Street Journal and Ottaway Newspapers, and his brother, David, is a retired Washington Post foreign correspondent and investigative reporter and currently a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
The Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting was founded in 2009 by John Christie, a longtime newspaper writer, editor and executive who is a former publisher of the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel. Christie, who was joined in 2010 by veteran Maine journalist Naomi Schalit, aimed to produce hard-hitting, non-partisan watchdog journalism about state and local government at a time when government reporting had dramatically declined in Maine. The organization’s newsroom is in the state Capitol complex in Augusta.
The center’s stories, written by Christie, Schalit, freelance writers and interns, are distributed as a public service to media partners across the state, including daily newspapers like the Bangor Daily News, the Sun Journal and The Times Record, as well as weekly papers like the Ellsworth American, the Lincoln County News, the St. John Valley Times and the Forecaster and Current chains.
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