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Smart Money: Who Funded Youth Media Election Coverage?
By: Kendra Hurley
Published: March 3, 2005
Category: Roundups

Minnesota-based Phillips Community TV raised money specifically for Battleground Minnesota, a teen-made documentary on the elections. “We did a whole separate fundraising campaign for this video,” said program director John Gwinn. First, they produced a trailer, then researched organizations that might be interested in helping to fund a full-length feature. One staff member at Phillips Community TV used to work for an online philanthropy project and, through that, had the idea that the locally based Target and Best Buy might be interested in funding the show through their government affairs divisions. After watching the trailer, Target gave $10,000 and Best Buy gave $5,000. They also helped Phillips organize a house party “mostly with young, wealthy liberals,” said Gwinn. It raised about $7,500 more.

Alternet.org, the alternative news source that hosts the youth-written Wiretap, got special funding to cover the elections from the Wallace Global Fund, the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, the Albert A. List Foundation, and the Open Society Institute.

A look at the funding strategies of youth media organizations that covered the 2004 election.
Alternet made the organizational decision to have Wiretap focus on the youth vote angle. But none of their funding was specifically earmarked for Wiretap funding, says editor Twilight Greenaway.

Andrew Lynne, educational facilitator at Manhattan Neighborhood Network’s Youth Channel, said that the organization did not raise money for its coverage of the elections. Even so, he says, Youth Channel thought it was important to cover the elections because its “staff members felt a certain responsibility to provide a community media outlet as opposed to a corporate media outlet on the election, and so we all took it on ourselves.”

In the past, New York–based Youth Communication received funding from the New York Community Trust, the New York Foundation, and the Valentine Perry Snyder Fund of JP Morgan during election years to produce special issues of the teen-written New Youth Connections on voting and political participation. They did not apply for funding for their special 2004 election issue, says executive director Keith Hefner, because he felt that year more foundations were interested in direct “get out the vote” efforts than what Hefner calls “pre-registration education.” “We’re trying to lay the groundwork so that when someone approaches a kid on the street and says, ‘Are you registered to vote?’, the kid will want to register because they understand why it would make a difference.”

Three youth-reported news services—Children’s PressLine in New York, Y-Press in Indianapolis, and 8-18 Media in Markette, Michigan—partnered to secure funding to exchange youth among the organizations covering the conventions. Each bureau received $5,000 in total from the Open Society Institute and the Arsalyn Foundation, which is part of the Ludwick Family Foundation. Children’s PressLine Program Director Katina Paron believes they received the funding not only because of the civic engagement angle; foundations “love partnerships because it saves on resources for them.” She adds, foundations “really love peer exchanges and this was kind of an extreme peer exchange.”

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