Impact
From funding internships, to increasing civic issue reporting, to building a better digital infrastructure, the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation continues making a difference in the local news ecosystem.
Art Cullen, Pulitzer Prize winning-editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot, summarized what recent WIJF philanthropy has meant for his newsroom:
“We now regularly staff Cherokee City Council, School Board and Board of Supervisors meetings, which were not covered before our expanded reporting grants. In Storm Lake, we are now able to staff all county supervisor meetings and regional schools (Alta-Aurelia, Newell-Fonda, Sioux Central, etc), which we were not able to before. These are the basic nuts and bolts of journalism, just covering ground we could not cover before. It also allows us to do good enterprise reporting — Tom Cullen and Madeline Coombs have done as much reporting on avian flu as any reporters in Iowa.”
As another example, Dustin and Taylor Teays are a young couple who defied trends and recently moved back to Taylor’s tiny hometown of Bayard, Iowa (population 404), to purchase and assume control of two legacy newspapers. With support from WIJF, they’ve taken steps to improve newsroom technology and increase efficiencies necessary for sustainability of both trusted news sources.
Overall, WIJF has supported 10 newsrooms across western Iowa. The following chart details WIJF’s funding history to date:
On top of that, WIJF submitted a successful $100,000, unrestricted two-year grant for La Prensa Iowa (a Spanish language newspaper) through an immensely competitive Press Forward open grant call.