Put your name behind the news!
Thank you for being a patron of truth and supporting trustworthy journalism. Nonprofit newsrooms like The Merced FOCUS are an increasingly important source of information for millions of people across the United States.
The trust people place in our reporting is our greatest asset, one we know you value as well.
We follow a practice of being transparent about who funds us and pays for that reporting, as one important way we preserve that trust. Being transparent about our funding means that anyone in our community, any reader or viewer or listener, can know who funds our work.
To that end, we’d like to encourage you to put your name behind your news support.
It is one of the strongest ways you can stand for open news and a free press in your community and beyond.
Transparency and trust in news media have never been more important than they are today. Because of that, many individual donors who give anonymously to other causes make an exception for news and attach their names to donations supporting news organizations. We hope you will consider doing the same.
We understand and deeply appreciate the many reasons donors may generally prefer to keep their gifts anonymous. We understand and respect donors’ wishes for privacy. When it comes to journalism and trust in independent, nonprofit news, however, we encourage you to consider another factor: the greater good that comes from people knowing who stands behind the news.
Over the last several years, extensive research has been done by The Trust Project on how people decide whether to believe a news item or source. Knowing a news organization’s funding is an important factor to consumers in gauging if a news outlet has an “agenda” or can be trusted. This is why we encourage you to identify yourself when you support news organizations. News plays an important role in building common ground in our society. Going public with your support of nonprofit news not only supports quality journalism, it also supports public trust and civic engagement.
News organizations have flexibility in how they identify donors. Some list all donors on their sites, some link to IRS 990 tax forms that list donors. We are happy to work with you to find ways to address your privacy or other needs and still be as transparent as possible to the community we serve.
Here is added information about how news organizations are building transparency and trust:
Our newsroom is a member of the Institute for Nonprofit News, a network of more than 425 nonprofit newsrooms dedicated to high-quality journalism and public service. Its member newsrooms are committed to building public trust and have adopted best-practice guidelines. We make public the names of individual and corporate funders of $5,000 and above and hold anonymous donations to a small percentage of a news site’s revenue. Exceptions are unusual and carefully considered. The goals of these guidelines are to ensure that journalism remains editorially independent and the public can trust nonprofit news sites, knowing they are not dependent on or shaped by high levels of anonymous funding.
Most news sites also publicly disclose their practices, such as this model policy:
We are committed to transparency in every aspect of funding our organization.
Accepting financial support does not mean we endorse donors or their products, services or opinions.
We accept gifts, grants and sponsorships from individuals, organizations and foundations to help with our general operations, coverage of specific topics, and special projects. Our news judgments are made independently – not based on or influenced by donors. We do not give supporters the rights to assign, review or edit content.
We will make public all donors who give $5000 or more per year. As a nonprofit, we will avoid accepting donations from anonymous sources, and we will not accept donations from government entities, political parties, elected officials or candidates actively seeking public office. We will not accept donations from sources who, deemed by our board of directors, present a conflict of interest with our work or compromise our independence.
Donors also help other donors by making their gifts known. Charity Navigator, Guidestar/Candid and other databases used by philanthropists to identify well-run nonprofits take donor transparency into account in their rankings.
Thank you for your interest in the news, and for putting your name and support behind independent, nonprofit news media. Together we can strengthen the sources of trusted information for thousands of communities. Your support makes a big difference.
For more information about supporting nonprofit, public service journalism, contact [Insert organization information. For more about nonprofit news standards, we invite you to contact INN, info@inn.org or by visiting INN.org.