Life sounds so easy when you get to a yes. I was alone in the office on Monday, February 17, the morning when I learned that a grant proposal I’d submitted to the TRACE Foundation was approved. My contact at the foundation emailed:
I’ve already heard back – it’s a great board – and we’re ready to proceed.
My inbox looked like a winning Powerball ticket. I brayed. My staff was working from home, so I had an entire corner of the New Times building to myself to giggle and, knowing me, probably clap a few times. I don’t really remember, other than that I probably had too much oxygen going to my brain.
The proposal I’d submitted asked for $123,000, enough to pay two dogged freelance writers to chase stories for us for a solid year. I sent it on a Friday. Now here I was the following Monday morning, with a yes. Of all things, a damn yes.
If you’re receiving this email, you know the drill around here. Like many news outlets, New Times has begun reaching out to readers directly asking for their financial support of our newsroom and local journalism. From the ‘70s until the early 2000s, news publishers turned newsprint into hard cash. Then the [expletive] internet came along and bled out the ad dollars. Meta and Alphabet and Craigslist and TikTok have ushered in a new, frankly crappier age for this business.
I think it’s only fair that if we’re asking readers for money (and, by the way, THANK YOU for stepping up to that call) we should also be pestering bigger donors as well. So I put together a proposal asking an anti-corruption nonprofit for a sack of dough that I could steer toward meat-and-potatoes reporting. I first wrote to the funder:
I’m starting to plan for some ambitious hard-news coverage, and I wanted to take your temperature on whether you think a partnership with Trace might indeed be a possibility this year. I’ve got a couple of veteran freelancers available who would love to take on deeper watchdog projects on corruption and systemic abuses in the state. Our freelance budget simply doesn’t have room for those kinds of commissions, unfortunately — the pandemic really did a number on papers like this one. But I’m confident if we wind up these seasoned investigators and give them a long leash, we’ll get quality work in return.
What I wasn’t expecting back in February was the long walk we ultimately needed to take to get to the starting line. Turned out we’d need a nonprofit partner to receive the grant and disburse it to us with a degree of oversight. The going rate for that service — called a fiscal sponsorship — could run as high as 10 percent of the grant, a huge sum that I’d not factored into the original proposal. I didn’t want to revise the proposal and put the yes in any sort of danger. So I beat the bushes looking for an organization that would meet the fairly strict criteria of a fiscal sponsor while also charging us bottom dollar.
Anything in life that you want fast, cheap and good tends to arrive with two of those three features, if you’re lucky. We got cheap and good when a top-flight news nonprofit called Deep South Todayagreed to take on the hassle of sponsoring our grant for a flat $3,000 fee. We spent weeks ironing out the contract before returning to TRACE with the partnership paperwork. That part of the story is boring, so let’s move on.
