Photo: Vojtech Okenka from Pexels
In February, I wrote about the soon-to-be-created Awards, Grants & Fellowship tab in the Freelance Center and highlighted five opportunities with approaching deadlines. Since then, the tab has been created and populated with descriptions of 19 non-AHCJ awards, grants and fellowships. Please email me if you have suggestions to add to the list.
Most deadlines for the listed awards are sometime in the first four months of the year and so have passed, but several fellowship and grant deadlines are approaching. Here are five of them:
The Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship
These fellowships are open to U.S. citizens who are full-time print journalists, including freelancers. Recipients receive $40,000 for a full-year fellowship or $20,000 for a six-month fellowship. The goal of the program is to “provide support for journalists engaged in rigorous, probing, spirited, independent and skeptical work that will benefit the public.” Winners are expected to produce four print articles. The competition opened in June, and applications must be received by October 1, 2022. The online application must include a fellowship proposal, work samples, two references, a professional autobiography and a project budget.
Fund for Investigative Journalists Grants
These grants of up to $10,000 are to defray the expenses of an investigation that uncovers wrongdoing by powerful people or institutions. The deadline for applications is September 7, 2022. Applicants must include a letter of commitment from a news outlet to run the articles. “The grants we provide cover the costs of investigations – gas money to interview sources, fees for copying open records, stipends for the hundreds of hours reporters spend digging through data,” according to the website. The fund provides a 30-minute webinar with tips for applying.
The Knight Science Journalism Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) offers fellowships to 10 science journalists for an academic year. Each fellow designs a unique course of study and must audit at least one science course per semester at universities in the Boston area. Fellows are required to complete a research project during their time at MIT. “Some element of the research project must be journalistic in nature, but it can expand beyond traditional parameters and in any format: long-form, story series, multimedia, video, audio, installation, etc,” according to the website. Fellows receive a $70,000 stipend and basic health insurance.
The Knight-Wallace Fellowships
Up to 20 experienced journalists are selected for an eight-month program of immersive study at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Fellows receive a $75,000 stipend and audit courses, participate in seminars and workshops and work on an individual journalism project. Applications for the 2023-2024 academic year will open in fall 2022, and the deadline is February 1, 2023. Winners are announced in early May.
Pulitzer Center’s Global Reporting Grants
These grants support reporting on critical issues from global health to climate change. The stories of grant winners address the root causes of crises globally, including in the United States. Awards cover reporting costs and can be $10,000 or more. Grants are awarded on a rolling basis. The application requires a project description, a letter of interest or commitment from editors, a budget, samples of published work and three professional references.
