Giving the Poor a Voice — With Help From the Rich

Maisie Crow

From where Barbara Ehrenreich sits, 2019 represents the latest sad act in an ongoing tragedy. Ehrenreich, the nation’s pre-eminent reporter on the dimming fortunes of the American working class, has watched as more and more journalists have faced the career guillotine.

“I’m angry,” says Ehrenreich, also the author of several much-acclaimed books on the downwardly mobile, including Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. “It makes me angry that billionaires think it’s OK to fractionally increase their incomes by destroying journalists.”

This year alone, around 2,500 journalists in the United States have lost their jobs. With the recent announcement of 65 journalists being fired after the sale of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the death knell sounded for yet another local legacy newspaper. For Ehrenreich, that means there will be fewer people like her plying their trade and less solid information for the public.

Now in her later years, Ehrenreich continues to fight against the odds stacked to benefit the rich — including those gobbling up and gutting media outlets — and against rank-and-file Americans and those who report on them. The Economic Hardship Reporting Project, an organization she formed in 2012 and then jump-started three years later with award-winning reporter and author Alissa Quart, makes grants to journalists who report on issues related to economic inequality.

Last year, it placed 132 articles, opinion pieces, photographic essays, and films in media outlets that, coupled with grant money from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, pay decent money to those practicing a threatened craft. Many of the stories sponsored by the organization have been produced by laid-off journalists or people who have been homeless or who have served as peons in a stagnant, low-wage economy.

An Ethical Tightrope

The organization is hoping to expand its shoestring budget — $700,000 this year — to get even more stories by and about marginalized people out to the public in 2019. It is working with donors and foundations on new funding so it can support more documentaries made by women, a podcast, and more money for laid-off reporters.

To help do all that, Ehrenreich has a curious target in mind: billionaires.

Currently, the EHRP gets most of its money from progressive private foundations. Its relationship with its largest donor, the JPB Foundation, points up the ethical tightrope that upstart nonprofit journalism operations face during our modern Gilded Age.

JPB, which made a $250,000 grant to EHRP last year, was formed by the late Jeffry Picower, who made a fortune betting along with disgraced Wall Street Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff.

Though she notes the irony in accepting money from the same strata of society that she has often blamed for both a national inequality crisis and the demise of journalism, Ehrenreich says there simply aren’t many other ways to keep incisive reporting alive.

“This isn’t the end-all solution for journalism,” Ehrenreich says of the group’s approach. “We’re looking to billionaires to do something to help in the meantime.”

Strange Bedfellows

Strange times can make for even stranger bedfellows. The declining market for traditional media has forced purveyors of news to search for any kind of support. In the past two years, one third of daily newspapers have announced layoffs. And in the past decade, newsroom positions have declined by nearly 25 percent, according to a report from Pew Research.

Online and electronic media continue to suffer as well. The desperation among journalists, particularly those who don’t produce clickbait or quick-turnaround web stories, is legion.

Because of the troubled for-profit news market, nonprofit news operations have sprung up — thanks to people with deep pockets.

The Intercept, which bills itself as an “adversarial journalism” outlet covering national security and politics, is bankrolled by a small portion of the profits Pierre Omidyar made from founding eBay, along with smaller donors.

Other investigative news sites, such as ProPublica and the Marshall Project, rely on the largess of billionaires.

Stephen Voss

‘We Don’t Hold Their Wealth Against Them’

In recent years, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project has expanded its money-raising approach to include gala events and an annual online appeal. It is considering some other methods for self-support, such as publishing an anthology of its works and producing a podcast that features Ehrenreich and Quart talking about the organization’s recent and upcoming work.

But for now, its leaders realize they have to go where the money is to make an impact.

“Nonprofits and foundations have to step into the breach to make sure Americans have access to the truth,” says David Wallis, managing director.

The EHRP is careful about the donations it accepts. Donors have sometimes expressed misgivings about some of the group’s work. “But we don’t go anywhere near anyone who would try to censor us,” Ehrenreich says.

The nonprofit also makes sure to take grants only from foundations that echo its values. They include the Annie E. Casey, Ford, James Irvine, NoVo, and Public Welfare foundations. The group also receives support from the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning Washington think tank that has housed EHRP since its inception and helps the organization with its health insurance, informational tax filings, and other back-office functions.

“We’re choosing the right kind of billionaires and foundations — ones who are aware of the issues and want to act responsibly,” says Quart. “We don’t hold their wealth against them.”

JPB fits the group’s profile because it espouses progressive solutions to poverty, while also funding environmental groups and medical research, Wallis says. As for the wealth behind the foundation’s endowment, he notes that Picower paid a price — over $7 billion in restitution — for his dealings with Madoff.

“Maybe in some cases, there is some penance” behind the grants the mega-rich might make to groups like hers, Ehrenreich adds.

Awards and Top Newspapers

To sell foundations and rich individuals on the project’s value, the organization’s leaders tout its high rate of story placement in some of the nation’s leading publications, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. “We do what we do with a teeny staff” of two full-timers and four part-time contractors, Quart says. “We’re incredibly efficient.”

The reporting project’s ability to win awards for the films it has financed, including an Emmy for Jackson, a documentary about anti-abortion activists, demonstrates its reach across the media spectrum, she adds.

The Ford Foundation, one of the nonprofit’s supporters, has taken note of the outsize effect of the group’s grant money. A 2017 report financed by the project and published in the Guardian, documented the high suicide rate among farmers and led to new laws on health-care access.

“It inspired a legislator to work for more mental-health resources in rural Washington State,” says Farai Chideya-Chihota, a longtime journalist who now works as a program officer at Ford, which made a $100,000 grant to the group last year. Eventually, Washington passed a law to help farmers. “That’s impact.”

Help for Fired Journalists

The Economic Hardship Reporting Project ponders its growth at a time when journalists find their work disappearing. It hopes to use donations to start a fund to help fired journalists get through tough times.

“They’ll have to write stories for us to get it,” Wallis says. “We haven’t figured out how much we’ll raise for that — probably $25,000 to $50,000. We’ll call it the Media Contraction Fund.”

Especially hit hard have been news operations in rural areas. The EHRP has started making grants — typically $2,000 to $8,000 for a written long-form article — to journalists in the Midwest and South to counter the concentration of media outlets on the coasts, where 70 percent of the media works, Quart estimates.

Central to the group’s ethos is supporting work that points out the hollowness at the core of modern American economic life. The lower classes are hardly benefiting from working harder, and they sometimes work two or three jobs at a time, the group’s leaders say.

“We’re here to crush the Horatio Alger myth,” Quart adds.

Ultimately, she believes, developing fresh, regular, and compelling personal stories — some of them first-person accounts by struggling journalists — will elicit the empathy that leads people to fight back against inequality.

“We’re trying to create an aesthetic,” Quart says, “one that causes people to feel the pain others are going through.”