As foundations and big donors race to stomp out fake news and support nonprofit journalism in creative ways, it’s worth looking back at how grant makers can make a difference by providing the kind of information that changes society.
It’s been 25 years since Race by Studs Terkel was published. The book set off a conversation that helped transform American life — and it would not have happened if a group of foundations had not come together to back the innovative public-interest experiment that created The New Press, which I now lead.
The idea for The New Press got off the ground when André Schiffrin, the longtime head of Pantheon Books (where I was a young editor), pitched the concept of a public-interest book publisher to Colin Campbell, the head of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
Mr. Campbell might not have seemed at first the ideal person to help create The New Press. Before heading the fund, he had been the president of Wesleyan University, where he shut down the Wesleyan University Press. André Schiffrin was one of two board members of the Wesleyan University Press who worked in the publishing industry, and he lamented the press’s closing.
Just a few years after the Wesleyan University Press closed its doors, Mr. Schiffrin left Pantheon, an imprint of Random House, after a very public feud over profitability and politics with Random’s owner (Kurt Vonnegut, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Studs Terkel were among 300 protesters who picketed outside Random House’s offices in a “lunch hour of rage”).
Mr. Schiffrin approached Mr. Campbell to see whether he might be interested, in his new role at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, in supporting a unique nonprofit publishing venture to fill the gap between the big commercial houses and struggling university presses. To Mr. Schiffrin’s great delight, Mr. Campbell saw the merits of the project and provided a small planning grant from the Rockefeller fund to the start-up, originally known as The Fund for Independent Publishing.
Getting the Message Out
In a model of foresight and collaboration, Mr. Campbell — together with Richard Leone of the Twentieth Century Fund (as it was known at the time) and Vincent McGee of the Aaron Diamond Foundation — gathered a dozen leading foundation directors and program officers to hear Mr. Schiffrin’s vision for an antidote to the corporate conglomeration of publishing houses.
“The motivation,” as Mr. McGee later recalled, “was understanding the importance of getting quality publishing about ideas and programs and movements and people who were leaders in ideas and change to have a voice, and not simply be dependent on the vagaries of the market and selling books.”
At a luncheon in February of 1991, Mr. Schiffrin presented to an all-star group of grant makers his radical idea for a public-interest book publisher, modeled on the roles of PBS and NPR.
Jane Isay, who had served with Mr. Schiffrin on the Wesleyan press’s board and was later drafted by him to serve as a founding board member of The New Press recalls that everyone was skeptical at first.
“André had this crazy idea that foundations would give money to a publishing company,” she says. She knew that the Mellon Foundation, for example, had given money to support projects like presidential papers. “But just for a left-wing publishing company? Impossible.”
But nothing seemed impossible to Mr. Schiffrin. He told the group, Mr. Campbell recalls, that “if you’re in the nonprofit sector, and you’re trying to build it and strengthen it ... what’s more significant than having a publishing arm that can get your message out in a substantial way?”
Ultimately, 11 of the 12 foundations represented at that lunch meeting made significant grants to The New Press. That support led to the founding of a nonprofit publisher committed to producing books that would foster public discussion and understanding of issues vital to our democracy; feature underrepresented voices; and focus on possible changes and innovation to tackle problems of a society in transition. Mr. Campbell attributes the group’s enthusiastic response to the “out of the box” idea to Mr. Schiffrin’s salesmanship and eloquence, and to a recognition that what he was proposing was badly needed.
Mr. McGee says that although the Aaron Diamond Foundation had never funded anything like what Mr. Schiffrin was proposing, the foundation’s key benefactor, Irene Diamond “was very interested in ideas,” as was Mr. McGee himself and members of the board. The foundation, he adds, had already shown itself, through its well-known work in the AIDS field, to be committed to opening doors to conversations on pressing social issues and how they might be addressed.
Priority on Social Change
Much has changed in the past 25 years, but philanthropic support for public-interest publishing remains critical.
Since its founding, The New Press has published more than 1,000 titles and has more than quadrupled in size and reach, from $1.5 million in net sales in its first year to a record-breaking $6.6 million in 2016. The press has continued to focus on issues of social importance, giving movement leaders a megaphone to discuss topics as varied as wage increases, gun control, for-profit colleges, juvenile detention, and solitary confinement.
A big and successful signature book of the press in recent years has been The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander (published with funding from the Ford Foundation). That success is exciting, of course. But what makes The New Press special is our editorial commitment to underrepresented voices and transformative ideas.
While our books land on best-seller lists and win prizes, that’s not the point. Because of our hybrid status — part publisher and part nonprofit — we give priority to books that have the potential to change society.
Susan Eaton’s Integration Nation, for example, is an important book by a vibrant public intellectual that examines how immigrants and refugees successfully integrate into U.S. communities (the book’s publication was supported in part by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation).
The Other College Guide, written especially for low-income students, offers practical information on navigating, selecting, and paying for college. (The book was supported in part by the Kresge Foundation.)Foundation and individual support have also been critical to The New Press achieving one of its original goals, which was to help diversify a notoriously monochromatic industry. Our internship program has helped hundreds of diverse young people get started in publishing careers and careers in the nonprofit world.
Preserving Democracy
Conservative donors have long understood the power of the written word to influence hearts, minds, and, ultimately policy. The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, was funded by the Bradley Foundation and the Pioneer Fund. The Olin, Koch, and Bradley Foundations are among the supporters of Encounter Books, a conservative book publisher whose books, according to the Bradley Foundation’s website, “are in the holdings of an estimated 20,000 libraries nationwide.”
What The New Press and other progressive nonprofit media organizations, including relatively new ones such as Pro Publica and The Marshall Project, make clear is that donors — individuals as well as organizations large and small — have a critical role to play in the intellectual life of the United States. Support for progressive media helps ensure that the best ideas for change and reform, and the widest number of perspectives, find their way into the national discourse.
A decade ago, Bill Moyers wrote in In These Times: “Without a free and independent press, this 250-year-old experiment in self-government will not make it. As journalism goes, so goes democracy.”
If the newspapers and publishing houses that make up the Fourth Estate are the protectors of democracy, philanthropic institutions are the protectors of a free and open press.
It’s worth keeping in mind the need for continual investment in all forms of information by grant makers. It doesn’t take just a few grant cycles to change the conversation and influence policy. It takes donors willing to invest for the long run and working collaboratively to bring innovative ideas to life.
Diane Wachtell is executive director of the New Press.