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Left to right: Francesca Dabecco, Mallory Falk and Maria Carter of City Cast Pittsburgh have an office at the Media Hub and use the studio for their podcast. (Nancy Andrews/Benter Foundation)

Hi! This week, I’m turning Local Edition over to my colleague, Megan Griffith-Greene, who has started a new series looking into what’s working in philanthropy and journalism. Here’s Megan:
1+1=3 is my favorite kind of math, and I’ll tell you why. Sure, it may look wrong on first glance, but I’m going to invite you to take a more generous — if fanciful — interpretation. It starts with two entirely whole quantities, but what you end up with is more than the sum of its parts.
Over the past few months, I’ve been looking for partnerships that fit that equation. You take a local news initiative that is doing good work and you add a philanthropist who wants to make their community better. But what you end up with doesn’t just sustain what’s there — it creates something entirely new, better than what came before it.
So I’m writing about some of these 1+1=3 projects that have inspired me, in a new series called “Grants that Work.” Each month, I’ll bring a different model that newsrooms and funders might find inspiring — or better yet, that they might steal, borrow and adapt for their own regions.
Philanthropy is an important part of the future of local news. But we’re going to really make breakthroughs when we get creative and go beyond what that equation has looked like in the past.
The first project I’m showcasing: the Downtown Pittsburgh Media Hub ([link removed]) . The Hub provides office space for seven newsrooms in Pittsburgh, all heavily subsidized (they pay 25% of market rent), where they share amenities like meeting space, office equipment and a podcast studio.
Here’s why I love the Hub and think more places should steal this model:
* It shows that foundations can think creatively and have a lot more to offer than just money.
* It helps hyperlocal newsrooms not just survive, but collaborate better (and seamlessly) all while feeling less isolated and alone.
* It also shows how a funder can find alignment between their community priorities (The Benter Foundation’s main goal for this project was downtown revitalization) and figure out how local news helps them meet that goal.

The result is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. Read more about the Hub in the first story in this series ([link removed]) , and let me know what project I should profile next (mailto:[email protected]) .
Grants that Work is part of Poynter’s program on ethics in local news funding, produced thanks to support from the Knight Foundation. Find out more about our free workshops and tools for funders who support local journalism. ([link removed])
Thanks, Megan!
That’s it for this week, and thank you for reading.
Kristen
Kristen Hare
Faculty
The Poynter Institute
@kristenhare ([link removed])

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