InsideClimate News announced today that it is the recipient of a $1.5 million grant from the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, to be used starting this year and over the next four years.
The grant is for general support for newsgathering and dissemination. The Grantham Foundation first became a donor to ICN in 2012 with an initial general support grant of $100,000.
“For as long as we’ve known them, InsideClimate News has consistently produced groundbreaking environmental journalism,” said Ramsay Ravenel, executive director of the Grantham Foundation. “We believe the best way to support ICN’s work now is with a longer term commitment to its independent journalism.”
It is the single largest grant the news organization has ever been awarded since its start-up in 2007.
“We have been working hard and growing carefully and incrementally for almost nine years, and we’re ready now to take a leap,” said David Sassoon, the founder and publisher of InsideClimate News. “The grant is welcome support for our vision for the next decade – to build and establish a permanent newsroom devoted exclusively to environmental journalism practiced in the public interest.”
This year ICN earned a series of prestigious journalism awards for a nine-part investigation called Exxon: The Road Not Taken. The series helped trigger probes of the oil company by state attorneys general for possible climate fraud.
The work was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
It has also earned national recognition from many other quarters, including the National Press Foundation, the Shorenstein Center of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Park Center for Independent Media, the Scripps-Howard Awards, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, and the White House Correspondents’ Association.
The news organization, currently with a staff of 12 and an annual budget of close to $1.5 million, is working to raise funds in order to double in size and cover climate and energy issues more broadly and deeply.
About the Grantham Foundation
The Grantham Foundation seeks to raise awareness of urgent environmental issues and supports individuals and organizations working to find solutions. Its grant-making supports communication and collaboration in environmental protection, with an emphasis on climate change. Between 2005 and 2012, the foundation annually awarded the Grantham Prize, one of the richest prizes in journalism, to recognize exemplary reporting on the environment.
InsideClimate News is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan news organization that covers clean energy, carbon energy, nuclear energy and environmental science. It is staffed by professional journalists, many with decades of experience from the leading media organizations in the nation. ICN is a 501 C3 tax-exempt organization operating with IRS approval as a public charity. It is governed by a Board of Directors and guided by best practices in non-profit management.
David Sassoon
Founder & Publisher
David Sassoon is the founder and publisher of Inside Climate News. He has been a writer, editor and publisher for 30 years, involved with public interest issues: human rights, cultural preservation, healthcare, education and the environment. Sassoon founded a blog in 2007 which has grown and evolved into Inside Climate News. He earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard University, where he majored in history, and a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
