http://tacticalphilanthropy.com/2007/04/council-on-foundations-conference Tue, 06 Jan 2009 03:40:06 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.5 http://tacticalphilanthropy.com/2007/04/council-on-foundations-conference#comment-163 Bruce Trachtenberg Wed, 11 Apr 2007 19:15:48 +0000 http://tacticalphilanthropy.com/2007/04/11/council-on-foundations-conference/#comment-163 Hopefully the attention that blogging is bringing -- and the many discussions and conversations it is spawning -- will encourage traditional press to deepen its coverage of philanthropy. It's not enough to simply report on the number and size of grants -- which is what the Philanthropic Awareness Initiative found as typical of foundation news coverage in its recent study of reporting on philanthropy over a 15-year-period. As my co-author and I wrote in a Chronicle of Philanthropy op-ed last July (http://www.comnetwork.org/72006oped.htm), "When reporters cover the business world, they produce articles when new products or strategies are announced, when money is made or lost, and when companies grow or fail. And in between the coverage of those developments, enormous attention is paid to the types of businesses they are, what underlies the decisions companies make, and what they could do to become more successful. That same approach should guide philanthropy coverage. Reporters should be encouraged to provide in-depth and analytic coverage about the underlying problems in society that foundations are trying to solve, the likely results of their investments, and follow-up coverage about what did or didn't happen." Hopefully the attention that blogging is bringing — and the many discussions and conversations it is spawning — will encourage traditional press to deepen its coverage of philanthropy. It’s not enough to simply report on the number and size of grants — which is what the Philanthropic Awareness Initiative found as typical of foundation news coverage in its recent study of reporting on philanthropy over a 15-year-period. As my co-author and I wrote in a Chronicle of Philanthropy op-ed last July (http://www.comnetwork.org/72006oped.htm), “When reporters cover the business world, they produce articles when new products or strategies are announced, when money is made or lost, and when companies grow or fail. And in between the coverage of those developments, enormous attention is paid to the types of businesses they are, what underlies the decisions companies make, and what they could do to become more successful. That same approach should guide philanthropy coverage. Reporters should be encouraged to provide in-depth and analytic coverage about the underlying problems in society that foundations are trying to solve, the likely results of their investments, and follow-up coverage about what did or didn’t happen.”

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