The most important woman in Chicago journalism attended the landmark Chicago Journalism Town Hall in early 2009 and sat quietly in back. Few people knew she was there or who she was, but the noisy room would have gone stone silent in an instant if she’d stood and said something like, “Many of you have some very interesting ideas, but this is what the MacArthur Foundation is willing to pay for.”
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Revere is the MacArthur Foundation’s vice president for media, culture, and special initiatives. Her job is to put serious money in serious hands, and here’s where some of the foundation’s money has gone on her watch: To support investigative journalism: $600,000 to the Center for Investigative Reporting, $750,000 to the Center for Public Integrity, $500,000 to ProPublica. To support public radio and television: $1.2 million to Public Radio International, $1 million to PBS’s NewsHour, $300,000 to the Third Coast International Audio Festival. To support documentary film: $1.5 million to P.O.V., $290,000 to Chicago’s Kartemquin Films, $1.1 million to the Bay Area Video Coalition. To support new media and technology: $430,000 to a University of Michigan research project “on credibility assessment in the participatory Web environment,” $450,000 to a Tribeca Film Institute project “to aggregate, digitize, curate and make available independent media content for online distribution.”
Collaboration is the premise and promise of the Chicago News Cooperative, which received a start-up grant of $500,000 from MacArthur and an equal grant a year later. “She’s tough, I’ll tell you that,” says O’Shea. “She’s very businesslike, and she’s very direct with her questions, her comments, and her observations. Basically, you have to deliver for her. You can’t just think, ‘Well, I’m OK because she’s given me one grant.’ She’ll actually make you walk the walk. I have an enormous amount of respect for her.”
Two years ago the Chicago Community Trust, publisher of the Chicago Reporter and Catalyst, launched its Community News Matters initiative to support new forms of local neighborhood journalism. MacArthur is too big and too national in scope to feel comfortable dealing directly with the grassroots, but it helped the CCT along with $100,000. Says Revere, “We wouldn’t have been in a position to go through dozens of local reporting projects and fund them with small grants, so we were happy to make a grant to the trust to do that.”
