The Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights has awarded five grants totaling $185,288 to journalists and newsrooms for reporting on inequalities and misconduct in the American criminal justice system.
The Lipman Center’s Initiative in Reporting on Race and Criminal Justice provides newsrooms and reporters financial assistance and professional collaboration to pursue major reporting projects in their communities on law enforcement, prosecutorial, judicial, incarceration, racial and human rights abuses.
The grants will support yearlong reporting projects and will cover costs for data acquisition, analysis, and visualization, additional staff, FOIA requests, travel or other reporting needs.
“These grants, generously funded by Arnold Ventures, have provided journalists with invaluable resources for local reporting, and once again the field has responded with innovative and important work,” said Robe Imbriano, Director of the Lipman Center, Ira A. Lipman Associate Professor of Journalism and Director of the Documentary Journalism Program at Columbia Journalism School.
The 2026 grant recipients are WyoToday, a local outlet in Riverton; Kansas City Defender, a Black media newsroom in Kansas City; Mississippi Today, a 2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning local newsroom in Jackson; CalMatters, a nonprofit news organization in Sacramento; and independent journalists Larkin Smith, Eryn Davis, and Amanda Purcell.
“The Lipman Center's Arnold Grant has consistently brought together some of the sharpest journalists working to pursue groundbreaking stories on criminal justice and this year is no exception,” said Jelani Cobb, Dean of Columbia Journalism School, Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism and Founding Director of the Lipman Center. “The work selected for the 2026 grant particularly highlights the crucial work being done by local news organizations on this topic. We look forward to having them as part of our community of Columbia Journalism School fellows.”
Members of the grantee selection committee were Lipman Center Director Robe Imbriano; Kat Chow, Newsday/Laventhol Visiting Assistant Professor at the Columbia Journalism School; and Dolores A. Barclay, project manager of the Lipman Center and adjunct associate professor of journalism.
“Each of these grant projects reflected the needs of their local communities with impressive and rigorous clarity,” said Professor Chow. “The proposed reporting is ambitious and reminded me of journalism’s power to serve the public and provide a check on power imbalances and misconduct.”
The Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights was created in 2017 with a gift from the late Ira A. Lipman to inform and shape the ways we research and report race, diversity, and civil and human rights in the United States and globally. This reporting project is made possible by Arnold Ventures.
