Lipman Center Grants Nearly $190K For Reporting on Inequality and Human Rights
The Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights has awarded five grants totaling $188,000 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.
“We had a very competitive and inspiring group of submissions this year,” said Robe Imbriano, Ira A. Lipman Associate Professor of Journalism and Director of the Center. “We’re confident that the recipients of these grants will deliver reporting that will go a long way toward helping local newsrooms and their communities understand how their legal systems can do better in the pursuit of justice."
The 2024 grant recipients are Invisible Institute, a 2024 Pulitzer Prize winning local nonprofit newsroom in Chicago; Open Vallejo, a local nonprofit news organization in California; the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting in Jackson, a 2024 Pulitzer finalist; independent journalist Jordan Michael Smith; and independent journalists Ryan Kost and Willow Grace Higgins in partnership with New York Focus.
"We are proud to offer this necessary support to newsrooms doing some of the most important reporting of our time," said Jelani Cobb, Dean and Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism. Dean Cobb was the inaugural director of the Lipman Center. "The toll of inequality has seldom been more apparent in our history — and these local organizations are doing a great service to their community in combating it."
Members of the grantee selection committee were Lipman Center Director Robe Imbriano; Alexis Clark, assistant professor of journalism; Keith Gessen, George T. Delacorte Assistant Professor of Magazine Journalism; and Dolores A. Barclay, project manager of the Lipman Center and adjunct associate professor of journalism.
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.