Foundation support for media grew at nearly four times the rate of giving in other areas between 2009 and 2011, a report from the Foundation Center, Media Impact Funders, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation finds.

The report, Growth in Foundation Support for Media in the United States (20 pages, PDF), found that 1,012 of the largest foundations in the U.S. made 12,040 media-related grants totaling $1.86 billion during the three-year period, and that media-related grantmaking increased from $568.2 million in 2009 to $687.6 million in 2011, a 21 percent jump, compared with a 5.8 percent increase in overall domestic grantmaking. The report also found that the growth in foundation investments for new media outpaced those for traditional media by a factor of four (116.5 percent compared with 29.4 percent), and that of the five focus areas analyzed — journalism, news, and information; media access, and policy; media applications and tools; media platforms; and telecommunications infrastructure — only telecommunications infrastructure saw a decrease in foundation support.

"We can now confirm that philanthropy is responding to the disruption of traditional media organizations in the digital age," said Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president at the Knight Foundation. "The data is a good start to understanding media grantmaking. It's just the sort of tracking we need."

According to the report, the top three U.S. media funders over the 2009-11 period were Freedom Forum, Inc., the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Knight Foundation, while the top three recipients were the Newseum (which received 95 percent of Freedom Forum's grant dollars), the University of Southern California, and New York City-based WNET Thirteen.

Funded in part by the Wyncote Foundation and produced in collaboration with GuideStar and the Ford Foundation, the report is part of a larger project that includes additional resources made available on the Media Impact Funders site: a data visualization tool enables users to explore where domestic media-related grants are going and to create charts filtered by dozens of criteria, while an accompanying knowledge center provides reports, case studies, and white papers related to media initiatives.

"Not only does this report show us the breadth of media funding by foundations," said Brenda Henry-Sanchez, director of research for special projects at the Foundation Center, "it also puts knowledge in the hands of funders and practitioners so that they are better equipped to identify gaps, set priorities for the future, and collaborate with others for even greater impact."