The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has received major new funding which it says will allow it to move into a “new phase of growth”.
The grant from global philanthropic organisation Luminate will total £800,000 over two years.
Bureau editor Rachel Oldroyd (pictured) said the new money was “very significant” for the non-profit investigative journalism outfit, which cost £1m to run in 2017, and had come at a “crucial moment”.
“We’ve grown very rapidly in the last two years, in terms of our size, the number of stories we put out and the number of publishing partners we collaborate with,” she said in a blog post.
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“We now want to put a structure in place that can propel our journalism and its impact to a new level.”
The new money will be used to expand the Bureau’s management team which Oldroyd said would allow it to “give more support to our reporters, work with more freelancers and undertake more collaborative projects”.
It will also create a new role, that of impact producer, whose focus will be “maximising the positive change that the Bureau and its work make to society,” she said. The role is common in documentary film-making.
The Bureau launched in April 2010, founded by Elaine and David Potter, with an initial grant of £2m.
It continues to rely on trusts, grants and donations to fund its work, which has spanned issues from drone warfare to political lobbying and superbugs.
“Digging deep into these types of stories takes a lot of time and effort, but time and time again we’ve seen how much good it can do,” said Oldroyd.
“Today the need for independent journalism that benefits the public has arguably never been greater. There are so many more stories we want to investigate and so much more we want to do with our work.”
In 2017 the Bureau set up Bureau Local, a network of local journalists, for which it won the Innovation of the Year award at Press Gazette’s British Journalism Awards that same year.
The Bureau’s new sponsor, Luminate, was established last year “with the goal of empowering people and institutions to work together to build just and fair societies”, it claims on its website.
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