Non-profit US news organisation Mother Jones has secured a $300,000 grant from The California Wellness Foundation and $50,000 from The Fund for a Safer Future to support its reporting on gun violence.
The donations come 11 years after Mother Jones created the first US database to track mass shootings. This was launched after a mass shooting in Aurora Colorado, on 20 July 2012, that left 12 people dead and 70 wounded.
It aims to record vital information about shootings including a perpetrator’s age, gender and race. According to Mother Jones, the database has been viewed more than 5.2 million times and has been cited by news outlets more than 2,000 times.
Mother Jones chief executive Monika Bauerlein said: “Gun violence is an omnipresent part of daily life in America, yet the causes and impact are still poorly understood—in large part because the gun lobby has been able to stop the federal government from doing essential research on this issue.
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“Our goal has been to fill that void, and the generous support of the California Wellness Foundation and Fund for a Safer Future will allow us to shine a light on the groundbreaking work that some communities are doing to prevent these tragedies.”
Talia Rivera, executive director at Fund for a Safer Future, said: “One of the challenges we face with gun violence is overcoming the public perception that nothing can be done, and yet preventing gun violence is possible if we listen to, and actively support, the communities and individuals at greatest risk.
“Mother Jones’ sustained, solutions-based journalism reveals how gun violence intersects with inequities in education, housing, and public health, and by addressing those underlying causes we can move our communities toward a safer future.”
Mother Jones VP of development Emily Cozart Mohammed told Press Gazette how the new funding will be used.
She said: “What we’d like to be able to do, and we already do this with some of our other reporting, is create co-publishing agreements with smaller local news organisations, particularly those most impacted by gun violence, and ensure that the stories that are taking place in their communities are uplifted and amplified at a national level.
“And likewise, we have done similar collaborations with our climate work, where we’re taking on local stories or news stories from other organisations and sharing them on the Mother Jones site.”
Asked what other areas of Mother Jones reporting could be boosted by philanthropic funding, she said: “We could absolutely use more funding for climate reporting. It’s the biggest crisis facing all of us right now. And although we consider that to be one of the beats that is really all hands-on deck, everyone is considered a climate reporter in one way or another, we could use more dedicated staff who are more mid-career and more senior reporters who their entire focus is say climate justice.
“Climate finance is becoming a big area of focus for us – to just have more editorial firepower there would be incredibly helpful.”
She added: “Democracy has long been a heavy focus of Mother Jones. It is similar to climate, it is something that imbues everything we do here. And we have a very high level of voter suppression. So I feel like we could throw much more editorial resources at anything related to democracy. And that will include things like disinformation, misinformation, extremism, etc., especially as we head into the 2024 election season.”
Mother Jones has an annual budget of $17m mainly funded by reader donations.
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