Maybe you’ve gotten an email or two or social media notice: Today, is #GivingTuesday, a global day of giving. We’ve profiled worthy nonprofits in our annual Philanthropy the last five years (2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013); perusing those is a good place to start on figuring out what do-gooders deserve your dollars. This Vox rundown of how to be smart about giving nationally and internationally is helpful.
But it’s also #GivingNewsDay, an effort promoted by NewsMatch, a national matching campaign to support nonprofit journalism. The Arkansas Nonprofit News Network, the investigative and public interest project I run on the side of my work for the Times, is part of NewsMatch. That means that, through the end of the year, every tax-deductible donation to ANNN gets matched dollar for dollar. If you make a monthly, recurring donation, NewsMatch will match it 12 times, for the expected 2019 annual total. In other words, set up a monthly $30 contribution to ANNN — less than a dollar a day! — and it will be matched with $360.
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The money we raise through NewsMatch will go directly toward producing news that matters to Arkansans, important stories like Benji Hardy’s tour de force examination of the flaws of Arkansas’s first-in-the-nation Medicaid work requirement reporting requirements. It was the culmination of a yearlong Medicaid reporting project Benji has done for ANNN. Or David Ramsey’s essential profile of Rusty Cranford, the man in the middle of Arkansas’s vast public corruption scheme.
Those stories and everything else ANNN produces get distributed, for free, to news outlets across the state, all of which can’t afford to devote staff resources to one story or topic for months on end. But there are a lot of essential stories that require that kind of commitment.