Celebrate with us!
We are delighted to announce that we’ve been chosen one of four winners in the McCormick Foundation New Media Women Entrepreneurs project, an initiative of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism.
The four grantees for 2012 were chosen from a group of 227 applicants by the highly respected McCormick judges.
“This year’s winners demonstrated clear-cut mindsets to take their start-up ideas and grow them into entrepreneurial businesses,” said Jan Schaffer, director of the J-Lab, which administers the program.
Clark Bell, Journalism Program Director of the Chicago-based Robert R. McCormick Foundation, said: “Focus, creativity and determination are at the heart of this competition. Like winners in previous years, these four projects will provide timely, reliable news and information to their targeted audiences.”
It’s a really great group of grantees that we join. The others:
- Symbolia, a tablet magazine spearheaded by media strategist Erin Polgreen that will blend investigative journalism with comics and illustration.
- Carolina Public Press, a non-profit, in-depth, investigative news site for western North Carolina, launched by journalist Angie Newsome.
- The Seattle Lesbian, a daily news site started by two journalists, Sarah Toce and Charlene Strong, who aspire to roll their initial success with news and traffic to a national network of sites.
The Clearhealthcosts.com team is excited to add this grant to our achievements. It totals $12,000, with an additional $2,000 possible if we raise $2,000 through our own efforts.
We won our first grant, $20,000, from the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism in December 2010, as a result of an entrepreneurial journalism class at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, taught by Jeff Jarvis (“What Would Google Do?” and “Public Parts”) and Jeremy Caplan, director of education for the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism.
Then, last spring, we won a $20,000 grant from the inaugural Women Entrepreneurs in the Global Digital News Frontier program, sponsored by the International Women’s Media Foundation, funded by the Ford Foundation.
McCormick’s groundbreaking New Media Women Entrepreneurs, now in its fifth year, is a unique initiative addressing opportunity and innovation, recruitment and retention for women in journalism by spotlighting their ingenuity and entrepreneurial abilities. “Pilot projects will show what can be done,” the initiative’s site explains. “Research will tell us what more to do. And an awards program and summit will showcase women’s creative ideas.”
Judges were: Lisa Williams, founder and CEO, Placeblogger.com; Cory Haik, deputy editor, Universal News Desk, Washington Post; Ju-Don Roberts, vice president and editor-in-chief of news and social media, Everydayhealth.com; Vivian Vahlberg, President, Vahlberg & Associates; Ellen Warren, senior correspondent, Chicago Tribune; Maria Ivancin, assistant professor, American University’s School of Communication; Janet Liao, journalism program officer, McCormick Foundation, and J-Lab’s Jan Schaffer.
