Ford Foundation provides $1 million grant to Los Angeles Times

The Ford Foundation, a longtime supporter of public broadcasting, has given a grant of $1 million to the Los Angeles Times, which will expand its coverage of beats including immigration and ethnic communities in Southern California, the southwest U.S. border and Brazil. A Ford Foundation spokesman told the newspaper that as media organizations face challenges funding reporting through traditional means, “we and many other funders are experimenting with new approaches to preserve and advance high-quality journalism.”

In a column on the announcement, Adam Clayton Powell, senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy notes that Ford used to give NPR "six and seven-figure grants each year for international news coverage and reporting of certain topics." But that has changed: While last year Ford continued to support certain pubcasting projects, Powell writes, the foundation's grants database does not include any grants to NPR, or PBS, in 2010 or 2011.