Queen City Nerve is honored to be one of 400 grant recipients announced today by the Facebook Journalism Project (FJP), the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and the Local Media Association to support COVID-19 news reporting and help fill immediate gaps for resource-constrained local newsrooms.
“In an international crisis like the one we’ve faced in recent months, local reporting is more important than ever in order for readers to remain up to date on the information that impacts their community directly,” said editor-in-chief Ryan Pitkin. “That job only becomes harder with advertising revenue plummeting, so we are thankful for help continuing our wide-reaching coronavirus coverage, looking into all aspects of how the people of Charlotte have been and will be affected.”
Q.C. Nerve was one of 10 North Carolina newsrooms to receive a $5,000 grant, joined by Carolina Public Press, Daily Tarheel, Enlace Latino NC, La Noticia, qnotes, Scalawag, Smoky Mountain News, WFAE 90.7, and WRAL Digital.
The FJP increased the total grant pool to $2 million after more than 200 publishers applied in the first 48 hours after the application launched. The grants are part of the company’s broader effort to provide support around COVID-19, including a separate $1 million in grants to support fact checkers and a recently announced additional $25 million in relief grants. Applications for these grants open on April 13.
The grant will allow Queen City Nerve to continue to publish its print issues and deliver them, while also funding more community reporting from a diverse range of voices. Tomorrow’s issue explores how local health-care workers and officials are preparing for the projected COVID-19 peak, among other things.
We ask that anyone with interest in covering the COVID-19 crisis in Charlotte contact Ryan at rpitkin@qcnerve.com.
This work by Queen City Nerve is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
