Editor's note: We're pleased to announce that Janet Coats will be posting regularly on this blog. Janet was a long-time editor of newspapers who in recent years led The Patterson Foundation's New Media Journalism Initiative and more recently as a consultant to foundation-supported news and information efforts. As foundations step into the local news and information space, we've asked Janet to share what she's observing and learning about foundation efforts.

My transition from for-profit newsroom executive to foundation representative to consultant on foundation-funded projects has given me a 360-degree view of the role of foundation funding in journalism and the emerging non-profit news community.

I will say, it has been  – and continues to be -- an education.

I’ve been struck over and over again during the last four years with just how many people know exactly what foundations should be funding and how they should be doing it. There remains an unsettling sense among some of the journalism entrepreneurial class that foundations are under some obligation to fund particular kinds of work in particular ways.

I found, during my brief time shepherding foundation investments, no lack of people who were eager to tell me of much better ways we could be spending the money.

But the truth is that foundation funding can never fill the gap created by the imploding media economic model, and we’ve all known that for a long time. When I first began working with The Patterson Foundation in 2009, newspapers already were spending $1 billion less on newsgathering than they had been at the turn of the century. And while foundations had stepped up to provide more than $140 million in funding for new media projects between 2006 and 2010, the difference in scale between what was lost and what was added was immense.

Foundations have continued to invest significantly in journalism in these subsequent years, but it’s also clear that their sense of what constitutes a wise investment is changing as well. Part of that is simply the learning curve – the more projects are funded, the deeper the track record we have as predictors of potential success.

But it’s also true that the same forces that have revolutionized journalism are changing the foundation world, too. Journalists tend to think that, because our world was hit early and hard by the shift, we’re the only ones who are making it. I’ve often used something I heard Howard Weaver say in describing the changes wrought by the digital era: “We think it’s raining on us, when it’s really just raining.’’

The shifting objectives and growing emphasis on impact measurement by foundations certainly have frustrated folks who’ve received traditional funding. It’s also led, I’ve observed, to a merry chase for “what’s hot’’ and fundable by some entrepreneurs, sometimes at the expense of pursuing work that might actually prove sustainable. Funders bear responsibility for their lack of clarity as they try to figure out their own path, churning waters that were already pretty well roiled by the changing journalism/business models.

But I think that we’re starting to see some of the flailing around subside. In part that comes, I think, as funders and those who are actually doing the work in the field come together more frequently for conversation about what works, what doesn’t and what risks might be worth taking. I’ve been encouraged by what I’ve heard from those who participated in recent conversations on nonprofit journalism led by The Knight Foundation and the Pew Research Center, for instance. And a gathering I participated in at Montclair State University to discuss a new study of the New Jersey news ecosystem last spring produced a lively conversation among those who provide funding and those who use it.

It’s this emerging conversation – about funders, non-profit startups, emerging partnerships with existing non-profit media – that has grown to fascinate me. It’s a conversation that is always there in the backdrop of my own work. In occasional  posts here, I hope to keep thinking out loud about the ways this dialogue is evolving, and help spark even more productive discussion.