Last year, Press Gazette tallied up the amount of funding provided to newsrooms large and small to find that at least £55m of money had been given to fund journalism as of mid-2021. Our current total for funding we know is confirmed until the end of 2022 stands at £77m.
Our research is based on figures supplied by some funders and recipients as well as publicly available records from the Charity Commission and 360Giving. We have also included grant support to journalism from tech giants Google and Facebook, which is separate to the content syndication fees they pay to publishers.
While our figure most likely misses some of the funding given, it suggests that the amounts given to UK newsrooms are going up and philanthropy is a growing source of revenue. Separately, to get an idea of the international picture, we also looked again at grants reported in a database by US donor network Media Impact Funders. The data show that newsrooms around the world raised a record $619.5m (£518m) from donors in 2020 (data for later years have not been fully reported).