Call for Proposals: Report on Vital Ocean and Fisheries Issues

The Pulitzer Center provides grants to cover the hard costs of reporting projects.

This new initiative seeks to support enterprising journalists with ambitious reporting projects that will yield high-quality, in-depth journalism that exposes long-running fisheries problems and enables key stakeholders and a well-informed public to find solutions that lead to more legal and sustainably caught fish, supply chains free of forced labor, greater food security, and thriving coastal communities. Through the support, they intend to develop a global cohort of journalists dedicated to surfacing vital underreported ocean and fisheries stories.

Topics

• They encourage applications for all formats of reporting on climate impacts, pollution, and biodiversity loss, and they would also like to see more applications on lesser reported topics, including:
  • Climate change impacts (other than sea-level rise)
  • Deep-sea mining
  • Marine energy generation
  • The blue economy
  • Marine genetic resources and the sharing of benefits
  • Marine Protected Areas (creation, implementation, and management)
  • Species and habitat loss, restoration, and protection
  • Ocean science
  • Blue carbon and ecosystem value
  • Marine geoengineering
  • Shipping
  • Polar issues
  • Fishmeal production
  • Aquaculture and blue foods.

Eligibility Criteria

• They welcome story ideas on illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, including fisheries subsidies, overfishing, and the depletion of fish stocks, impacts on small-scale fishers and livelihoods in coastal communities, as well as solutions-oriented stories.
• Grants are open to all journalists: writers, photographers, radio producers, and filmmakers; staff journalists as well as freelancers.
• They support veteran reporters who have been widely published, but also back younger applicants who are looking for help to jumpstart their careers. A diversity of voices— gender, ethnicities, backgrounds and nationalities—is important to them. Some applicants get a grant on their first try; others have to work harder at it.
• They particularly welcome applications from the Global South, and seek more reporting from these regions: Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific, east and southern Africa, the Middle East, and North Africa.
• They are also interested in receiving proposals for collaborative reporting projects by teams of reporters working on ocean and fisheries issues.

What they don’t fund?

• To save the grantees and staff time, they thought it would be helpful to outline editorial products and project expenses they don’t fund:
  • Books (they can support a story that might become part of a book, as long as the story is published independently in a media outlet).
  • Feature-length films (they do support short documentaries with ambitious distribution plans).
  • Staff salaries.
  • Equipment purchases (equipment rentals are considered on a case-by-case basis).
  • An outlet’s general expenses (for example rent, utilities, insurance).
  • Seed money for start-ups.
  • Routine breaking news and coverage.
  • Advocacy/marketing campaigns.
  • Data projects aimed solely at academic research. Data should be developed to enhance/support journalism.

For more information, visit Pulitzer Center.