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UK charity launched to support public interest journalism

<span>Photograph: Alberto Pezzali/AP</span>
Photograph: Alberto Pezzali/AP

British news outlets are to be supported by a new charity which will take advantage of tax breaks to funnel donations into public interest journalism across the UK.

The Public Interest News Foundation, which claims to be the first organisation of its kind to be awarded charitable status, is asking for donations to support journalism that helps inform the public. It will seek money from tech companies such as Google and Facebook – along with wealthy philanthropists, charitable trusts and members of the public – before deploying the cash to support news outlets it selects as meeting qualifying criteria.

“The objective is to support the new breed of small independent news organisations,” said founder, Jonathan Heawood. “They don’t have to be local, it just has to be public interest news. It can be international investigations, or news about the roadworks down your street. Just as long as they’re doing it accurately and ethically.”

Heawood said the existing business model for providing public interest news, often through financially struggling for-profit local newspapers, was failing. “A lot of these small players are clinging on by their fingerprints. There’s not much argument for sustaining something that isn’t working but there is an argument for investing in something new.”

The Public Interest News Foundation’s charitable status was awarded on the basis its work will boost public education, citizenship and civic responsibility. It also means donors can receive significant tax breaks on any money they donate. But there is one key caveat: due to British charity law, outlets which receive the money will have to avoid anything that could be perceived as political campaigning.

While the US has a long culture of philanthropists supporting news organisations, with the likes of investigative site ProPublica winning a Pulitzer prize for journalism in the process, there has been less of a shift to this model in the UK.

One of the few exceptions is the Guardian, which has been owned by the Scott Trust since 1936. It has a duty to maintain the provision of the Guardian’s journalism and increasingly relies on reader contributions but is not legally a charity.

Last year a government-commissioned report on the future of local media proposed a state-backed organisation supporting public service, a recommendation dismissed by ministers on the basis that it would damage press freedom.

However, the financial crisis in local news – with regional newspaper group JPI Media still struggling to find a buyer, 15 years after it was purchasing newspapers for hundreds of millions of pounds – has revived interest in the charitable model.

The new independent foundation is a spin-off from the press regulator Impress, which was set up by Heawood in the aftermath of the Leveson report. It is the only officially recognised press regulator, aided by millions of pounds of funding from Max Mosley’s family trust, but has failed to attract any major publications to regulate.

Heawood and three other members of Impress staff have been given a 12-month leave of absence to try to get the new organisation off the ground and make it a success. It has already distributed 20 emergency grants of £3,000 to small media organisations such as Muslim website 5 Pillars, Scottish investigative site the Ferret, and women of colour outlet gal-dem.

Tom Murdoch, of lawyers Stone King, who helped secure charitable status for the Public Interest News Foundation, said the decision was a breakthrough. “In legal terms, this represents a new interpretation of the law to recognise that public benefit journalism can be charitable.”