… and we couldn’t be more psyched to see our seventy 2011/2012 nonprofits as the feature of this week’s issues of the Washington City Paper:

[...] Ordinarily, we’d sit around grousing about holiday materialism before schlepping out to pick up stocking stuffers. But this season, we decided to do something different.

For the better part of a decade, the Catalogue for Philanthropy: Greater Washington has been vetting top local nonprofits to include in its annual giving guide. The process, which takes about six months, involves selecting 70 organizations with budgets under $3 million and rock-solid financial and organizational structures. The vetting is conducted by expert volunteers from the nonproft sector as well as by accountants from the auditing firm RAFFA. Traditionally, the Catalogue has bound its list into a book and distributed thousands of copies to “high net worth individuals” in the area. This year, we’ve worked with the organization to highlight its list in our pages, with the idea that you don’t have to be rich to want to give a little.

Read the full piece here (or hurry to the nearest City Paper box!), and get an awesome glimpse into our newest nonprofits. We’ve also highlighted volunteer opportunities, so you can give with time or money this season.

We always like to celebrate a “first ever” for CFP!

From the American Journalism Review (October 21, 2011):

Investigative reporting remains a major part of the mission for the mainstream media. But financial pressures have drastically reduced the watchdog capacity at many news organizations.

Nonprofit investigative outlets like ProPublica have jumped in to help plug the gap. But there’s still plenty of accountability reporting to be done.

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A new study from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has received quite a bit of attention since its publication yesterday. Titled “Assessing A New Landscape in Journalism,” the study delves into a new news phenomenon:

As traditional newsrooms have shrunk, a group of institutions and funders motivated by something other than profit are entering the journalism arena. This distinguishes them from the commercial news institutions that dominated the 20th century, whose primary sources of revenue — advertising and circulation — were self-evident. [...]

The 46 national and state-level news sites examined — a group that included seven new commercial sites with similar mission — offered a wide range of styles and approaches, but roughly half, the study found, produced news coverage that was clearly ideological in nature.

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