IWMF's PROGRAMS

Digital New Media Entrepreneurs

The Global Digital News Frontier grants are providing women entrepreneurs financing and professional support to launch innovative start ups.

Read about the 2012 start-ups selected to receive $20,000 each in seed money here.

Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship

April 30 is the deadline for the Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship, named after IWMF Courage in Journalism Award winner and Boston Globe correspondent who was killed in Iraq in May 2003. The 2011-2012 Neuffer Fellow was Jackee Batanda from Uganda.

Courage in Journalism Awards

Every year the IWMF honors brave women journalists who risk political persecution,injury and sometimes death in their efforts to expose corruption and champion human rights.

The 2012 Courage in Journalism Award and Lifetime Achievement Award winners will be announced May 3. They will be honored at Courage in Journalism events in New York on Oct. 24 and Los Angeles on Oct. 29.

4-Year Africa Project

With generous support from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, the IWMF launched "Reporting on Agriculture and Women: Africa." The project energized the way African media cover one of the most important topics on the continent.

The IWMF helped African journalists to boost coverage of agriculture and rural development and increase women’s voices – both as journalists and as sources – in stories about agriculture

Funding HIV/AIDS Investigative Reporting

The IWMF established fellowships to train journalists in South Africa to write investigative reports on the HIV/AIDS epidemic. With support from the M*A*C AIDS Fund, these experienced journalists conducted interviews and wrote in-depth research for their publications.

Susan King: Co-Founding IWMF Was ‘Turning Point in My Life”

Twenty-one years after co-founding the International Women’s Media Foundation, Susan King has reinvented herself once again and taken over as dean of the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

King, who stepped down as vice president of external affairs for Carnegie Corporation in New York, said that co-founding IWMF “was a turning point in my life when I realized the power of what we can create. I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t broadened my horizons at IWMF.”

After taking over as dean of the UNC School of Journalism on Jan. 1, 2012, King talked to IWMF about her new job and the paths that took her to this latest challenge overseeing 700 undergraduates, more than 60 graduates and 30 PhD candidates with a staff and faculty of 110. Previously she was a TV anchor in Washington, D.C., and Buffalo, N.Y., a reporter for CNN and ABC Radio and assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor.

Susan King: “I never wanted to be anything but a reporter. I loved being a reporter. It was my very soul. But I started getting bored. I was repeating. I still loved journalism, but I saw that it was changing. I had time on my hands and along with Judy (Woodruff) we created what we hoped would become a nonprofit – the IWMF. When it started, we envisioned it as a global meeting of journalists from around the world. Then we started wondering if we could leave something lasting.

“Launching a nonprofit changed my life. I found I really liked making something happen. I got a real sense of satisfaction in building a nonprofit. It gave me the courage to accept something else – that’s when I took a government job. The sense of building a nonprofit and working with friends and colleagues gave me the courage to start something new.”

IWMF: Now you’re taking over at UNC – how does this transition feel?

Susan King: “I’m pulling together all the things I did in life. At Carnegie I helped build a higher education strategy for journalism. Now the rubber hits the road. Now I’ve got to make this thing keep on going at a time when money is tight. Legislatures aren’t giving as much. I want to share the values I care about with the student population -- who will define what the business looks like years from now.”

IWMF: What will you be telling the students?

Susan King: “My message to students simple: You won’t be just one thing all your life. You need to network from one perch to another and learn new skills. What the world is going to be 10 years from now is different than the world 10 years ago. You have to be flexible and stretch yourself from the foundation you’ve built. At the Department of Labor, we talked about how young people will have eight different career posts.”

IWMF: What are your plans for UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication?

Susan King: “Chapel Hill is part of the 12 schools the Carnegie Knight Initiative (On The Future of Journalism) identified as the best in the country. It’s not like the place is broken. It has been very innovative and out front in how to invent the next form of news. My job is to keep it at that level. “I’m in a listening mode. I can’t come in here and say, ‘Here is what I want you to be.’ I don’t want to be that presumptuous. I think it would be great during the course of my time to name the school – most of the great journalism schools have a name like Newhouse.

“The students are sometimes farther ahead on some digital fronts. They may be digitally adapted, but not really know about great storytelling on all these different platforms. Students are very conscious of social media. One new young scholar we brought in had written a book on Obama’s 2008 campaign and how he used the Internet to win – the documentation and analysis of that. Classes might do research using Twitter.

“One group is looking at how women are portrayed in advertising and doing an analysis of that – looking at the positives and negatives. A group actually went out and produced and wrote the ads.”

IWMF: Is there any thought of creating a Washington, D.C., or state bureau using UNC students?

Susan King: “The first thing we would do is something in North Carolina – local accountability journalism. Some of the important newspapers have cut out important beats. We could have the graduate students reporting and that would service North Carolina. In that way journalism schools can produce work that can be used in the state to really serve. All the changes in journalism have left a gap. Universities can be partners.”

IWMF: How has the transition from New York to Chapel Hill been?

Susan King: “My second day here I went to get coffee in this 18th century building and realized I was used to walking through Times Square. The intensity of what I’m doing is no less than when I did it in an office in New York. When the students arrived back on campus, I walked the same path and I thought, ‘It’s like walking down 5th Avenue at Christmas time. There was a lot of energy.’ ”

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