Hidden Costs brings together award-winning journalists, scholars and major media organizations — the New York Times, PBS Frontline, the Toronto Star, Smithsonian Channel, NBC News, DigitalGlobe and Google News Labs — to undertake investigative-reporting projects.

The money for this $1.9 million journalism project comes not from the Ford, MacArthur or Knight foundations. It’s from an organization most reporters have probably never heard of: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

The research council is an arm of the Canadian government that typically funds literary analyses, sociological studies and anthropological ethnographies, but it seemed to think a motley group of journalists was worthy of support. And it’s not the first time.

Two years ago, we formed the Global Reporting Centre at the University of British Columbia as an outgrowth of a weekend workshop called Re-Imagining Global Reporting. The workshop, funded primarily by the Canadian research council, enabled us to bring journalists and scholars to Vancouver to identify problems of international reporting, brainstorm solutions, and explore what a small, independent organization like the Global Reporting Centre could do to make a difference.

Credit by - GIJN

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