Our Scholarships+ program is back for 2022, to help you find and attend programs that take your career down the paths you’re most excited about. If you already know about something you want to learn this year, our application form will be open January 31-February 11. If you’d like to hear some ideas about how you could use scholarship funds (and how this program can broaden your network in journalism), read on!

How you can use our Scholarships+ program in 2022

At OpenNews, we believe in a network effect: Supporting one journalist can strengthen entire communities of practice. Helping journalists pay for professional development is one of the ways we make that community support more visible and available. If you’re new to our Scholarships+ program, it offers money toward events and trainings for journalists who work with data or code. This is one way we can help people in those roles build skills and relationships to make their newsrooms more equitable and just.

This program focuses on participatory workshops and coaching because we love the way experiential learning connects you with people along with new skills. Many journalists don’t have enough colleagues to turn to for ideas, answers, and support, so helping people develop their personal networks can be career-changing, too. We know it’ll take working together to make a better future for journalism, and our “together” gets a lot more powerful as we add deeper relationships to draw on.

Ideas for using our scholarships

In 2021, Scholarships+ participants used stipends to take part in:

• Professional journalism and affinity-group conferences like NICAR, AAJA, ONA, and the Association of Healthcare Journalists Conference
• Journalism-adjacent and skill-building events like Allied Media Conference, PyCon, and Dataharvest
• Leadership development with Poynter’s leadership academy for women and the Management Center’s Online Managing to Change the World
• Online workshops in accessibility, statistics, dataviz, and information verification
• Focused work with a speaking coach and an expert in newsroom management

We want to give you money in 2022 (and other orgs do, too!)

Our scholarship applications ask a few questions about how you’d like to use a stipend, and we don’t ask for any followup beyond some quick feedback about how everything went. And we’re not the only ones who want to help you get to events!

Conferences, workshops, and other support organizations like us often build in financial aid to make professional development more accessible. If you’re thinking about attending NICAR this year, for example, there’s a fellowship program just for that event, open through January 31. You should apply! And as you encounter other opportunities, please let us know. We’d love to spread the word about those too.

Applications for the first round of Scholarships+ this year will be open January 31-February 11. If you’d like to get notifications about programs like this one, Twitter and our newsletter are great ways to stay up-to-date.