Ocean and Fisheries Reporting Grant

Ocean and Fisheries Reporting Grant

Status: ACTIVE
Funder: Pulitzer Center
Last Updated: March 24, 2026

Summary

The Pulitzer Center is inviting applications for the Ocean and Fisheries Reporting Grant, aimed at supporting journalists in addressing critical ocean health and fisheries issues. This initiative encourages innovative reporting on topics such as illegal fishing, climate change impacts, and biodiversity loss. By fostering a global network of journalists, the grant aims to highlight underreported stories, promote sustainable practices, and empower coastal communities. Ideal for both seasoned and emerging journalists, this grant seeks to enhance public awareness through impactful journalism.

Overview

The Pulitzer Center, a nonprofit organization that supports independent global journalism, is now accepting applications for a new reporting initiative focused on ocean health and fisheries. The Pulitzer Center is seeking ambitious reporting proposals from freelance and staff journalists from around the world who wish to report on vital ocean and fisheries issues and are in need of support for their reporting projects. Grant Overview We believe journalists can play a crucial role in raising awareness about the complex web of challenges facing the ocean and fisheries. We also know that reporting on these issues can be extremely challenging, given that ocean research, illegal trawling, fishing fleet labor abuses, and other fisheries-related issues often occur on the high seas, far from public view. This new initiative seeks to support enterprising journalists with ambitious reporting projects that will yield high-quality, in-depth journalism that exposes long-running fisheries problems and enables key stakeholders and a well-informed public to find solutions that lead to more legal and sustainably caught fish, supply chains free of forced labor, greater food security, and thriving coastal communities. Through our support, we intend to develop a global cohort of journalists dedicated to surfacing vital underreported ocean and fisheries stories. Over the past couple of years, the Pulitzer Center has invested in a number of in-depth, hard-hitting reporting projects documenting climate change, environmental degradation, crime, and human conflict playing out across the world’s oceans, while at the same time chronicling solutions and the resiliency of communities facing these threats.

Eligibility

You can learn more about this opportunity by visiting the funder's website. We welcome story ideas on illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, including fisheries subsidies, overfishing, and the depletion of fish stocks, impacts on small-scale fishers and livelihoods in coastal communities, as well as solutions-oriented stories. We encourage applications for all formats of reporting on climate impacts, pollution, and biodiversity loss, and we would also like to see more applications on lesser reported topics, including:Climate change impacts (other than sea-level rise)Deep-sea miningMarine energy generationThe blue economyMarine genetic resources and the sharing of benefitsMarine Protected Areas (creation, implementation, and management)Species and habitat loss, restoration, and protectionOcean scienceBlue carbon and ecosystem valueMarine geoengineeringShippingPolar issuesFishmeal productionAquaculture and blue foodsFreelance and staff journalists from around the world We support veteran reporters who have been widely published, but also back younger applicants who are looking for help to jumpstart their careers.

Ineligibility

To save our grantees and staff time, we thought it would be helpful to outline editorial products and project expenses we don’t fund:Books (we can support a story that might become part of a book, as long as the story is published independently in a media outlet) Feature-length films (we do support short documentaries with ambitious distribution plans) Staff salaries Equipment purchases (equipment rentals are considered on a case-by-case basis) An outlet’s general expenses (for example rent, utilities, insurance) Seed money for start-upsRoutine breaking news and coverage Advocacy/marketing campaigns Data projects aimed solely at academic research. Data should be developed to enhance/support journalism.