I found an article in the American Journalism Review that described the recent development of foundation funded news.
This kind of set up is not quite crowdfunding where interested individuals pool resources to support reporting. In this case the money is in foundations, already pooled for a particular purpose.
New forms of nonprofit, grant-funded news operations are proliferating. The lineup includes the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting (see “Funding for Foreign Forays”), Brandeis University’s Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, MinnPost.com (see Drop Cap) and at least two state-level health news sites (see “Healthy Initiatives”). The Washington Independent, freshly minted in January, joined the Center for Independent Media’s network of four related sites in Colorado, Iowa, Michigan and Minnesota. And there are many more in the mix
— Nonprofit News American Journalism Review February/March 2008