A ray of sunshine amid the constant reports of newspaper layoffs: the Ford Foundation is giving the Washington Post a half a million dollar grant to "expand its government-accountability reporting at the national and local levels," which will pay for four new hires, according to a Post memo reprinted by Andrew Beaujon. In an earlier move to “to preserve and advance high-quality journalism," the Foundation in May gave the L.A. Times a cool million-dollar grant to "focus on the Vietnamese, Korean and other immigrant communities, the California prison system, the border region and Brazil.”