The New York Times isn’t new to working with local newsrooms. But it does appear to be getting better at the task.
As my late colleague Rick Edmonds reported in 2011, the Times Company sold 16 regional newspapers it owned to invest in its own “next wave of digital development.” Fourteen years later, I think we can agree the Times has reinvested in itself pretty well.
In the last few years, it has moved back into the local news space in a different way — as a partner.
In 2023, I wrote about the Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship, which would work with journalists and newsrooms around the country to invest in, edit and support ambitious journalism. This year, one of those partnerships won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism with The Baltimore Banner.
Now, the work moves beyond mere partnership.
Last month, the Times announced its latest project — a regional investigative center with Deep South Today. (Deep South Today is a network of nonprofit newsrooms in Mississippi and Louisiana.) The center, which launches early next year, will include a lead editor, full-time investigative reporters and data reporters, and fellows at Mississippi Today and Verite News in New Orleans, according to the press release. The center will also get support from Stanford University’s Big Local News. (Fun fact: Verite News’ editor-in-chief is Terry Baquet. The New York Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship’s executive editor is brother Dean Baquet.)
“Our very first fellow came from Mississippi Today, investigating sheriffs across Mississippi,” said Chris Davis, the fellowship’s deputy editor.
As that work expanded and the journalists involved found serious and continuing examples of police brutality, “no one wanted to walk away from them because there’s still more to be done.”
“We’re really trying to fill the gaps in local news coverage all over our region, and there are a lot of gaps,” said Warwick Sabin, Deep South Today’s president and CEO.
Thanks to the partnership with The New York Times, reporters in Mississippi and Louisiana are able to build investigative muscles, he said, and with the new center, they’ll add more permanence and infrastructure to the work.
“What we thought was necessary was to house this investigative reporting center at Deep South Today,” Sabin said, “on the ground.”
The Times’ Davis sees the Deep South Today center as a new way to test how the fellowship can help local news. If it works there, it could be replicated.
For Deep South Today, which partners with a number of organizations, the center is an opportunity to build something sustainable.
“The reason why Deep South Today was created was we’re in a region underserved by local journalism,” Sabin said. “If we’re going to really do this kind of investigative reporting, which we all agree is very needed … then I think we’re going to have to do it in partnership and collaboration with other organizations. We can’t do everything ourselves, and we have to make the most of all the resources that we can coalesce.”
And there’s a lot to cover, including the environment, health care, how cuts to the federal government are hitting communities and voting rights. Positions are open now.
Something that’s stuck out as the Times’ fellowship has worked with newsrooms across the country, Davis said, is that it’s hard to build capacity for this kind of work in small newsrooms.
“This is one option for trying to address that problem.”
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