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Early this year, before we thought much of masks, quarantines and vaccines, three veteran journalists were preparing for life after the newspaper.
Greg Moore, Ken Ward Jr. and Eric Eyre each spent more than 20 years at the (Charleston, West Virginia) Gazette-Mail. On Feb. 20, Moore’s position as editor was eliminated
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. Ken Ward Jr., an investigative journalist and 2018 McArthur Fellow
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, went into the newsroom that weekend and cleared out 30 years of stuff. Unopened boxes now sit stacked in the spare room in his house. He quit the following Monday. And Eyre, who won a Pulitzer Prize
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in 2017 for his work exposing Big Pharma’s role in the opioid crisis, left a little more than a month later
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.
Today — mid-pandemic, pre-election, with a few decades’ experience with investigative reporting and a few months’ experience with the business of journalism — they’re launching a newsroom
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. (You should be able to see the new site by this afternoon.)
“Things are chaotic out there,” said Moore, co-founder, executive editor and CEO. (“I still cringe a little bit every time I say that,” he said of his title, “but that’s what it is.”)
Add to that chaos the unhealthy state of investigative and in-depth reporting in West Virginia, and “it’s a great time to be up to no good in this region,” Moore said. “We see the need there, and we plan to fill it.”
The three veteran journalists have been talking about what’s become Mountain State Spotlight for years. For most of those years, however, they envisioned it living inside the Gazette-Mail. That newsroom, a product of two merged newsrooms, declared bankruptcy, got a new owner, and was starting to make progress
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building digital audiences. They hoped to build an investigative hub fueled by the “sustained outrage”
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former publisher W.E. Chilton III championed. And they figured it could eventually transition to a nonprofit to insulate it from the sustained decline of local newspapers.
The day Moore was let go, Ward said, was a signal that the structural changes happening at the paper meant it wouldn’t be the kind of place that could support the work the three envisioned. Ward, whose work has included covering the impact of coal mining, was funded by ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. He reached out to ProPublica, then Report for America and the American Journalism Project.
By the end of March, The New York Times’ Ben Smith reported on the creation of a new, then-unnamed newsroom
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.
For all it takes to get money, support, talent and buzz for the launch of a new newsroom, Mountain State Spotlight happened pretty fast. And, again, at the start of the pandemic.
That’s meant that until recently, the team hasn’t met in person, and then, only for a photo shoot, masks on, space between them. There’s no physical newsroom yet. They have support from Report for America with four reporters, a partnership with ProPublica and financial and business support from the American Journalism Project.
“Ken, Greg and I, we really know how to do the journalism part,” said Eyre.
But what about the business side of running a newsroom, like reimbursing reporters for mileage or figuring out budgets and salaries or the big stuff, like fundraising?
When reporters needed a printer/scanner, Eyre said, “I just ordered one myself on Amazon and had it sent to one of their houses.”
AJP is helping the co-founders figure those details out, plus how to build local philanthropic support, which they’ll have to do to keep running.
“I can’t say enough about the way those national figures in this movement to save journalism have tried to help West Virginia,” Ward said. “It’s really on us now.”
The goal, Moore said, is to give West Virginia the kind of watchdog journalism it needs and deserves while building a sustainable nonprofit newsroom that serves the state, particularly underserved communities.
All three still have friends at the Gazette-Mail and believe a healthy local newspaper is good for their community. They’re focusing on longer-term investigative work around public health, poverty, business, government and politics. Mountain State Spotlight has made listening to the community a fundamental part of how they work, Moore said, starting with a community needs assessment.
The pandemic has made the launch of a new newsroom tough. So has the economy, Moore said, and the issues facing legacy media make investigative reporting even harder.
“But at the same time, partly because of all those things, it’s hard to imagine a moment when people in general and West Virginia in particular need strong accountability journalism more than they need it now, and that’s what we’re doing here.”
At top: Staff of Mountain State Spotlight gathered for the first time at the capital for socially distanced group photos. Both Ken Ward Jr., and Eric Eyre spoke about the talented, eager reporters they’re now working with, several who are West Virginia natives. (Photo by F. Brian Ferguson)
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Remember the Kenosha journalist who left his newsroom
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over a clickbait headline? He’s raised $45,000
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and has now partnered
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with Racine County Eye.
You can follow the rural reporter who will be biking and reporting
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across 900 miles ahead of the election.
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that are taking part in LION’s first boot camp.
Google News Initiative has announced the GNI Digital Growth Program “aimed at helping small and mid-sized news publishers around the world develop the capabilities required to accelerate the growth of their businesses online.”
This week as part of my fellowship, I wrote about lessons from a viral obit
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.
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And here’s the latest obit
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I wrote for the Tampa Bay Times.
I’m still tracking the journalists who’ve died from the coronavirus
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.
And finally, I don’t know who else needs this today, but the Los Angeles Times’ plant content
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is very good.
That’s it for me, see you next week!
Kristen
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