Hi Revealer,
I’m very pleased to introduce myself as the new CEO of The Center for Investigative Reporting. I join CIR as someone who has had a front-row seat to many of the technological and economic shifts that have reshaped news media, and like many of you, I look at these changes with a genuine mix of hope and concern.
What energizes me about CIR is that in our 45-year history, we have never sat on the sidelines of change. This is an organization that has repeatedly reinvented itself to deliver on its mission to hold the powerful and corrupt to account for the harm they cause in the world.
One of the keys to that spirit of reinvention has been a relentless focus on impact. In 2021 alone, our reporting forced positive change. State governments across the country fundamentally reconsidered how they regulate workplace safety to address Amazon’s workplace injury crisis. Federal authorities sprang into action to react to the exploitation of workers by one of the world’s major sugar companies. The reporting can change individual lives, too: On the local level, our reporting helped a daycare owner fight against oil drilling in her backyard, for example.
At a time when it can feel like many of our institutions are deadlocked or even broken, I find it encouraging to know that accountability journalism can help make our government and legal system more responsive to the needs of their constituents.
But this journalism is hard. It demands independence and rigor, patient cultivation of sources, and an ability to see patterns in the data the rest of us miss. None of that work would be possible without your support. Thank you.
In the coming months, I will be sharing where we are headed next. But please don’t wait to reach out to me. I’m eager to talk to our community to understand what you think we can do to make investigative journalism work in the attention economy.
Thank you,
Kaizar Campwala
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