The news needs inspiration, and collaboration delivers it

Leading a local newsroom in America is about managing crisis — everywhere, all at once.

There’s the business crisis and trying to cobble together a mix of revenue after Big Tech hoovered up ad dollars. The crisis of reaching people when algorithms and AI turn off the information spigot. The crisis of trust and news avoidance. The crisis of physical and legal harassment that reporters face. The crisis of labor and building a skilled, diverse workforce when career prospects are so precarious. 

And this: The crisis of faith, believing that news and journalism are on a one-way death march of steady, inevitable decline.

That is one I cannot accept.

That is one that InvestigateWest, in its own small way, is trying to combat.

InvestigateWest is growing, from one full-time staffer at the end of 2021 to 13 today. On top of that, we actively seek to collaborate with other local news outlets that are still fighting the good fight. Together, we can pool expertise and resources to produce labor-intensive, high-impact projects that would otherwise be out of reach.

Consider this recent column by the editor of the Methow Valley News, the weekly paper of record in Twisp, Washington. It’s basically a love letter to InvestigateWest — timed to the fact the paper was republishing a 4,500-word investigation of ours — and the editor raises an important point worth underlining here: "Articles like the one we are reproducing from InvestigateWest inspire us to consider our own projects, and try to find ways to pursue them.”

Those two words: “inspire us."

Just as bad journalism hurts journalism at large, good journalism — hard-hitting, expensive, ambitious reporting that holds power accountable — raises the bar for everyone. In real ways, these collaborations strengthen the region’s news ecosystem, uplifting under-resourced newsrooms and overworked journalists.

Here’s another example, also from last week: Sound Publishing — “the largest community news organization in Washington State” — reached out to us in July, looking for help on an investigation they wanted to pursue, but didn’t have the time or resources to execute. 

That project fell to our "collaborative investigative reporter,” Moe K. Clark, who teamed up with Andy Nystrom at the Mercer Island Reporter, to produce this scorching investigation last week: "A beloved Mercer Island teacher was accused twice of sexual misconduct with students. The school district kept it quiet." 

“Without this collaboration, I don't believe our newsroom could have produced such a bulletproof story that fast,” Andy Hobbs, the Mercer Island editor, told us. “And that's not a knock on my team. We are a small but mighty group of community newspapers, and we punch above our weight. But as you know, investigative journalism is a different discipline, and our small newsroom simply lacks the resources/experience to ensure the story would have maximum impact. … We learned so much from it.”

The article instantly became the Mercer Island Reporter’s best-read story of the year, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of people who read it on InvestigateWest’s website. Then, KUOW, the Seattle NPR station, got in on the action, hosting Clark on air to discuss her findings, amplifying the story even further. 

In the same week, Danielle Dawson, our collaborative reporter in Oregon, was featured on Oregon Public Broadcasting to talk about her reporting on Medicaid cutbacks. And in Idaho, an investigation we published Friday — revealing that anti-drag legislation pushed by a powerful Christian Nationalist group was built around a deceptively blurred image — was republished by the state’s largest newspaper, among others.

No one yet knows how to solve all the crises facing news and journalism; anyone who says otherwise is selling something. I am willing to bet, however, it will involve smart collaboration, a leap of faith by savvy funders and wildly ambitious journalism that, by its mere existence, inspires more of the same.