The Times-Picayune and The Advocate on Wednesday announced plans to dramatically increase the size of its investigative unit and to expand coverage throughout Louisiana.
The news organization will double its staff by hiring a data journalist, two additional reporters and a deputy editor. The team will be led by Gordon Russell, managing editor for investigations.
The new hires will be made possible through tax-deductible donations to the Louisiana Fund for Investigative Journalism.
The fund will be administered by the The Greater New Orleans Foundation.
The 3-year, $1.5 million effort reflects an emerging business model being used by legacy news organizations to diversify in a challenging business environment. The Times-Picayune and The Advocate were among 16 news outlets selected in September by the Local Media Association to participate in a program designed to develop this model. It is being led by staff members of The Seattle Times, an industry leader in fundraising for specialized reporting teams.
Program leader Joaquin Alvarado, who helped develop The Seattle Times’ investigative fund, said the complex reporting that holds the powerful to account often ends up on the cutting-room floor because of how expensive it is to produce. Newsroom employees at American newspapers have declined by more than half between 2008 to 2019, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“As more and more newsrooms adopt the community funding model to expand their public service journalism, investigative reporting stands out as the most critical challenge,” Alvarado said. “Investigative reporting takes time, commitment and resources. It also takes trust, and by inviting the community to participate, we are deepening our commitment to them.”
No place needs investigative reporting more than Louisiana, said Gordon Russell, who has spent his career exposing wrongdoing in the state. Louisiana has long been among the poorest and most corrupt in the nation, and ranks tops for mass incarceration and poor health outcomes.
“We are last on all the sorts of lists you don’t want to be last on, and we’ve had way too many public servants who have served their own interests rather than those of the public,” Russell said. “We think this state needs a lot more of it, and we think we’re the ones to do it.”
The Times-Picayune and The Advocate, with a combined five Pulitzer Prizes, has a rich history of producing deeply-reported projects.
Most recently, the newspapers won a Pulitzer Prize in local reporting for the 2018 series “ Tilting the Scales,” which analyzed Louisiana’s unusual law allowing non-unanimous jury verdicts in felony cases. After a year of hand-compiling trial records from the state’s 64 parishes, the newspapers found that not only was the law created as a tactic to suppress the votes of Black jurors, but it continued to exert racist effects on Black defendants. The series prompted Louisiana voters to change the state constitution and in 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court, citing the newspapers’ work, declared non-unanimous juries unconstitutional.
By doubling the size of the investigative unit, the news organization intends to ramp up the volume of its investigations, which have focused on topics ranging from self-serving government officials to tax incentive giveaways to insider dealing in the state prison system. The papers will also expand the scope of their work to include other parts of the state where media coverage has diminished.
The Times-Picayune and The Advocate, owned by John and Dathel Georges, currently serve Southeast Louisiana with daily home delivery in the New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Lafayette areas. The news outlet also has more digital readership than any other in the state, reaching 10 million visitors a month on its affiliated sites: NOLA.com and TheAdvocate.com.
All three newsrooms are led by Publisher Judi Terzotis and Editor Peter Kovacs.
The Times-Picayune and The Advocate will maintain full editorial control over the stories and other content financed by the Louisiana Investigative Journalism Fund. To learn more, visit investigate.nola.com.
