A letter from our Director

August 9, 2024

Dear Reader,

I’m pleased to announce we’ve won another major grant.

The Cincinnati-based Scripps Howard Fund has awarded the Institute for Public Service Reporting a $300,000 grant to launch an open-source investigations program.



This four-year grant is a true game-changer. It will grow our budding national profile and create new teaching opportunities for The Institute and the University of Memphis’ Department of Journalism and Strategic Media.

Marc Perrusquia

The grant allows us to launch a hybrid journalism-academic program in Fall 2025. With this new graduate-degree program, the UofM will become one of only a handful of colleges nationwide teaching digital and visual investigations. It's an emerging field in which journalists analyze publicly available video, satellite imagery, social media networks, online databases and other data in the performance of investigative journalism.

Many journalists now using these techniques are either self-taught or have learned them via online forums.

As reported in separate press releases earlier this week by Scripps and the UofM, our new Open-Source Investigative Reporting Program adds another dimension to The Institute’s mentoring program, the Otis L. Sanford Journalist Incubator. The incubator currently features a paid internship program for UofM students and operates Civil Wrongs, our documentary-style podcast and academic course exploring racial injustice.

The incubator also works with introductory journalism students at University Middle and High School.

This is the second major national grant this year for our “small but mighty” nonprofit news organization. Last spring, the Public Welfare Foundation awarded us a $100,000 grant for a data journalism initiative.

This momentum is extremely energizing. Now in its seventh year, The Institute is hitting its stride. We are realizing our two-fold mission: Increasing the quality and quantity of investigative reporting in Greater Memphis while also mentoring the next generation of journalists.

I’d like to thank the Scripps Howard Fund, which created this opportunity in partnership with the Adam R. Scripps Foundation.

By the way, this is the second open-source grant Scripps has awarded. The first went amid stiff competition earlier this year to the University of Southern California, which runs one of the country’s elite journalism schools. That’s pretty good company.

Thanks also to you, our readers, for your continuing support. Thank you, too, for your deep concern for our community and your abiding faith in journalism that makes a difference.

You make it all possible.

Marc Perrusquia

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The Institute is led by director Marc Perrusquia, who worked nearly 30 years as an investigative reporter at The Commercial Appeal. He’s the author of the 2018 book “A Spy In Canaan,’’ which exposed civil rights photographer Ernest Withers’ secret life as an FBI informant and inspired the 10-part podcast “Ernie’s Secret” and the documentary film “The Picture Taker,’’ to be released on PBS in January.

The Institute’s associate director, David Waters, worked more than 30 years at The Commercial Appeal and another four at The Washington Post. He is revered as Memphis’s best news writer and is beloved for his work exploring faith, child poverty and education

Laura Kebede-Twumasi is a Report for America corps member. She recently hosted and wrote WKNO public television’s special “History, Justice and the Journalists” on unresolved civil rights crimes in the Memphis area. She previously covered education inequities for Chalkbeat Tennessee and local government and religion for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.