A letter from our Director

January 10, 2025

Dear Reader,

I have some good news. We’re teaming with Report for America again this year.

RFA has named the Institute for Public Service Reporting as one of 66 newsrooms across the U.S. that will host an emerging journalist to help ramp up local news coverage.

With RFA's financial assistance, we will add a journalist to our staff this summer to help coordinate our new open-source investigations program. 

Marc Perrusquia

Our recent experience with RFA has been tremendous, and we’re expecting huge returns from this new venture.

RFA has paid us more than $60,000 over the past three years — money used to develop our Civil Wrongs podcast and hire award-winning journalist Laura Kebede-Twumasi, who has been on staff since 2022.

We are expecting a similar financial commitment when we launch our open-source investigations program in July.

If you’ve never heard of Report for America I encourage you to check them out. They are doing amazing work to help reverse the devastating decline of journalism in our country.

RFA operates as a national service program that pairs journalists with local news organizations to help report on under-covered issues and communities across the U.S. It is an initiative of The GroundTruth Project, a nonprofit journalism organization “dedicated to rebuilding journalism from the ground up”.

That includes supplying talent, technical assistance and financial support to host newsrooms.

“Since our program started, we've seen firsthand the impact of helping newsrooms tell their story to help their community better understand the roles and benefits of local news,’’ RFA local news sustainability director Morgan Baum said in announcing this year’s host newsrooms. “People are stepping up to generate new ways to fund newsrooms across the country."

Nearly 60 percent of RFA newsrooms are small news organizations like ours with nine or fewer editorial staff members. Sixty-five percent are nonprofits.

This year’s RFA host newsrooms include two other Tennessee news organizations: The Nashville Banner, which is hiring an education reporter, and the Kingsport Times News, which is adding an environmental reporter to its staff.

Our new RFA corps member will lead our open-source investigations program that launches July 1. In a partnership with the University of Memphis’s Department of Journalism and Strategic Media, our open-source investigations reporter will serve on staff at The Institute while doubling as a professor of practice in a new graduate-degree program.

He or she will teach students and working journalists how to locate and analyze publicly available video, satellite imagery, social media networks, online databases and other information in the performance of investigative journalism.

We’re expecting our open-source journalist to expand our reporting parameters while also sharpening the skills of Memphis’ larger pool of journalists.

The new program is largely funded by a four-year, $300,000 grant from the Scripps Howard Fund. The money we receive from RFA — as much as $30,000 in the first year alone — will subsidize our open-source journalist’s salary. The money we save there will be steered into subsidies and tuition discounts to make the learning component of this program affordable to disadvantaged students.

You’ll be hearing more about this in the months to come.

We’re grateful to Scripps and Report for America for making this new initiative possible.

We’re also grateful to you, our readers, for your continuing interest and support.

Marc Perrusquia

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