What do an independent journalist in Brooklyn and the editor-in-chief of a local Kansas nonprofit newsroom have in common? At first blush, not much. But when I, the publisher of a newsletter called The Handbasket, and Sherman Smith, the top editor of the Kansas Reflector, teamed up to report on the one-year anniversary of a police raid on a small Kansas newspaper, something special happened: We were able to bring two entirely different perspectives to the same story for a series of powerful pieces.
Going into the project, I was keenly aware I had never been to Kansas and had no understanding of the people and geography — which is why I knew it was important to partner with a local journalist who had the lay of the land. Smith helped set up meetings with people in town who trusted him, and he could zero in on which stories would connect with Kansans. Conversely, I brought a more zoomed-out view to coverage, asking questions I knew national readers would want answers to. Smith comes from a hard-news background, whereas I deal mostly in features and commentary. He was the perfect journalism yin to my yang.
Our collaboration is just one example of national and local reporters teaming up in a landscape of dwindling local media outlets and a vacuum of rural news coverage. What makes these partnerships essential is their high potential for impact: If a story isn’t told, change can never be made.
In recent years, local journalists have been working directly with national nonprofits and newsrooms to improve their communities — and they’re holding power to account that may have otherwise gone unchecked.
Providing local outlets with much-needed support
Sarah Blustain, assistant managing editor at Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica, helps run the nonprofit investigative newsroom’s Local Reporting Network. Launched in 2018, the program engages local newsrooms across the country in a two- to three-year partnership, during which it supports a reporter’s investigation with time, money and resources. In the six years since the program’s inception, ProPublica has partnered with more than 70 local newsrooms.
“I think you can’t overstate how important it is to do investigative reporting locally,” Blustain said. “There’s so many stories that are out there, so many rocks to look under that there’s literally not the bandwidth in many locations to do so.”
ProPublica typically works with 20 newsrooms in a given year, chosen from a pool of applicants who map out the stories they want to investigate. It provides up to $75,000 toward the salary of one investigative reporter in the newsroom, plus some benefits. It also assigns an editor to meet virtually with the reporter every week and arrange face time with specialty team members like data and visual reporters. By 2029, the program hopes to have local reporters in all 50 states. “Everything that we would do for a ProPublica story, we have available for our Local Reporting Network partners,” Blustain said.
Similarly, national nonprofit Report for America pairs approximately 200 reporters a year with resource-strapped local news outlets in need of more staff. An outgrowth of an international project helping journalism thrive in countries where democracy was at risk, the U.S. program was started when RFA founders realized that democracy was at risk right at home.
Without Report for America’s local collaborations, stories like that of a Guatemalan asylum-seeker navigating Charlotte, North Carolina’s complicated immigration courts may have never been told. The piece also earned reporter Maria Ramirez Uribe an award from the National Association of Hispanic Publications.
“The goal is to make sure that every community has access to good local news, because we have been seeing year after year what happens as community after community loses all news sources,” said Kim Kleman, executive director of RFA. “We’re starting to see with data coming out from all different places the result of what happens when communities are not civically engaged and local newsrooms go away.”
Beyond providing financial support for the reporters’ salaries, RFA also provides all its reporters with training sessions on topics like how to request a public record, how to cover a protest and how to cover specific beats. Perhaps most crucially, it teaches local newsrooms how to effectively fundraise so they can remain financially viable for years to come. RFA has helped 200 newsrooms raise $7.4 million in donations, according to its 2024 impact report.
Approaching collaborations with mutual respect
Initiating a collaboration is the easy part: Sending a friendly email to gauge a person’s interest in partnering and demonstrating your knowledge of their work is a good first step. Be sure to explain why you believe working together would make the story stronger, help them understand what you bring to the table and highlight what you think they’ll bring to a partnership.
When I first reached out to Smith at the Kansas Reflector, I was admittedly a bit nervous: Who was I to suggest a partnership? Did my work have any relevance to his? But the most important thing was that I respected his outlet for uncovering the corruption in Marion County, Kansas, that led to a 2023 police raid. No matter how he responded, the actual work mattered above all.
“Too many editors are insecure and should trust their reporters more,” Smith said. “These projects are so much easier when two people with mutual respect and enthusiasm for the story can just get together and work it out. I’ve had collaborations break down in the past because someone at another organization felt like they had to leave their mark.”
When working with reporters and editors in different locations and with different backgrounds than you, perhaps the most essential piece is to check your ego at the door. Blustain echoed Smith’s sentiment.
“You need to go into those partnerships, whether you’re on staff or a freelancer, with a healthy amount of respect for one another — that each person in that partnership is bringing something unique and valuable to working together,” said Blustain. “I think you also need to go into it with clear parameters for what each person is gonna do and a shared sense of what the goals are — really open lines of communication.”
Increasing potential for impact
Beyond providing information to communities, national reporters, outlets and nonprofits acutely understand the potential for real-life impact when local journalism is given appropriate support.
Blustain pointed to a ProPublica project from 2023 in which an investigative reporter for the Idaho Statesman looked at the state’s hazardous and crumbling school buildings, and why the school districts lacked the funds to fix them. When the reporting project was completed, Idaho Gov. Brad Little approved using $2 billion in state funds to fix the decaying structures.
“That’s the kind of thing where I think doing this kind of work at scale in partnership really changes what is possible as a result of the journalism,” Blustain said.
At The People Sentinel in Barnwell, South Carolina, RFA placed reporter Elijah de Castro, a native of rural New York, to cover a local county’s city hall for the first time in 10 years. The mere presence of a journalist at council meetings was viewed as a sign of hope to county residents who were used to having their lives ignored, said Kleman. Over the past year, de Castro has uncovered scandals and malfeasance in local government, like the sudden firing of a county official and contamination in the water supply.
“You think about shenanigans in national politics or national government, but this is happening all over the place in communities in the country because so few reporters are there to pay attention,” Kleman said.
At the Kansas Reflector — part of States Newsroom, a network of nonprofit newsrooms in all 50 states — Smith and his team have also seen firsthand how their work has created real change in the state. Aside from the outlet being the first to report on the police raid of the Marion newspaper, Smith himself identified a former candidate for local office who was present at the January 6th insurrection. His story ended up being included in the FBI indictment. And when a small town church attempted to shutter the local library, stories by reporter Rachel Mipro attracted the ACLU and allowed the library to stay open.
Above all, the existing and growing partnerships between national and local outlets are a reminder that the values of good journalism are universal.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re working for a small-town paper like the Marion County Record, a bigger newspaper, a statewide nonprofit like Kansas Reflector or a one-woman shop out of New York City,” Smith said. “You have to be passionate about giving a voice to the underdog and speaking truth to power.”
NBCU Academy and Project UP, in partnership with nonprofit Local Media Foundation’s News Is Out and Word In Black, launched The Digital Equity Local Voices Lab in April, placing journalists at 16 Black- and LGBTQ-serving news publications across the country.
