ProPublica has selected three partner newsrooms to work with its Local Reporting Network over the next three years. Each of the participating local media partners — Arizona Luminaria, Invisible Institute and the New York Amsterdam News — will dedicate a reporter for a three-year term to focus solely on investigative reporting, in collaboration with ProPublica’s editors and specialized teams. This project is made possible by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
“Over the last six years, the Local Reporting Network has delivered critical reporting to communities across the country and prompted real-life changes,” ProPublica Assistant Managing Editor Sarah Blustain said. “With the support from the Knight Foundation, we’re excited to be able to support more sustained partnerships with these three newsrooms, all of which have a demonstrated track record of investigative reporting. We’re thrilled to get started.”
Arizona Luminaria
Arizona Luminaria, launched in 2022, is a nonpartisan, nonprofit digital newsroom that publishes in English and Spanish, prioritizing local reporting that centers on underserved and underrepresented communities. Under the leadership of co-founder and Executive Editor Dianna Náñez, the newsroom provides free access to local information for readers in Tucson and across Arizona to take action in civic life, community-building and holding power to account. It offers a mix of daily, in-depth and investigative reporting on five topic areas — equity, education, community, voting and the environment — that shine a light on the lives of Latino/a/e, Black, Indigenous and historically excluded people.
Arizona Luminaria’s coverage of the disparate rates of people dying in the Pima County jail won a 2023 Institute for Nonprofit News investigative journalism award and helped drive changes that have led to more awareness and fewer deaths. In 2023, under the leadership of an Indigenous journalist from the Navajo Nation, the newsroom launched a data and investigative reporting project to shed light on “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two-Spirit and Transgender People” — the first comprehensive data effort of its kind in Arizona.
The Invisible Institute
The Invisible Institute, founded in 2015, is a nonprofit journalism production company based on the South Side of Chicago. The newsroom, led by Executive Director Andrew Fan, uses investigative reporting to hold public institutions accountable. As a small team of journalists, data scientists, lawyers and artists, their work coheres around a central principle: that citizens have co-responsibility with the government for maintaining respect for human rights and, when *****s occur, for demanding redress.
The Invisible Institute’s investigations have helped to shift policy in Chicago and beyond, including contributing to overturning more than 200 convictions. In 2015, the newsroom launched the Civic Police Data Project, which makes hundreds of thousands of Chicago police complaints available to the public. This year, the Invisible Institute won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for audio reporting that revisited a 1997 hate crime and the other for local reporting on how police investigations of missing persons cases disproportionately harm Black women and girls.
New York Amsterdam News
For more than a century, the New York Amsterdam News has been committed to racial justice journalism and has reported on the fight for equality during the Jim Crow era, the events of the Civil Rights Movement, the Montgomery bus boycott and the Freedom Riders, among other stories.
In 2022, the Amsterdam News, headed by Publisher Elinor R. Tatum and under the leadership of Executive and Investigative Editor Damaso Reyes, founded Blacklight, the first investigative unit at a Black newspaper, to provide opportunities for journalists of color to pursue investigative projects. Among their projects is the groundbreaking “Beyond the Barrel of the Gun” initiative, which focuses on the root causes of, impact of and solutions to gun violence in Black and Brown communities. Blacklight’s reporting has won numerous awards including the New York Association of Black Journalists 2023 Ed Bradley Award for investigative journalism for its story on the impact of COVID-19 on families of color, a 2023 Solutions Journalism Award for its reporting on the impact of climate-change-fueled heat on gun violence, and a 2024 Deadline Club Award for digital video reporting for its first documentary film, “Be-Loved,” which highlights the story of a Harlem-based credible messenger working to reduce gun violence.
About ProPublica
ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. With a team of more than 100 dedicated journalists, ProPublica covers a range of topics and focuses on stories with the potential to spur real-world impact. Its reporting has contributed to the passage of new laws; reversals of harmful policies and practices; and accountability for leaders at local, state and national levels. Since it began publishing in 2008, ProPublica has received seven Pulitzer Prizes, five Peabody Awards, five Emmy Awards and 15 George Polk Awards.
About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
The foundation supports democracy by funding free expression and journalism, arts and culture in community; research in areas of media and democracy; and in the success of American cities and towns where the Knight brothers once had newspapers. Learn more at kf.org and follow @knightfdn on social media.
