How we develop print and online partners
Our longest partnerships to-date are PBS FRONTLINE — helping to research 15 programs — and The Washington Post — helping to research hundreds of stories. The environment, immigration and health care continue to be at the forefront of our work, but we also have dealt with racial discrimination in pro sports and helped to track all the court cases stemming from the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol. The Washington Post staff won the Pulitzer for Public Service for the latter, with contributions from IRW interns and graduate students at American University who work in our practicum at the Post.
We also have co-published and distributed our stories WAMU-FM, Reveal News, the New Yorker, ABC World News Tonight, Politico, the Philadelphia Inquirer, McClatchy newspapers, Mother Jones magazine, New America Media and the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR). We worked with smaller nonprofit newsrooms during the pandemic to report nursing-home staff shortages, working with the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting; Eye on Ohio, and in Maine, with the Maine Monitor.
Over the years, we have shared the reporting process, such as our summer 2011 partnership with San Francisco-based New America Media on the foreclosure crisis, which looked at particularly hard-hit ethnic communities in northern California and in Maryland’s Prince George’s county, the country’s largest majority-minority county. Our stories were translated into three languages and distributed to ethnic press outlets in print as well as online.
In 2020, we published a series of stories about toxic air around oil refineries nationwide in partnership with E&E News and NBC News. In 2021, we published a series of stories about water management problems in New Orleans in partnership with WWNO. We have since published multiple stories related to access to water and other problems nationwide.
And we announced in August of 2021 our latest collaborator: Public Health Watch, an investigative site, national in scope and based in Austin, Texas. Longtime, award-winning reporter and editor Jim Morris heads the organization, and is working with IRW staffers and his own teams on health stories related to accountability with the aim of exposing injustices.
Note: Our FRONTLINE partnership, which included collaborations with NPR, ended in mid-May of 2021 following writer-director-producer Rick Young’s decision to leave FRONTLINE after almost 30 years.
