Deep South Today, the nonprofit network of local newsrooms that includes Mississippi Today, Verite News in New Orleans, Louisiana, and The Current in Lafayette, Louisiana, announced Tuesday that it will create a new regional investigative reporting center in collaboration with The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship.
The Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center will launch in early 2026 with a lead investigative editor, dedicated full-time investigative and data reporters, and New York Times Local Investigations Fellows at Mississippi Today and Verite News. It will also include support from Big Local News, a program at Stanford University that empowers journalists with data, tools and collaborations. As the Deep South Today network of newsrooms continues to grow, the Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center will add capacity in its new newsrooms with dedicated reporters and fellows.
“The Deep South Today newsrooms are already publishing impactful and award-winning investigative reporting, and our new Investigative Reporting Center in collaboration with The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship will dramatically expand the breadth and depth of that work,” said Warwick Sabin, President and CEO of Deep South Today. “We developed Deep South Today to provide the infrastructure to sustain and grow local journalism in a region that is under-resourced and underserved, and this critically important initiative will advance our mission.”
The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship is committing substantial resources in addition to the fellowship positions. Deputy Editor Chris Davis will manage the Deep South Today investigative team and the work will be co-published by Deep South Today newsrooms and The Times, and made available to local news organizations for co-publication. The Times will also lend staff time to help Deep South Today recruit, hire and train the editors and reporters who will be a part of their new investigative reporting center, as well as edit the stories being produced. Support from the Times will help fast-track Deep South Today’s ambitious goals to produce local beat coverage and investigative stories of importance to communities across the region. Additionally, the Local Investigations Fellowship will continue working with other newsrooms across the U.S. to produce original accountability journalism.
“Deep South Today has big ambitions for robust coverage of the South and building an investigative team is vital to that mission,” said Dean Baquet, former Executive Editor of The Times who now leads the Local Investigations Fellowship program. “We’ve already worked with Mississippi Today to much success and we look forward to doing more.”
Across the Deep South, the capacity of local and state newsrooms to produce resource-intensive, in-depth investigative reporting that exposes injustice and holds the powerful accountable is scarce. Local journalism is under attack on numerous fronts, and this initiative is being launched at a critical time when access to public information in the public interest is increasingly being restricted and accountability reporting is more challenging than ever to produce.
“This collaboration will redefine what’s possible for local journalism,” said Adam Ganucheau, Deep South Today’s Executive Editor and Chief Content Officer and a native Mississippian. “By combining the familiarity and trust of Deep South Today’s newsrooms with the resources and expertise of The New York Times, we’re building something truly unprecedented — a regional force for accountability and change. Together, we’re proving that the future of investigative reporting starts here, in communities that need it most.”
By working with The Times to launch and build out a new investigative reporting center, Deep South Today will position an upstart investigative team alongside some of the most prominent editors in the journalism industry. This initiative builds on the success that Mississippi Today already established with The Times and Big Local News: A joint investigation by those organizations about corruption and abuse by Mississippi sheriffs was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting and led to expanded federal investigations and legislative reforms in the state. Mississippi Today also separately won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting in 2023 for its investigative series “The Backchannel” and The Local Investigations Fellowship won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting in 2025 in collaboration with the Baltimore Banner and Big Local News for an investigation into the deadly opioid crisis.
“This collaboration is about more than just investigative journalism — it’s about building power through reporting in communities that have long been overlooked and where local newspapers are struggling to survive” said Terry Baquet, Verite News Editor-in-Chief and a Louisiana native. “We’re not just working together on stories; with The New York Times, we’re building a new model for how serious journalism can thrive in the South. It’s deeply personal to me, and I believe it is the future of local journalism.”
Integrating data journalism into the investigative teams and providing mentoring and training in computational methods with the support of Big Local News will level up the capacities of the Deep South Today newsrooms to uncover hidden patterns, provide sophisticated investigative coverage, and lower the cost of accountability reporting through better use of tools and algorithms.
“These resources mean Big Local News will be able to provide data journalism support to the Deep South reporters and editors that will further equip them to find and report out critical investigative stories,” said Cheryl Phillips, Founder and Co-Director of Big Local News. “I hope this work in the Deep South can serve as a model for how to scale local news.”
This initiative was made possible through a grant from Arnold Ventures, and Deep South Today and The Times view it as an opportunity to create a new sustainable, replicable model for building strong regional investigative teams that can produce high-impact local, state and regional stories in underserved communities.
All of the new positions for the Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center will soon be posted on the Deep South Today website at: deepsouthtoday.org/careers
ABOUT DEEP SOUTH TODAY
Deep South Today is a nonprofit network of local newsrooms that includes Mississippi Today, Verite News and The Current.
Founded in 2016, Mississippi Today is now the largest newsroom in the state, and in 2023 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. Verite News launched in 2022 in New Orleans, where it covers inequities facing communities of color. The Current is a nonprofit news organization founded in 2018 serving Lafayette and southern Louisiana.
With its regional scale and scope, Deep South Today is rebuilding and re-energizing local journalism in communities where it had previously eroded, and ensuring its long-term growth and sustainability.
ABOUT THE NEW YORK TIMES
The New York Times Company is a trusted source of quality, independent journalism whose mission is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. With more than 11 million subscribers across a diverse array of print and digital products — from news to cooking to games to sports — The Times is a diversified media company with curious readers, listeners and viewers around the globe.
ABOUT BIG LOCAL NEWS
Launched in 2020 as a program of Stanford University’s Journalism and Democracy Initiative, Big Local News helps reporters better use data in service of accountability journalism. Big Local News shares data and reporting recipes for journalists to localize stories at biglocalnews.org. It also provides news detection tools that monitor a wide variety of data and information streams. The goal: make it easier for journalists to find the stories that matter at the local level.
Big Local News regularly supports and mentors journalists in computational methods, including the New York Times Investigative Reporting Fellows, and was integrally involved with a collaborative project with The Times and The Baltimore Banner, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting earlier this year.
Hence then, the article about deep south today to launch regional investigative reporting center in collaboration with the new york times was published today ( ) and is available on Mississippi Today ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Deep South Today to launch regional investigative reporting center In collaboration with The New York Times )
Also on site :