Missouri State Capitol building in Jefferson City (Getty Images).Six years ago, when we launched The Missouri Independent, I made what was probably a pretty lousy sales pitch.
Don’t trust us. Not yet, anyway.
I asked Missourians to judge us by our work. To hold us accountable for our promises. To make us prove that we really were, as legendary investigative reporter Wayne Barrett once put it, “detectives for the people.”
It was easy enough to make those promises in October 2020. We were a brand-new nonprofit newsroom with four journalists and some pretty big ambitions.
Living up to them was going to be the hard part.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
SUBSCRIBE
As The Independent celebrates its sixth anniversary this week, I look at what our team has built and find it hard to believe how far we’ve come. But the thing I’m most proud of isn’t how much we’ve grown. It’s that we’ve been able to grow without abandoning the promise we made on day one.
Relentless investigative journalism. Daily reporting that helps Missourians understand their government and the people who run it. And all of it free. No paywall. No advertising.
That’s been our mission from the beginning.
Consider what happened just a few weeks ago.
Two of our reporters, Clara Bates and Anna Spoerre, won the Missouri Press Association’s A-Mark Prize for Investigative Journalism for their reporting on Missouri’s troubled foster care system.
Their work exposed how children languish in state custody, how inadequate legal representation can leave families trapped in the system and how a young woman who spent nearly her entire life in foster care had to fight the state to keep her own baby.
I’m proud of the award. I’m even prouder of the journalism that earned it.
Because those stories took time. They required tracking down records, earning the trust of vulnerable people, asking uncomfortable questions and refusing to accept easy answers.
That’s what investigative reporting is supposed to look like. And it’s exactly the kind of work we promised to do six years ago.
It’s also the kind of work that costs money.
And because of the people who believe in our mission, we’re able to do more of it.
Earlier this month, we announced a partnership with ProPublica, one of the country’s premier investigative news organizations, that brought veteran reporter Luke Nozicka into our newsroom.
Luke has a track record of accountability reporting, including investigations that helped free an innocent man from prison and exposed racial discrimination within the Kansas City Police Department.
With Luke’s arrival, our team has expanded from four journalists in 2020 to seven today.
We’ve also expanded beyond the written word.
Last month, in partnership with Missourinet, we launched Missouri on the Record, a weekly podcast designed to take listeners beyond the headlines.
The goal is simple: Give Missourians more context about the stories shaping their state, introduce them to the people behind those stories and hopefully reach audiences who might never have stumbled across our website.
And we continue to see our journalism published and broadcast by newspapers, television stations and radio outlets across Missouri.
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.
SUPPORT
We don’t believe important journalism should be confined to the people who know where to look for it. A story about state government belongs just as much to someone reading their hometown newspaper in the Bootheel as it does to someone checking our website in St. Louis or Kansas City.
So we give our work away. Other news organizations can republish it for free, extending the reach of our reporting well beyond our own audience.
And none of it happens without you.
We depend on readers who believe that journalism is a public good worth investing in. Even small contributions matter enormously.
Five dollars a month may not sound like much. But when enough people make that commitment, it adds up. It helps pay for reporting trips, public records requests and the time it takes to pursue a story when the people in power would rather we move along.
And if donating isn’t in the cards, there’s another way you can make a real difference.
Share our free morning newsletter with friends and family. Forward it. Encourage someone to sign up. At a time when social media algorithms increasingly determine which stories people see, our newsletter gives us a direct line to readers. And every new subscriber means one more Missourian who doesn’t have to depend on a tech company to decide whether our journalism is worth seeing.
I know there are plenty of people who don’t trust journalists. Some never will. And I’m not asking for blind faith now any more than I did six years ago.
Read our work. Challenge us when we get something wrong. Tell us what we’re missing. Hold us to the standards we’ve set for ourselves.
More than a century ago, Walter Williams, the founding dean of the Missouri School of Journalism, wrote in his Journalist’s Creed that “the supreme test of good journalism is the measure of its public service.”
That’s the standard we’ve tried to live up to.
And six years ago, I asked you to hold us to our promises.
I hope you never stop.
