Story

Indira Lakshmanan Interviewed About Pulitzer Center's 'Bringing Stories Home' Initiative

August 19, 2019 | Journalism.Co.UK
By
Indira Lakshmanan
Robert "Stretch" Hull, foreground, directs a cow in a pen while Cory Bidlingmaier looks for bidders during an auction at the farm of Dale and Marsha Ryan in Belleville. The Ryans sold off their dairy livestock and feed and will switch to farming corn, beans and some beef cattle. Tom and Cory Bidlingmaier, second and third generation auctioneers, view the current situation as an agricultural depression. Image by Mark Hoffman. United States, 2019. A project in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel as part of the Pulitzer Center's 'Bringing Stories Home' initiative.

Robert "Stretch" Hull, foreground, directs a cow in a pen while Cory Bidlingmaier looks for bidders during an auction at the farm of Dale and Marsha Ryan in Belleville. The Ryans sold off their dairy livestock and feed and will switch to farming corn, beans and some beef cattle. Tom and Cory Bidlingmaier, second and third generation auctioneers, view the current situation as an agricultural depression. This ongoing project by The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is part of the Pulitzer Center's "Bringing Stories Home" initiative. Image by Mark Hoffman. United States, 2019.

The journalism industry is experiencing major job losses, with some of the worst affected being local news publications, which have been forced to make cutbacks and layoffs, reducing their ability to hold power to account.

Add to that worsening levels of mistrust in the media, and you have a recipe for disaster.

In January 2019, the Pulitzer Center responded by launching a US local news initiative called Bringing Stories Home to support "public service" reporting projects, made possible through a $5m endowment fund from the Facebook Journalism Project.

In this week's podcast, Indira Lakshmanan, executive editor, Pulitzer Center, talks about the 11 projects that have since received financial, editorial and data-driven support and why this intervention is crucial today to secure the future of journalism and regain audiences' trust.

To listen to the podcast on the Journalism.Co.UK website, visit here.