The New York Times’ local investigations fellowship gives local reporters the time and resources to take big swings

If last year’s Pulitzer Prizes were a “coming-out party for online media,” this year’s winners were dominated, for the most part, by national legacy media (and modern Pulitzer regular ProPublica).

But one of this year’s honorees is a notable exception — or, half-exception — to that trend: The Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting is shared between the nonprofit, less than three-year-old Baltimore Banner, and The New York Times. The Pulitzer Board recognized the “compassionate investigative series that captured the breathtaking dimensions of Baltimore’s fentanyl crisis and its disproportionate impact on older Black men,” reported by The Banner’s Alissa Zhu, Nick Thieme, and Jessica Gallagher. Zhu was a member of the Times’ 2023-24 class of Local Investigations Fellows, the inaugural year of that fellowship, during which she and her colleagues began work on this series.

“Before moving to Baltimore, I worked at local newsrooms across the country where we never had the manpower or the time or the resources to do the really ambitious big reporting that we wanted to,” Zhu said in remarks after the Prize was announced. “The launch of The Banner in 2022 was a game changer for local news, and being able to partner with the Times Local Investigations Fellowship made a two-year investigation into Baltimore’s overdose crisis possible.”

The Pulitzer recognition is a credit to the upstart Banner, which has made covering the city’s opioid crisis a priority since its launch, footing a large legal bill to obtain records and continuing to invest resources in the project well after Zhu completed the fellowship. This award is also among the latest indicators of the potential, and growing importance, of the role national outlets with more resources can play in supplementing local investigative reporting through partnerships. In a similar vein, ProPublica has committed to publish accountability journalism in every state; the Marshall Project and the Associated Press are among other national organizations partnering with local outlets to bolster accountability and investigative reporting.

But, as 2024-25 fellow Jolie McCullough put it, “there’s no resource pool like the Times.” In the face of the rapid erosion of local news, The New York Times created a program that would channel some of its resources toward local investigative reporting. In 2023, the Times launched the pilot of its one-year investigative reporting fellowship under the leadership of newly retired executive editor Dean Baquet, introducing a class of seven fellows from five states. This year’s class (2024-25) expanded slightly to 10 fellows from eight states. The fellowship, New York Times spokesperson Naseem Amini said, is “a multi-million dollar investment by the Times.”

The 17 fellows so far have included freelance reporters and employees of nonprofit startups like The Banner and of for-profit, legacy outlets alike, reflecting the hodgepodge of the modern local news landscape. “There are more strong candidates and strong story pitches than we can take,” said Times deputy investigations editor Chris Davis. “We have enough applicants who have good stories that we could probably double the size of the class.”

From the outset, the fellowship has been geared toward mid-career reporters, including, in some cases, reporters who have done many years of beat work but haven’t had the chance to develop investigative skills. “We’re not really built to support reporters who have very little experience, and our mission isn’t to pick a bunch of well-developed investigators who are on major I-teams and already can do the work without us,” Davis said.

“The No. 1 thing we want to do is help produce journalism that wouldn’t otherwise get done,” he added.

The Times has sought out “diversity in all ways” with the fellowship, according to Davis — in geography, story topic, reporters, and otherwise. But it’s also made a deliberate decision to invest more resources in Mississippi — in part because it’s a state with few resources for accountability reporting. The Times also organically developed a strong relationship with Mississippi Today through inaugural fellow Ilyssa Daly and editor Jerry Mitchell, and “a story developed there that we didn’t want to walk away from,” Davis said. (That story would become an exposé about a “Goon Squad” of deputies in Rankin County.) Both fellow classes have included reporters from Mississippi Today, and the Times has also paid those reporters as freelancers to keep them on the story. (Mississippi Today fellows from both Times classes were finalists for the 2024 Local Reporting Pulitzer for their accountability reporting on corruption and abuse by Mississippi sheriffs and officers, including the Goon Squad story.)

The Times can’t keep people on the payroll beyond the one-year fellowship every time. But Davis asks the question: “For the right story, are there ways that we can continue to support the local effort to dig, dig, dig?”

To date, the fellowship has produced more than 50 stories that, beyond being published in the Times, are available to more than 100 local newsrooms to republish for free.

The fellowship provides local reporters with many resources — editing, data training and expertise through a partnership with Stanford’s Big Local News, and access to resources like legal support, video teams, and photo editing. (Zhu credited working with editor Adam Playford as making “a world of difference” to The Banner’s project.) But across the board, Davis said, the most precious resource the fellowship gives the local reporters is simple: time. Specifically, time to take a big swing that might or might not turn up results.

“The thing that has disappeared the most, or one of the things that is the most costly, is the loss of the cushion that lets you take risk on stories,” he said. That loss is apparent in legacy newsrooms that have suffered round upon round of cuts, but also in startups that have energy, but still face pressure to turn out copy to build an audience, and remain smaller than legacy newsrooms were at their peak. “As much as we’re replacing legacy newsrooms with other options, most of those options are smaller and don’t have the scale to help them do what we’re talking about here,” Davis said, “which is: Invest some time in something that might not pay off.”

Davis knows it’s a big ask to take a small newsroom’s best, or one of its best, reporters for a year. But he thinks supporting a reporter on an opportunity like this can work toward retaining them — and can have “some bottom-line benefits” where the Times might cover some costs associated with a story, saving the local newsroom money.

“I want newsrooms of all kinds to see programs like this as an opportunity,” Davis said.

Blaze Lovell, a reporter for the nonprofit Honolulu Civil Beat, spent his fellowship year examining how government contractors continued donating to politicians after failed reform efforts. That included examining “hundreds of thousands of campaign contributions and more than 70,000 state contracts to draw connections between vendors and their donations to political races,” revealing that “nearly 20 percent of all campaign contributions since 2006 have come from people tied to companies doing business with the state and local governments” (which, Lovell and his co-reporters note, is likely an underestimate because the data is incomplete).

Lovell shares his byline on his second story from the fellowship with two data journalists from Big Local News, who, in addition to reviewing the data alongside him, taught him how to do data work, setting aside an hour a week to answer questions he had.

Lovell had previous experience as a beat reporter, but wasn’t an investigative reporter before the fellowship. The mentorship the program provided, and the glimpse into how Times reporters’ and editors’ “brains work during the reporting process” from start to finish — how they organize their notes, data, and documents, and how they approach sources — was among the most valuable aspects of the program for him.

Before applying, though, Lovell imagined the Times as “the Hogwarts of journalism.”

“I thought I was going to learn all the magical tricks and spells to cast on my stories and my journalism that would make everything better,” he said. But, he realized through the fellowship, “there really isn’t a magical formula for any of this” — good shoe leather reporting is the same at the Times as it is anywhere.

Reporter Callie Ferguson, who scrutinized Maine’s juvenile justice system, had the same epiphany during her fellowship year. “They just are the best at those fundamentals,” she said, but the fundamentals are the same at the Times as at the Bangor Daily News — talk to everyone, ask lots of questions, ask for all the data.

The difference is “when you’re allowed to have so many months of uninterrupted time to look into something,” she said, “you’re going to stumble upon leads that you were totally unaware of.”

Ferguson also emphasized the role her two Big Local News colleagues played in her fellowship year. The data reporters “helped me write and send my data requests, respond to public officials when they raised concerns or reservations about providing data, and conduct the analyses of prosecutorial data that shows Maine’s declining rates of juvenile prosecutors, types of juvenile crime, and disparate case outcomes,” she said.

“Justin [Mayo] and Irene [Casado Sanchez] ended up being more than just data partners,” Ferguson added. “It could be lonely at times to be off on your own on one project,” especially for an entire year, and the two “supplied a lot of company and camaraderie” through weekly meetings, as well as feedback and ideas on reporting beyond data expertise.

Ferguson reflected that her newsroom “was in a position to let me go for a year” in that the Bangor Daily News did not need to scramble to fill her beat in her absence. “I imagine it might be harder on [a] newsroom to lose, for example, their statehouse reporter for an entire year,” she said.

McCullough, a fellow in the most recent class, spent almost a decade at The Texas Tribune. Months after being laid off, she joined the Times as a fellow, as a freelance journalist. Her reporting tracked how poor defendants could be lost in the system and denied legal representation.

The Times’ travel budget, she said, was critical to her reporting. McCullough lives in Austin, and made more than a dozen trips to Eagle Pass, about three and a half hours away, over the course of a year — often for three or four days at a time. “In a typical newsroom,” she said, that travel budget is “unthinkable.” But, it was also essential to her reporting: “It was almost impossible to get anyone to talk to me unless I was cornering them in the courthouse or their office,” she said. Similarly, she had to physically track people down and watch people print off records she needed, because “it wasn’t happening unless I was there all the time.” (The threat of Times lawyers getting involved helped with getting records too, she added.)

Though McCullough wasn’t anchored at a specific publication, the Times pushed to get her “as many co-publishers as possible,” she said. Her reporting ended up running in several Texas newspapers, including The Dallas Morning News, the San Antonio Express-News, and publications in smaller towns across the state. (It was also translated into Spanish — for most residents of Maverick County and Eagle Pass, Spanish is their first language.) Having the Maverick County story run in the San Antonio Express-News was especially impactful, McCullough said (it led the Sunday edition), because it’s the closest major newspaper to Eagle Pass.

“Ideally,” McCullough said, “this type of money would be able to be spent at the local level. But that’s just not the reality we live in.” She appreciates the structure of the Times program because it isn’t poaching reporters to cover the coasts, or pulling reporters away from communities, and also makes an effort to ensure coverage reaches the local community.

“It’s filling in a gap where there is one — and they have the means,” she said. “These are the people with the money, so it’s nice to see them spending it in this nice way.”

The Banner’s reporting was built on a data set that combined academic data on U.S. deaths with population counts by age and gender for every county in the country. Struck by its findings — especially the outsize rate of deaths among Black men in their mid-50s to early 70s — The Banner collaborated with the Times and Big Local News to share the data with nine other local newsrooms. The San Francisco Standard, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The 51st, The Star-Ledger, and PublicSource published local stories based on that data in December; The Boston Globe, Wisconsin Watch and Free Press Indiana/Mirror Indy followed suit in January. Highlighting a generation long overlooked, not just in Baltimore, but in post-industrial cities across the country, was deeply meaningful, Zhu said.

Times editors visited The Banner multiple times, and offered the newsroom virtual workshops. Zhu observed that the Times fellowship, coming so early in The Banner’s organizational lifespan, helped the nonprofit newsroom grow and form certain habits and skills; participation in the fellowship, she said, “helped us figure out our own processes.” Zhu and Gallagher collaborated with the Times’ security team on safety measures for their on-the-ground reporting around overdoses, which meant, for instance, that a designated security professional knew where they were at all times in any potentially risky reporting situation. After the fellowship ended, The Banner implemented some of the practices Zhu and Gallagher learned, such as designating an editor to check up on them.

In a different vein, The Banner’s data editor figured out how to “hack The Banner’s site where we could also implement the same scroll-y feature” that ran in The New York Times (meaning images that load as the user scrolls to introduce the story), which The Banner has since used in other stories.

“Newspaper wars are out,” Zhu said. “I think the future of local news is collaboration.”