Why the New York Times is sticking around the South

The New York Times isn’t new to working with local newsrooms. But it does appear to be getting better at the task.

As my late colleague Rick Edmonds reported in 2011, the Times Company sold 16 regional newspapers it owned to invest in its own “next wave of digital development.” Fourteen years later, I think we can agree the Times has reinvested in itself pretty well.

In the last few years, it has moved back into the local news space in a different way — as a partner.

In 2023, I wrote about the Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship, which launched to work with journalists and newsrooms around the country to invest in, edit and support ambitious journalism. This year, one of those partnerships won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism with The Baltimore Banner.