By
Jessica Weiss
In 2004, Texas man Todd Willingham was
executed for starting the fire that had killed his three daughters thirteen
years earlier. The case rested on the testimony of a jailhouse informant who
claimed that Willingham confessed the crime to him.
But now, the informant says he lied.
When a 5,000-word investigation called “The Prosecutor and the Snitch,”
was published about the case in early August, the world heard a harrowing tale
about the United States criminal justice. It also got a taste of what’s to come
from the innovative new journalism startup that published it.
The Marshall Project, whose name is an “homage to
Supreme Court justice and crusading civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall,”
is a new nonprofit journalism outlet focused solely on covering the U.S.
criminal justice system. It plans to cover topics including sentencing reform,
prosecutorial misconduct and the war on drugs.
But perhaps most notable is the way the
stories will be told: “interactive graphics, maps, charts, words, all on the
same page, and all in a way that the reader is not taken out of the story,
regardless of what format they're consuming it in,” the project’s managing
editor for digital, Gabriel Dance, former interactive editor for the
Guardian, told journalism.co.uk.
The Marshall Project promises to
“combine the best of the old and the new in journalism," according to its
website.
The project was announced late last
year by Neil Barsky, a former
journalist turned hedge fund manager. In addition to Dance, the project’s
editorial team is led by former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, who will be editor in chief, and
Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times journalist Tim Golden, who will be managing editor for
investigations and news. The project plans to launch in October.
At the core of the Marshall Project’s
news style is “finding different ways to tell stories,” Keller told
journalism.co.uk. "Good journalistic writing, combined with what you can
do online and with social media to tell the story visually, means we can reach
an audience that the drier academic research may not reach.”
Though the Project will still have a
primary writer working on each investigation, “interactive reporters” will also
work on stories, according to Dance.
The outlet will offer both short- and
long-term investigations distributed on the web, as well as through newsrooms
and other partnerships, Keller told Nieman Journalism Lab
earlier this year. The Willingham story, for example, was published on The
Marshall Project’s website as well as on the Washington Post's.
That story, which was mainly a text
piece, broke the Project’s interactive storytelling model, as the decision to
run the story came as a pressure group sought to file a complaint against the
prosecutor involved in the case. “Finding points of a story that can be best
told in a manner other than text,” Dance told journalism.co.uk, “is an approach
that would have been taken with the Willingham story."
In addition to publishing its own
investigations, the project “will curate the daily torrent of criminal justice
news from publications around the country, highlight the work of advocacy
groups on both the right and left, host debates, and drive a lively discussion
on social media,” according to the site.
The ultimate goal, it says, is to drive
a national conversation that can “help us confront our troubled courts and
prisons.”
The nonprofit’s annual operating budget
will between US$4 million and US$5 million, with the funding coming from
Barsky, philanthropies, and a number of donors, according to Nieman Lab.
The Marshall Project is being heralded
as another sign that nonprofit journalism is here to stay. “Whereas there used
to be just a few species, now a plethora of new mutations is leaping off the
page, using cheap technology to launch start-ups in different niches,” wrote
Gillian Tett in the Financial Times Magazine.
These nonprofits “tap a desire by some
rich people to support civic initiatives – and produce deep investigative
journalism in areas that the mainstream media often ignore, because it is
unfashionable or just not commercially viable,” she wrote.
Barsky told Nieman Lab that he believes
nonprofit journalism has the potential to be more sustainable over time than
for-profit journalism.
“A nonprofit organization has to
sustain itself by being excellent and having an impact. So does for-profit,
frankly,” he said. “But the difference is there are people of goodwill out
there who are willing to support us if we do great work.”
Jessica Weiss is a freelance journalist
based in Bogotá.
Image CC-licensed on Flickr via 710928003.
Source: Ijnet.org
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