The Garrison Project is not your standard digital news organization.
It’s produced a total of 48 stories about criminal justice issues in a bit more than two years — hardly the publishing pace of a typical startup. You can read those articles on its website, but their presence there feels almost perfunctory. It produces local news, but not in a single location; it swings from Texas to Florida to New York, Baltimore to San Francisco to Baton Rouge. It doesn’t sell ads, or subscriptions, or anything, really.
But its oddness is one of the few things that’s made me optimistic about where American journalism is headed in 2024. Being a news publisher today can be punishingly hard. But maybe there’s a way to be a news producer without all the agony of running the entire journalism assembly line — from story idea all the way to pushing it out on social.
“Building an audience to a specific site is incredibly hard,” Ethan Brown, Garrison’s founder and editor-in-chief, told me. “That doesn’t mean I don’t want to do hard things — I do. But I’d much rather be doing hard things in the stories, in the journalism, you know what I mean?”
Second, he has lots of contacts with freelancers around the country, thanks to the years he spent as enterprise editor of like-minded site The Appeal. (He left after the site’s odd “sunsetting” in 2021.)
And finally — and most uniquely — he had nearly a decade of experience working inside the criminal justice system as a mitigation specialist for attorneys representing death-penalty defendants, mostly in Louisiana and surrounding states. That work meant hundreds of visits to prisons around the region and country — including ones reporters don’t typically get access too.
“The New York Times Magazine did a front-page story on ADMAX in Colorado, the highest-security prison in the world,” Brown said. “I don’t think a journalist has ever been inside there — the journalists who wrote that piece didn’t.”
The idea dates back to 2017, when someone from a foundation named the Vital Projects Fund reached out to Brown. (VPF grew out of the estate of businessman Horace W. Goldsmith, who died in 1980; it has been, among other things, an opponent of the death penalty.) The fund was getting lots of requests from journalists for small grants — $3,000, $5,000, that range — to support specific reporting projects around criminal justice. But taking time to evaluate them all was outside their wheelhouse — could Brown do it for them? He agreed, and that project became known as the Garrison Fund, based at Investigative Reporters and Editors.
The fund stage didn’t last long because Brown joined The Appeal later that year. But the idea stuck with him, and when The Appeal closed its doors in 2021, he returned to it. “I had this network from when I was at The Appeal of reporters all over the place, doing really great county-level or municipal-level criminal justice coverage. Reporters in Baltimore, reporters in the Bay Area, reporters from Los Angeles, and on and on. And I wanted to edit place-specific criminal justice reporting — but not just in one place, right? So I thought back to the Garrison Fund.”
Garrison Project stories can come from freelancers who pitch or from an idea Brown tries to connect to the right reporter. Once it’s taken shape, they figure out the right outlet to pitch it to. Sometimes that’s a national outlet (Rolling Stone, HuffPost, The Daily Beast, The Intercept), other times a local one (Pittsburgh City Paper, Raleigh News & Observer, Baltimore Brew, New York). The pitch offers two key benefits to the news outlet. First, Brown will do the first substantive edits, including rigorous fact-checking, so what the publication gets is closer to the finished product than a typical first draft would be. And Garrison will pay either part or all of the reporter’s freelance fee — usually at $1.25 a word, a number he called “good but not amazing.” Those both reduce the strain a complex criminal justice story can impose on a news outlet likely dealing with its own cutbacks.
“Anything that’s successful is really only being successful because of the team — all the parts of the team, the reporter, the editor, the fact checker, and so on,” he said. “I think a huge missing piece in journalism today is that most people don’t have the benefit of those kinds of teams bringing their work to publication. So anything we can to provide support and minimize the chaos of editing is good.” (He describes chaos thusly: “Hey, let’s just put it in a Google Doc and have five people editing it at once.”)
The results have been positive, he said, with several Garrison-incubated stories becoming big traffic hits for outlets. (“I want these pieces to be able to be read by anybody, not just someone who’s deep into this stuff.”)
But I wonder sometimes if we’ve swung too far in that direction. We have a better appreciation now for how small the local news market is, how low the demand can be in a universe of infinite alternatives. The job of producing good journalism feels increasingly disconnected from the job of getting it in front of an audience. In a time of constrained resources, why make everyone solve the audience problem to do journalism?
In that sort of environment, something like the Garrison Project — complex criminal justice reporting as a service — is interesting. Imagine a larger version of it that could work with local reporters and bring specialized skills to outlets that wouldn’t otherwise have them in-house. Then imagine the same model but applied to other local/national beats — higher education, say, or health care, or campaign finance. Then imagine it applied to specific journalism skill, like crunching education data, understanding complex infrastructure issues, or assembling massive datasets. Or even to certain broader needs of local outlets — like advanced FOIA work or legal defense against SLAPP-style litigation.
In other words, can we do more to build (horizontal) national support structures for all the (vertical) new outlets that are the future of local news? Most of those outlets will never reach the size of 20th-century newspaper newsrooms, the scale that allowed the good ones to bring all sorts of specialized expertise in-house. Are there ways to let them access that expertise from outside? Can that expertise be useful in getting readers to turn into subscribers — and in solidifying these new local institutions?
“The flaw in this model is the fast disappearance of news organizations,” Brown says. “I’m a pessimist about the future of journalism, but even my pessimism has been exceeded by the shrinkage so far in 2024.” I suspect more efforts like The Garrison Project could be useful in making sure there’ll still be outlets to publish in.
