Filed
6:00 a.m. EST
02.11.2025
Your enter helps us determine what points The Marshall Mission – St. Louis ought to dig into subsequent.
A view of the St. Louis, Missouri, skyline at nightfall, that includes the Gateway Arch and the Mississippi River.
Most choices in regards to the authorized system are made regionally. So, during the last a number of years, The Marshall Mission has invested in native information. Our reporters have dug into systemic points inside the justice methods in Cleveland, Ohio, and Jackson, Mississippi, to carry them to the eye of the general public in addition to the native elected officers with the facility to make change.
This 12 months, we’re excited to launch The Marshall Mission – St. Louis. We’ve already had a head begin exposing how the system is falling quick. Final 12 months, The Marshall Mission collaborated with St. Louis Public Radio on an investigation into the greater than 1,000 unsolved homicides in St. Louis over the previous decade. The investigation targeted on the police division’s failure to shut circumstances because of a scarcity of assets and botched investigations by a number of detectives. That investigation was essential to exposing the lax oversight of the division’s murder unit, in addition to the racial disparity in whose circumstances obtained solved.
However for the households on the heart of the investigation, the truth that so many circumstances have gone unsolved isn’t new. Tales like our Unsolved sequence increase vital questions on our work: May we additionally use our storytelling abilities to instantly handle the grief that many of those households really feel for his or her liked one, or their frustration on the lack of solutions all these years later?
Engagement reporting goals to bridge the hole between our accountability work and the neighborhood through the use of journalism to offer extra assets and knowledge to serve the folks we frequently write about. As a neighborhood reporter, this implies producing work that responds to or meets a necessity in St. Louis or throughout Missouri — whether or not that’s an investigative podcast or an explanatory comedian — in addition to work that brings folks collectively throughout metropolis and county traces.
In my position as engagement reporter, I’ve two main obligations: Ensuring our work addresses subjects that individuals in St. Louis and throughout Missouri truly care about, and determining how finest to speak our work to the neighborhood, and particularly to folks most impacted by the prison justice system.
In our different native newsrooms, engagement work has seemed like a Q&A to assist folks navigate the arraignment and bail course of in Hinds County, Mississippi, and an election information to the candidates working for county choose in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In each areas, reporters have engaged instantly with individuals who would profit from the data by internet hosting city halls to share their findings with residents and distributing fliers to native organizations that work with the prison justice system.
These are just some examples of the various kinds engagement work can take right here. We determine what assets to make by listening to communities. The responsive nature of the work means what we create varies from place to position, and newsroom to newsroom.
Our engagement work is community-informed, however journalistic independence is paramount. Right here are some things you need to find out about working with us:
- We’re journalists, not attorneys, activists or social employees. Which means whereas we’re dedicated to utilizing each reporting device we now have to create assets neighborhood members discover helpful, we don’t provide authorized opinions, monetary recommendation, direct help or promote particular coverage agendas.
- Equity, accuracy and transparency are our high priorities. This implies we by no means cover the truth that we’re journalists or what we’re engaged on. It additionally implies that whereas we take all allegations of wrongdoing critically, we are able to’t merely “take somebody’s phrase for it” with out investigating all of the details ourselves. We don’t publish rumors or data that may’t be verified.
- We cowl prison justice points. Our work intersects with many different vital subjects, like local weather change, public coverage and the well being care system. However we don’t cowl every part, and we direct most of our time and power to systemic points and traits quite than writing a couple of single occasion. So whereas we give consideration to each concept, query or concern we obtain, our focus stays on telling tales that illuminate the area’s justice system, from policing and courts to prisons and jails.
- We love collaboration. Virtually each story we write right here is copublished with one other journalism group, both on tv, radio, on-line or in a newspaper or journal — like this story one in every of our reporters wrote about circumstances within the St. Francois County Jail, revealed in partnership with the Riverfront Occasions. We’re not aggressive, and are most focused on telling tales that nobody else is overlaying as a approach so as to add one thing new and useful to the media ecosystem.
- We wish to get to know you! Not like investigative reporting, the place tales might be constructed off nameless suggestions and information collected from bureaucratic businesses, engagement reporting is strongest when journalists have an intimate understanding of who we’re writing for — and about. Significantly in a neighborhood newsroom, understanding what folks right here wish to be taught, and the way you get your information, is paramount to our work.
Since this work is constructed on belief and transparency, I wish to share a number of issues about myself, too.
Earlier than coming to The Marshall Mission – St. Louis, I lined prison justice at The Boston Globe, the place I used to be the newspaper’s police accountability reporter after which state courts reporter. I investigated police misconduct — together with a police officer with a observe document of reckless driving who totaled a lady’s automobile throughout a police chase — and in addition extensively lined the state’s reentry applications and entry to larger training in prisons. The prison justice challenge I’m most pleased with, although, is a podcast miniseries I reported about girls who fall in love with males in jail, and the way they overcome the limitations the justice system creates to household, relationships and intimacy.
I’m excited to carry my curiosity and abilities overlaying prison justice points to St. Louis. With the closing of the Workhouse in St. Louis, and the opening of the jail nursery in Vandalia, the state’s prisons and jails are at an inflection level. There’s no higher time to check the circumstances of those services, from entry to medical care to instructional alternatives.
Most of all, I’m trying ahead to listening to from you. Whether or not you’re employed in legislation enforcement in Missouri, have been detained within the St. Louis jail, volunteered at a jail a pair instances, had been incarcerated, have a good friend or member of the family behind bars, or have been the sufferer of a criminal offense — your perspective issues, and is essential to bettering our understanding of the system.
You’ll be able to at all times attain me through electronic mail or discover me on Twitter/X @itsivyscott (I don’t use it a lot, however DM me if you happen to’d want to talk over the safe messaging platform, Sign!).
