Raw Story Investigative Fund

Raw Story Investigative Fund

Dear Readers:

As part of Raw Story’s reorganization, we will be creating a fully separate investigative news team to dig even deeper into those stories that require closer attention and longer focus.

Our overworked managing news editor, Larisa Alexandrovna, has also been our only investigative reporter and almost entirely her own team following very closely stories that are important to all of us.

Larisa will now focus on heading up a full investigative team that will operate with some autonomy from the day-to-day news management of the site. The investigative team will be able to branch out and cover more stories than ever before, and expand our access to the information that’s important to you.

An investigative news team is desperately needed in every news organization. While quick and up-to-the-minute news coverage is important, and we ourselves work tirelessly to provide it, other stories require much more focus and digging. Sadly, most news outlets today are reducing—or altogether eliminating--their investigative work and focusing almost exclusively on the 24/7 news cycle. It’s easy to see why; Investigative reporting is incredibly expensive, with very little financial reward.

But we want to do better. To put it bluntly, we find the decline in American investigative reporting to be a serious and disturbing failure of the media. And we’re here to be part of the solution, not the problem.

This is where we need you guys, our readers, to help. Raw Story’s readership has grown immensely in the last two years, and as a result, revenue has also improved. Unfortunately, since the most expensive ads rotate through first, the increase in revenue is far from proportionate to the increase in readership. Also, our click through rates our below industry standards which prevents us from serving premium ads. The money just doesn’t come as easily as the readers.

If we want to fight the tide and throw ourselves into more investigative reporting, we need to raise the funds to make an investigative news team possible and functional. If you agree with us that such work is much needed, then please help by making it possible.