In August 2022, flooding on the Pearl River knocked out Jackson, Mississippi’s main water treatment plant, leaving roughly 150,000 residents without safe drinking water and little information about when service would return. For months, daily life depended on information that was hard to come by: which distribution sites had water, when to boil it, and what to do to stay healthy. Mississippi Today published daily, practical updates while investigating the reasons for the plant’s failure to fill that information gap. The local paper became an indispensable resource for the city and a clear example of how information can safeguard communities.

Unfortunately, this kind of reporting is disappearing. Since 2005, the United States has lost more than a third of its newspapers. Today, 212 counties across the nation have no local news source at all. In another 1,525 counties, only one outlet remains. Nearly 60% of the hardest-hit counties sit in the Heartland.

Deep South Today is a Ford grantee and nonprofit news network that covers the Heartland. The network includes Mississippi Today (a Pulitzer Prize winner and largest newsroom in the state), Verite News, and The Current. It also has plans to expand with a new statewide newsroom, Arkansas Today. With its regional scale and local insight, Deep South Today’s mission is to provide high-quality reporting that equips readers to address the challenges their communities face every day. 

Here, Warwick Sabin, president and CEO of Deep South Today, discusses what local journalism means to communities and its role in supporting civic engagement. 

A Shared Set of Facts

Democracy runs on neighbors and institutions solving problems together, from potholes to national security. This all depends on collaborating in ways that also preserve the identities that make communities distinct and recognized for their potential rather than their problems. That work requires a shared set of facts.

When a community loses that, every other civic muscle weakens. Voters can’t weigh a candidate’s record against their promises. Neighbors stop debating productively because they’re no longer arguing about the same thing.

Local journalism illuminates those shared facts—reporters who live in the places they cover, who show up to the 6 p.m. county commission meeting and read the documents no one else does, who do the underrated work of giving a community the trusted information it can act on together.

Local news is the most trusted source of information Americans have. Yet the region is losing it faster than almost anywhere else, leaving news deserts where people fall back on social media, friends, and family for their picture of what’s happening at home. A neighborhood Facebook group can be a wonderful thing, but it cannot send a reporter to a city council meeting.

When a community loses its newspaper, civic engagement measurably falls. Voter turnout drops, split-ticket voting declines, fewer people run for local office, and coverage of city councils, hospital boards, and school districts simply stops. People engage with the things they understand, and they show up for the institutions they recognize as their own. When residents can read a clear, honest account of what their school board did, what the audit found, or who their state senator voted with, they participate. When they cannot, they tune out, or they tune in to something that confirms what they already believe. 

News Where It Matters

We reach the readers most affected by news deserts by being part of the communities we cover. Our newsrooms are local, staffed largely by reporters who live in, and often grew up in, the places they cover. That matters in a region where outside coverage has too often talked about our communities rather than to them. 

Our coverage is also free for any local outlet to carry, from the smallest weekly in the Delta to a bilingual radio station on the Gulf Coast. We are not competing with what remains of local media. We are strengthening it. 

In the deepest news deserts, our reporters cover county commissions, school boards, and hospital boards in places where nobody else has shown up for years. At Verite News, we are deepening coverage of Black neighborhoods in New Orleans that have long been the engines of the city’s culture and civic life, and deserve institutional reporting equal to their contribution. We’re also working to address the information needs of Latinx and immigrant communities, who are too often invisible in mainstream coverage, through reporter hires and partnerships with Spanish-language media.

Informed vs. Engaged Readers

Informed means a reader has the facts. Engaged means they have somewhere to direct them. Too much accountability reporting tells a community what is broken and stops at the doorstep. We try not to do that. When Mississippi Today and The Fuller Project investigated Mississippi’s extraordinarily high rate of cesarean births and the consequences for maternal health, the series did not end with the scale of the problem. It ended with case studies of hospitals that had reversed the trend, giving mothers, administrators, and policymakers a shared playbook for action. 

We pair investigations with explanatory work, civic guides, and follow-up reporting that tells readers not only what happened but also what can be done, and who is already doing it. And we don’t publish behind a paywall, but wherever readers already are. Our work runs in the local weekly, the bilingual radio station, the Facebook share, and the email newsletter. We hold live events, partner with community organizations, and create spaces for readers to ask the reporter the next question.

People engage when they recognize their own questions in journalism and when they see the reporting take their lives, their institutions, and their concerns seriously as the starting point, not as a sidebar.

Policy People Can Feel

The decisions that most affect daily life in the South—on Medicaid, school funding, water infrastructure, criminal justice—are often debated in language designed to keep most people out of the conversation. Our job is not to simplify the policy. It is to put it back in proximity to the people it will reach.

We anchor every policy story in a specific person, family, or place. If a state legislature is debating a Medicaid waiver, our reporter is also at the hospital that will keep or lose its labor and delivery unit, talking with the family who would have to drive 90 minutes to give birth if it closes. We explain the mechanism: who decided what, what the bill actually says, what it changes, and who benefits or loses. And we publish in formats that respect the reader’s time: short explainers alongside long investigations, voter and citizen guides at key moments, and follow-ups that say what happened next. Done well, policy journalism is not a barrier between citizens and their government. It is a doorway in.

A Pulitzer-Winning Investigation

One of the most consequential examples of reporting we have undertaken is Mississippi Today’s investigation into the largest public welfare fraud scheme in the state’s history. Over five years, reporter Anna Wolfe and her colleagues documented how millions of dollars in federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funds were diverted to politically connected projects, including a volleyball facility at a state university. The series produced federal investigations, bipartisan policy debate, and ongoing federal and state litigation. In 2023, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, the first earned by a Mississippi newsroom in decades. 

The most meaningful result, though, is harder to measure. The investigation produced a shared, well-documented set of facts that let Mississippians, from families to lawmakers, come to the same table and start the same conversation about how to fix it.

The reporting became civic infrastructure. Other Mississippi outlets republished it. State legislators cited it in debate. Families, service providers, and policy leaders used it to ground their own work. 

That is what we hope Deep South Today’s reporting will do as we expand: It will put every reader, every official, and every community partner in possession of the same well-sourced account of what is happening, so they can come to the same table, with the same facts, and figure out together what to do next. That is local journalism doing its work, helping the American people safeguard their communities and democracy.

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