News

22 Oct InvestigateWest receives $40,000 Bullitt grant

InvestigateWest, a Seattle-based investigative journalism center, has received a $40,000 grant from The Bullitt Foundation to do in-depth, independent environmental reporting. InvestigateWest was founded in July to pursue investigative stories important to the Pacific Northwest and the West.

InvestigateWest rose from the ashes of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The center’s core staff of five journalists has won or been finalists for every significant national journalism award for investigative and narrative work, including the Pulitzer Prize, the White House Correspondents’ Association Edgar A. Poe award, the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism, Best of the West and the PEN literary award.

Since its establishment as a 501(c)3, InvestigateWest has maintained an active Web site (www.invw.org) with three blogs, including “Dateline Earth,” which spotlights environmental news with perspective, “Western Exposure,” which focuses on health, social justice and environmental news from around the West, and “From the Field,” a running update on its organizational activities.

InvestigateWest is also a charter member of the national Investigative News Network, a consortium of nonprofit investigative news outlets that formed in July. Other charter members include the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Center for Public Integrity, and National Public Radio.

Michael Massing, writing in The New York Review of Books, recently included InvestigateWest as one of the “new buds” in the blackened landscape of the newspaper wars.

InvestigateWest’s journalists have already begun reporting several investigative stories and have received a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism as well as support from individual donors. These stories will be distributed with major online, broadcast and print media partners in the coming months.  The Bullitt Foundation grant is a critical vote of confidence in InvestigateWest’s model for producing and distributing investigative journalism.