Time to support Investigative Post

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I’ll get right to the point: As a nonprofit newsroom, Investigative Post depends on community support to fund our operation. Not advertisers, not subscribers, but donors. 

People like you, dear reader.

We’re in the midst of our annual drive, during which most of our smaller donors (under $1,000) contribute. This year, we’re again matching donations of up to $1,000 thanks to the generosity of national foundations providing funds under NewsMatch and local companies, including Try-It Distributing.

Donors have multiple options. You can make a one-time or monthly contribution. You can do so online or by mailing us a check. (Details laying out the options are here.)

If you’re a current donor, I thank you and ask you to consider digging a little deeper. If you’re not, please join the club. We’re a worthy cause.

Investigative Post produces the most time consuming and expensive form of journalism. As media observer Matt Pearce recently put it:

“It’s getting more and more expensive to produce the good stuff, and the good stuff has to compete against more and more trash.”

The quality of our work – the “good stuff” – is not lost on our readers. We surveyed them a couple of months ago and asked them to rate the quality of our reporting on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the best. They gave us a rating of 4.6. (Our competition: 2.6.)

We will produce some 250 pieces of content for our website this year, mostly investigations and follow-up stories. In addition, Geoff Kelly and I will produce another 100 newsletters between us.

Our best-read stories of late include our recent analysis of the presidential vote in New York State, a spate of unreported deaths at Erie County’s jails, and the latest in the unrelenting scandals at the Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corp.

Of course, we can’t do this work without your support. Your donation not only sustains our operation, but enables us to expand our coverage. 

There’s a need for us to grow our coverage, given the decline of the established news outlets in our town. Most are losing staff and audience and limiting their coverage as a result. We’re helping to fill the void, producing journalism about what matters.

Our need for community support has never been greater given current events. As the aforementioned Matt Pearce wrote:

If you want a press that will serve as a bulwark against autocracy, shove money at anything that produces high-quality professional investigative journalism. Investigative journalism has Baumol’s cost disease: It’s incredibly costly and only gets more expensive every year. It’s long past time to dramatically boost funding of  it everywhere.

Please donate today if you value local, independent, fact-based journalism. Your money will go towards building a better Buffalo and a stronger democracy.

Jim Heaney