Many recent local journalism stories can be hard to follow. There are often a lot of organizations involved with confusing names and purposes. That is true in this story about “Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk” also known as “AGWaterDesk”.
Ag & Water Desk (as we’ll call them for short) has just received $2.5 million grant to expand their mission. That story includes Report for America, Missouri School of Journalism, the Society of Environmental Journalists, Walton Family Foundation, and dozens of media outlets.
Fortunately Ag & Water Desk have a great explainer video that outlines what they do and how they’ll spend that grant:
The Ag & Water Desk website is built on WordPress and so are the sites of many publishing partners including these:
- Wisconsin Watch (Madison, WI)
- Investigate Midwest (Champaign, IL)
- The Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA)
- The Lens (New Orleans, LA)
- Inside Climate News (Washington, D.C.)
Even the project’s key backers run on WordPress including the Missouri School of Journalism, Report for America, Reynolds Journalism Institute, and Covering Climate Now.
WordPress is a fundamental part of this new journalism movement.
Click here to see the kind of stories that AGWater Desk publishes. AGWater Desk isn’t alone in this area: we’ve covered other WordPress-powered publishers in Mississippi and in the rural MidWest.
