Shrinking newspaper staffs that deprive communities of local news have struck the nation's largest newspaper chain, Gannett, as well. The company has responded by deploying limited resources toward stories in the public interest with the most potential impact, on such topics as hospital safety and government corruption. Local newspapers pool resources to do investigative-reporting joint projects, which then feed into the chain's national newspaper, USA Today. Some stories have inspired reform legislation.

Non-partisan, watchdog journalism has formed a financially healthy platform for Texas Tribune in its first decade, filling a public-interest gap left by shrinkage in the number of statehouse reporters from 95 in 1989 to about 30 in 2008. By hiring an aggressive team of journalists and diversifying its revenue streams, the Tribune turned seed-money grants into a self-sustaining online publishing business whose serious coverage of neglected policy stories inspired Texas lawmakers to coin the term "the Trib effect" for the changes in capitol behavior when it's clear "someone is always watching."

As America’s war in Afghanistan reaches 17 years, the war in Iraq reaches 15 years, and military action continues in other parts of the world there is a need for reporting on these conflicts that is informed, independent, and honest. To fill this need, specialized newsrooms have been developed with staff and reporters who are veterans and use their experience, and the insight and access it brings, to bear on their reportage.

Founded in 2012, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project commissions, edits, and places articles, films, photojournalism and other reportage focused on inequality. EHRP’s articles not only humanize issues of inequality, but also provides a source of income and a means for people living in poverty to tell their stories. The organization also actively collaborates with other publishers to ensure their articles are spread widely.

This is an opinion piece by the paper's staff based on a large series of investigative stories about evictions and substandard housing in Baltimore. It critiques a system that was designed to protect tenants, where they can get a judge to set up an escrow account to collect rent while landlords make repairs, because it usually favors landlords over tenants. The column outlines specific fixes that would address this imbalance, including more code inspections, a more transparent process and laws that hold landlords accountable for substandard properties.

When a new California law unlocked the disciplinary records on misconduct from 700 police agencies statewide, competing news organizations formed the California Reporting Project to accomplish as a team what would have been daunting, if not impossible, for each news organization individually: compile a database of all the records as they are released. Just months into the project, the resulting news stories informed the public of officers who escaped serious consequences for misconduct, and whose careers benefited from keeping the public unaware.

A new California law requiring that police departments make public their records of police officers' misconduct revealed numerous cases that had not been known before. Police unions and state and local governments sought protection in the courts from having to disclose the records, but when they lost those challenges the records began coming out. The California Reporting Project formed as a coalition of news organizations statewide that have teamed up to make full use of the new transparency law. The project filed hundreds of records requests seeking more disclosures.

More than 30 California news organizations collaborated to gain access to, and publish news stories about, previously secret police disciplinary cases. Filing more than 1,100 records requests with more than 600 law enforcement agencies, members of the California Reporting Project leveraged each others' resources rather than competing to tackle the massive reporting project made possible by a new state transparency law. The collaboration is an example of local and regional partnerships that have helped a struggling news industry still cover local and state government news.

By creating a centralized team of detectives to focus on non-fatal shootings, Denver police improved their rate of solving such crimes from 39% in 2019 to 65% in the program's first seven months. The team of six detectives, hired for their talent at winning the trust of victims who might be reluctant to cooperate with the police, treats such shootings with all the seriousness of a homicide investigation, on the theory that solving these crimes will prevent more shootings. The boost in the so-called clearance rate, albeit preliminary, comes despite a big increase in shootings in Denver in 2020.

As incarceration rates of women in America continue to rise, Still She Rises, a project of the Bronx Defenders, uses a holistic approach to legal defense for incarcerated mothers in Tulsa, OK. Attorneys for the organization investigate injustices in cases and represent local, often impoverished, mothers, who face losing custody of their children in the face of the law.

Citizen watchdogs can hold local police accountable by using the tactics of investigative reporters that have successfully exposed systemic problems and sparked reforms. One reporter shares five approaches he’s used to hold up policies and practices to scrutiny, some of which led to positive change. He provides a how-to on learning the existing policies, obtaining public records, engaging influencers in honest dialog, presenting verified evidence in a fair format, and seeking allies to pressure for reform.

A two-hour investigation places America’s heroin crisis in a fresh and provocative light -- telling the stories of individual addicts, but also illuminating the epidemic's years-in-the-making social context, deeply examining shifts in U.S. drug policy, and exploring what happens when addiction is treated like a public health issue, not a crime.

In Chicago, a white police officer shot Laquan McDonald, a young black man, 16 times, for refusing to stop. The city created a task force in the midst of an already existing investigation by the Department of Justice into the Chicago Police Department’s use of force. "The No. 1 good thing about these federal interventions is they force local municipalities to face the issue of police misconduct head-on.”