Dear Inside Energy Readers and Supporters:

I am writing to thank you for your continued interest in and support for Inside Energy! Our public media collaboration began in the spring of 2014 with the mission to create a more informed public on energy issues. The feedback we’ve received from audiences and the journalism community lets us know that we have achieved that goal. We’ve won multiple awards for our coverage and have had over 100 stories air on national broadcasts, bringing the energy stories from our region to audiences from California to Vermont. We hosted numerous live events seeking to interact with our audiences and further our collective understanding of critical energy issues.  

For three years we have been funded with generous support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That support comes to an end at the end of this year, and Inside Energy will be closing its doors a few months later. While coverage of these energy issues is more critical than ever, we were unable to secure sustainable funding to continue the collaboration at this time. That “sustainability” challenge is one that faces all nonprofit newsrooms at this time, and I addressed it in more detail in this article contributed to the public media journal Current. 

There is one sustainability success we can report: Prairie Public Broadcasting in North Dakota has received a pledge of $100,000 to establish and encourage more funding for a western North Dakota journalism project for the station. This comes as a result of three years of strong reporting of the Bakken and western North Dakota by Inside Energy’s Emily Guerin and Amy Sisk.

We are obviously disappointed that this collaboration is ending. We’ve become “energy nerds” and feel passionately that this subject deserves ongoing, sophisticated, balanced coverage. Still, many of us will continue to cover energy in new jobs as we move forward. You can see what we are reading and what we are producing by following each of us on Twitter. In the meantime, energy coverage will continue with reporters at all of your local public media stations, so please continue to support them at rmpbs.org, wyomingpublicmedia.org, wyomingpbs.org, and prairiepublic.org. Please continue to stay informed on energy and environment stories by supporting other non-profits covering these issues at organizations like High Country News or InsideClimate News. 

We’ll send you one last newsletter in late January with two new and final podcasts currently in production. Feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns at the email address below.

Thank you again!