Watch Now: How the Pulitzer Center Is Supporting Change-Making Local Journalism

In January 2019, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting launched Bringing Stories Home, an initiative to help local and regional news outlets do ambitious public service reporting for their communities, with a focus on how global and national problems affect us at home. We are giving local newsroom partners financial, editorial, and data-driven reporting support as needed, and amplifying the impact of the work by bringing the journalists and their stories into schools, colleges, and public forums to engage citizens about problems and solutions to drive change.

One of our first Bringing Stories Home grantees is Rick Barrett at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who is reporting on the crisis facing Wisconsin’s dairy farms. In a new video produced by the Facebook Journalism Project, Barrett talks about why this ongoing project is so important to readers.

“This is our culture, it’s our identity as a state,” said Barrett. “It’s not just a changing industry, it’s a changing way of life for people. Wisconsin lost nearly 700 dairy farms in 2018, more than 300 so far this year.”

Since January, Bringing Stories Home has yielded 11 high-impact reporting projects on a range of issues—from brazen police corruption in Baltimore and racial profiling in Missouri to life-threatening conditions in Central America and Mexico that are driving migration to communities such as Tucson, Arizona, and Palm Springs, California.

Learn how Bringing Stories Home grantees brought important under-reported stories to their local communities.