Washington Bureau Initiative
We launched the Washington Bureau Initiative to close the gap between constituents and their elected officials while creating important new audience and revenue opportunities with our newsroom partners.
Working closely with local editors, NOTUS assigns Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows and veteran reporters to produce a steady feed of locally relevant accountability coverage for co-publication and distribution. We are currently working with partners in 5 states — California, Oklahoma, Louisiana, North Carolina and New York — and will add another group of partners this fall.
Current Partners:
What is the Washington Bureau Initiative?
The nonpartisan nonprofit Allbritton Journalism Institute and its DC-based newsroom NOTUS are partnering with local, state and regional newsrooms to cover elected officials in Washington and federal agencies with particular influence in newsrooms’ communities.
“Most states don’t have a single reporter covering Washington on the ground anymore,” wrote Columbia Journalism Review last year. “This is corrosive to democracy in many ways ... The most glaring problem is that lawmakers aren’t held to account.”
We launched the Washington Bureau Initiative to change that, closing the gap between constituents and their elected officials while creating important new audience and revenue opportunities with our newsroom partners.
In coordination with our partners, NOTUS will assign a full-time reporting fellow guided by veteran editorial leadership to produce a steady feed of locally relevant accountability coverage. We co-publish everything we offer, and welcome partners to further distribute the work across their own networks. The partnership begins with a one-year commitment and is renewable for a second year by mutual agreement.
Our first partners include:
- Verite News, from Deep South Today
- Oklahoma Watch
- Times of San Diego, Santa Barbara News-Press and Stocktonia from NEWSWELL
- San José Spotlight
- The Assembly (North Carolina)
- THE CITY (New York)
We’ll welcome another group of newsroom partners later this year. We’ll sustain these beats and partnerships in the years to come.
What are the criteria for partners?
We seek independent newsrooms with:
- A track record of impact-generating government accountability reporting in their communities.
- Editorial capacity to coordinate closely with NOTUS on production and distribution.
- Interest in working collaboratively to track and measure local and national impact of the journalism produced and the conversations generated.
- Ability to contribute to the cost of the fellows, directly and/or through joint local and regional fundraising.
How does the partnership work?
NOTUS editors identify congressional delegations that are likely to be most active and AJI/NOTUS conducts a series of conversations with potential partners, with the goal of reaching agreement and beginning to deliver work for co-publication by November. NOTUS takes the lead on story assignment and editing, remaining in dialogue with local editors throughout the process, which often yield collaboratively reported stories that balance DC decisions with local impact.
We ask that each partner contribute a portion of the reporting and editing costs annually. And we are glad to work with you to secure additional revenue to cover some or all of this. In Fall 2025, AJI/NOTUS will announce a more formal revenue infrastructure for working with partners on philanthropic and commercial revenue.
