The Marshall Project: Making people care about criminal justice
The Marshall Project is thinking a lot about who is reading its investigative reporting on the American justice system. But while many online media outlets’ goal is to have as large of an audience as possible, the Project’s focus is more on who they reach, be that other journalists, politicians or those whose work relates to the criminal justice system. They measure success through metrics like a retweet from a Congressman, being a catalyst for more criminal justice journalism and even influencing legislative change.
“We try to assign stories if they’re good and not whether they will get clicks…” said Ivar Vong, the Project’s director of technology. “Our stories are not designed for a million people. They are designed for the right amount of people and the right kind of people.”
Former hedge fund manager Neil Barskey and former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller started the nonprofit organization in 2014. Part of the reason Vong and others are not focused on page views is because the publication does not face pressure from advertisers. The Project is funded by private citizens and organizations such as the Rockefeller Family Fund and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. These funds support the Project’s long-term justice reporting around the United States, which focuses on the topics of police brutality, wrongful convictions and other forms of corruption in the criminal justice system.
Since its first article — which was a collaboration with the Washington Post on a possibly wrongly convicted man who was executed in 2004 — The Marshall Project has developed a collaborative model and has worked with over 50 publications including more traditional outlets such as the New York Times and newer publications such as Refinery29 and Vice. Besides being able to bring the Project’s work to a wider audience, these collaborations can also add multimedia storytelling elements including original art, photography and audio. The Marshall Project recently won its third Pulitzer Prize in collaboration with ProPublica for “An Unbelievable Case of Rape,” the story of a rape survivor who was actually persecuted for her crime. According to managing editor Gabriel Dance, the story led to changes in the Westminster Police Department, which was involved in the investigation, around how it handled sexual assault.
“Everybody behaves differently when trauma occurs,” said Dance. “There’s no right way to behave when you have been you have been raped or something terrible has happened to you.”
He believes “return on investment” style journalism like this will become more popular not only in nonprofit media, but in more traditional commercial outlets as well. Currently, The Marshall Project is helping both local and national publications develop investigative reporting skills, including how to file Freedom of Information Acts and get access to people in prison. Managing Editor Kirsten Danis explained that they often use lawyers as sources, as they are often able to disclose more information about a case. Danis, though, highlighted the power of talking to people in person and said that people involved in the criminal justice system are often willing to speak openly.
“I don’t think people distrust (the media) as much as you suspect they might,” said Danis. “People really want to tell their stories. In general, people want to talk. They want you to know what happened to them.”
One common criticism of the Project is that it is biased against the criminal justice system. This is arguably most clear in the Next to Die tracker, which uses data from around the country to produce updates on who is next to be executed on death row. Conversely, Vong said that they also have readers in favor of the death penalty who share the tracker’s updates. “We are trying to humanize what is often an inhumane process,” said Vong, explaining the reasoning behind the tracker.
“I think it’s really important that the government can’t kill people in private,” added Dance. “Without this project, there is no way to know who’s up next.” This relates to the Project’s larger goal of getting a diverse audience to read about topics that are not only complicated, but also involve people who are difficult to sympathize with. Dance, though, argues it’s important to share these stories because without The Marshall Project, they would be forgotten.
“It’s hard to get people to care and empathize because the people we cover have at sometime done something that wasn’t lawful…” said Dance. “So we are dealing with people who nobody wants to look at, who nobody wants to help, who don’t have much of a voice… So a lot of it is finding the human element that people do connect with.”
