South Mississippi has a new reporter focused on COVID vaccines. Here’s the backstory.
The Sun Herald has hired a reporter with investigative experience to cover one of the biggest stories of our lifetimes — the COVID-19 vaccination effort in South Mississippi.
I normally would not write a column about a new hire. But there is an unusual and inspiring story here that I want to tell.
Last fall, the newspaper started a class sponsored by the Local Media Association, a national journalism trade group. The Sun Herald was the only newsroom from McClatchy, our parent company, selected to participate. Our editors learned how to raise philanthropic dollars to pay for local reporting projects.
The Sun Herald isn’t a stranger to this concept, as we are proud to have Isabelle Taft on staff. Taft is funded through philanthropic contributions from local donors and Report For America, a national program dedicated to strengthening local news. I wrote about Taft earlier, and she’s been an invaluable member of the Sun Herald team.
As quoted in a recent LMA report, “philanthropy has emerged as a viable way to fund essential local journalism, not as charity but as a way to sustain informed communities. Some local publishers have funded up to one-third of their news organizations via philanthropy.”
During the class, my team and I set a goal to raise $36,000 to pay for a vaccine reporter for six months.
And, happy to report, we did it.
We spent much of the spring meeting with potential donors. Our pitch was that they could help solve a community issue, our state’s low vaccination rate, by working together with the Sun Herald. And now, through January, we have a reporter devoted to writing only about vaccines, increasing the amount of verified information available.
Our new hire is Isabella Murray. She’s from Chicago and is a graduate of the University of Minnesota. She spent a couple of years working for a start-up news organization in Iowa, where she covered presidential campaigns. She’s smart and savvy, just the type of young person that South Mississippi wants to attract.
We also have a new visual journalist, Hannah Ruhoff, who will be helping Murray tell the stories of South Mississippians. Ruhoff is a recent graduate of Ohio University who has produced award-winning work and interned at The Virginian-Pilot and Cincinnati Enquirer.
We know it’s an individual choice about whether you should or should not get a vaccine. Our state health officials, and many local doctors, are urging people to get the shot. And the vaccines are proving effective.
To cover all angles, Murray will be writing stories, for example, about why South Mississippians are hesitant to get the vaccine, what strategies to promote vaccination are or aren’t working, and why certain local geographic areas have a higher or lower vaccination rate than others.
I want to publicly thank some of our largest donors: the Gulf Coast Community Foundation, Chevron and businessmen Dave Dennis and Richard Scruggs.
What we have done, working together to help try to solve a community problem, is “One Coastish” in its truest form. That’s a reference to the local One Coast community program that encourages cities and counties to talk and reach common goals.
If you think we’re on to something and would like to help us focus reporting on this issue for longer than six months, or if you’re interested in philanthropy-funded journalism in general, shoot me an email at bmkaplan@sunherald.com. Any contributions would be made to the Mississippi Gulf Coast Community Foundation, so they would be tax deductible.
In the meantime, know that the Sun Herald remains committed to writing about, and attempting to help solve, our area’s biggest issues.
We’ve been serving the Coast for some 130 years, and we are not going anywhere.
And if you want to talk vaccines with our reporter, Isabella’s email is imurray@sunherald.com.
This story was originally published July 23, 2021 at 11:50 AM.