A support group and a lab in the St. Louis area provide resources for people with the allergy to mammal products — and evidence that its effects can be reversed.
Today, the Ag & Water Desk was named a Press Forward grant recipient. We join this inaugural, historic cohort of more than 200 local newsrooms across the country that are filling critical information gaps and working in service of our communities.
We have some exciting news: The Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk has won a $100,000 grant in the first round of funding from Press Forward, a national movement to strengthen communities by reinvigorating local news.
More than 900 newsrooms nationwide applied for the funds, and 205 were selected. The funds will provide general operating support to newsrooms that are reaching underserved communities and addressing gaps in coverage. The Desk, in providing its reporting free of charge to news organizations through a network of reporters and partner newsrooms, offers local environmental journalism that can otherwise be hard to come by in rural communities.
“For people living in the largest watershed in the country, local reporting about land and water is too often missing,” said Sara Shipley Hiles, executive director of the Desk and a professor at the Missouri School of Journalism. “For them, ‘news desert’ takes on a new meaning. Our job is to turn those deserts into oases where fact-based, locally-informed coverage of the environment is readily available.”
The grant is part of Press Forward’s $500 million investment to strengthen local newsrooms, close longstanding gaps in journalism coverage, advance public policy that expands access to local news and scale the infrastructure the sector needs to thrive.
We're thrilled to be part of the inaugural Press Forward cohort and have been meeting with our partners to figure out the best use of these funds. Thanks to you, our readers, for supporting the Desk's work.
Speaking of our work, check out the Desk's very first comic!
Drawn by our engagement editor, Britny Cordera, it's based on Desk reporter Elise Plunk's story on efforts to control the invasive carp population in the Mississippi River Basin. Midwestern states spend millions every year to prevent giant, goggle-eyed fish from invading rivers and lakes. But invasive carp have firmly established a home in the watershed, and experts say they are here to stay. They're eating up the food of native fish and insects and present a threat to the fisheries in the Great Lakes.
Researchers hope that creating new markets for the invasive fish could be one way to control their numbers. Their ideas include rebranding the fish to make it more appealing for human consumption or processing it, bones and all, for pet food.
We want our stories to reach and engage the widest audience possible, particularly those affected by the issues we write about. Sometimes that might mean trying new formats, like a comic, to get the story out there.
