Searchlight New Mexico (http://searchlightnm.com/)
Searchlight New Mexico is a non-partisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to investigative reporting and innovative data journalism. In a landscape of shrinking media resources, our mission is to spur reform by exposing abuses of power by government, business and other institutions through high-impact investigative journalism on topics of local, regional and national interest. We believe great reporting empowers people to demand honest, effective public policy.
A bad place to grow up. Nothing more disgraceful might be said about a state. Yet for years, New Mexico has been unable to shed that distinction. In 1997, the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Kids Count Data Book ranked us 44th among states for child well-being. In 2010, we fell to 46th, ahead of only Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Wresting data from local, state and federal agencies has become increasingly difficult. And few news organizations today have the resources to mount the lawsuits often needed to get public records that government agencies, by law, should make readily available. A central feature of Searchlight New Mexico will be a web portal containing vast amounts of government data and tools to make it easy for anyone to explore how their state and local tax dollars are spent, and to give academics, public interest groups and other news organizations easy access to data for reporting and research. We are in the process of gathering the data from state and local agencies across New Mexico, and already are running into heady resistance. One county insists they do not have payroll records in digital format. That begs the question: How do they pay their employees?
A bad place to grow up. Nothing more disgraceful might be said about a state. Yet for years, New Mexico has been unable to shed that distinction. In 1997, the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Kids Count Data Book ranked us 44th among states for child well-being. In 2010, we fell to 46th, ahead of only Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Wresting data from local, state and federal agencies has become increasingly difficult. And few news organizations today have the resources to mount the lawsuits often needed to get public records that government agencies, by law, should make readily available. A central feature of Searchlight New Mexico will be a web portal containing vast amounts of government data and tools to make it easy for anyone to explore how their state and local tax dollars are spent, and to give academics, public interest groups and other news organizations easy access to data for reporting and research. We are in the process of gathering the data from state and local agencies across New Mexico, and already are running into heady resistance. One county insists they do not have payroll records in digital format. That begs the question: How do they pay their employees?