The Garrison Project, an award-winning investigative reporting initiative that collaborates with national and local newsrooms to explore criminal justice issues, will fold its operations into Deep South Today, a nonprofit network of local newsrooms that includes Mississippi Today and Verite News.
Ethan Brown, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Garrison Project, will be Senior Editor for Collaborations at Deep South Today, conceiving and overseeing work similar to what he produced through The Garrison Project, but with a particular focus on the Deep South region. The Garrison Project, which until now has been a fiscally-sponsored project of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), will no longer continue as an independent entity.
“We are pleased to welcome Ethan Brown to Deep South Today and provide the infrastructure to continue and expand the outstanding work he directed through The Garrison Project,” said Warwick Sabin, President and CEO of Deep South Today. “The Deep South Today newsrooms are producing impactful and award-winning investigative reporting, and there is a need for even more accountability journalism in our region — especially about criminal justice issues. Ethan will not only help us meet that need through his own enterprise projects, but he will also bring additional capacity and expertise to support the journalists across our network.”
“I’m excited to work with Deep South Today’s innovative and award winning newsrooms,” said Ethan Brown, Editor-in-Chief of The Garrison Project. “Their multi-local approach is the lens through which I viewed The Garrison Project when I launched it in late 2021. I’m thrilled to tap into their expansive network of newsrooms and assist in any way I can in making their top-tier, hyper-local coverage even better and more impactful. And, as a longtime Louisiana resident, I’m particularly thrilled to remain here and help cover my home state.”
Launched in late 2021, The Garrison Project has published reporting about state and local criminal justice systems in national and local publications including The New Republic, New York Magazine, Slate, Rolling Stone, The Pittsburgh City Paper, The Raleigh News & Observer, Black Pittsburgh, The Border Belt Independent, WFAE, The Texas Observer, Baltimore Magazine, and CalMatters.
Impactful work published by The Garrison Project includes a first-ever full account, published with New York Magazine, of a 1992 police riot on New York City Hall led by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani that was named one of the best pieces of 2021 by Longreads; with The Intercept, an analysis of illegal, race-based strikes of Black jurors by North Carolina prosecutors that was cited by the state supreme court in a landmark 2022 decision; a multi-part series with Baltimore newsrooms including The Baltimore Brew on misconduct committed by The Baltimore Police Department’s specialized unit District Action Team (DAT) that helped lead to the suspension of DAT officers and in 2024 was named a finalist for The Institute for Nonprofit News’ Best Investigative Journalism Award; and an investigative feature published with Rolling Stone about a detective in Raleigh, North Carolina who framed Black residents in heroin cases. The feature was cited in a complaint to the U.S. Department of Justice, and soon after it was published the City of Raleigh entered into a six figure settlement with the detective’s victims.
Reporters who have contributed to The Garrison Project include Laura Nahmias (now a Senior Reporter covering New York City and state politics at Bloomberg News), New York Times bestselling author Jacob Silverman, award winning investigative reporter Sean Campbell, and Roxanna Asgarian, whose book We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) won the 2023 award for non-fiction from The National Book Critics Circle.
Last year, Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton wrote that The Garrison Project “is one of the few things that’s made me optimistic about where American journalism is headed in 2024.”
ABOUT DEEP SOUTH TODAY
Deep South Today is a nonprofit network of local newsrooms that includes Mississippi Today and Verite News. Founded in 2016, Mississippi Today is now one of the largest newsrooms in the state, and in 2023 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. Verite News launched in 2022 in New Orleans, where it covers inequities facing communities of color. With its regional scale and scope, Deep South Today is rebuilding and re-energizing local journalism in communities where it had previously eroded, and ensuring its long-term growth and sustainability.