Thanks to 88 fantastic people, the first LA Justice Report story is fully funded.
(Woooo-hooo!)
This is a very, very good thing—particularly because reporter Matt Fleischer has been hard at work on the story for over a month.
The LA Justice Report, as you may or may not remember, is a partnership between WitnessLA and Spot.Us. It uses the Spot.Us wonderfully cool “crowd-funding” model to support social justice-oriented investigative journalism in LA.
The partnership’s first project is called Follow the Gang money, and it will look at how the city of Los Angeles is spending it’s $26 million of gang violence reduction money, which is dedicated to gang prevention and intervention. That $26 million is one of the very few city budgets that was not cut this past budget slashing season.
Matt has done incredible reporting, in several cases employing the excellent tool known as the Public Records Act to get the information that the mayor’s office and others were a bit…um…slow…to fork over.
Now, we have the answers.
Matt’s resulting story series will be published here in the 3rd week of August—(In other words, a few days after WLA and I are back from vacation).
What Matt has learned will, I promise, surprise, interest and likely infuriate you.
But here’s the thing: Los Angeles is our city, and we have the right to know how our money is spent on such essential issues. If the information is withheld, we have the duty to acquire it.
So we have done just that.
Thank you to all of you who have thus far been a part of our collective endeavor.
And for those of you who have not donated or acquired credits to donate: don’t worry, there will be other opportunities ahead. Trust me.
In the meantime, stay tuned. An important LA story awaits you.