Happy Holidays.

Most of us are accustomed to reading end-of-the-year letters from friends and family members that painstakingly detail every success and every milestone from the past year. These are sent with the best intentions, many are interesting, and all offer the chance to tie a bow around an eventful year and give a hopeful glimpse of the future.

Having been on the receiving end of many such missives, we prepared this report with humility but mostly with a great sense of gratitude to the people who took a chance on us — our supporters and especially our staff, many of whom have left solid jobs in journalism to join this pioneering experiment to create new ways of covering the news. We also write with a spirit of optimism and excitement; as 2007 comes to a close, the Center is looking forward to an extraordinary year in 2008.

So, if you’ll bear with us, here’s our report on what we’ve done, how we’ve grown, and where we’re headed next.

This year, 2.7 million people came to read our state web sites in Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, and Minnesota. In turn, our Fellows’ stories were cited in newspapers 284 times, reaching millions of readers in local communities through their local media; our Fellows went on TV and radio 178 times, reaching millions through broadcast media with important messages on the key issues of our time, such as immigration, education, health care, national security, civil rights and liberties, and state budgetary priorities. All told, our Fellows generated 84 million impressions on TV, radio, and newspapers, up from 45 million last year. That’s the power of timely relevant news to inform public debate. Details on our growth can be found in our updated Key Performance Indicator Report.

And what stories captured public attention? With more than 10,000 published in 2007, it’s a difficult task to pick a few to mention here: A series on the availability of “Plan B” in our states (leading in part to legislation ensuring access in Colorado), community driven coverage of the I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis followed by deep analysis of how to invest in transportation infrastructure for the long term, our political coverage in Iowa chronicling the prelude to ‘08, and our house specialty: chronicles of how interest groups attempt to influence public debate to their advantage, with little public scrutiny. Thanks to information uncovered by our Fellows’ reporting, five ethics complaints have already been filed by organizations in pursuit of cleaner government.

We have a talented and growing staff of journalists, who reflect the immediacy of the medium and honor the quality and ethics of good reporting. We’ve grown from two programs with 20 Fellows to five programs with 50 Fellows. Our fellows have received nine awards from the Society of Professional Journalists for excellence in reporting, a first place award for reported commentary from the Association of Capitol Beat Reporters and Editors, and finalist placement the Online News Award from the USC/Annenberg School for Communications and the Online Journalism Association. We broke stories, and we built an engaged audience, melding the best of online media with the best of traditional journalism.

As this report goes out, we can announce the launch of our fifth program. The Washington Independent went live on December 10 and will showcase the reporting from our Fellows on the workings of Congress and federal government, led by an incredibly talented staff.

Joining us at the Washington Independent are: Allison Silver, The Independent’s news editor, is a former opinion editor with the Los Angeles Times, week-in-review editor with the New York Times, and producer for Charlie Rose; Spencer Ackerman, an alumnus of the New Republic, the American Prospect, and the Talking Points Memo blog, covering national security; Mary Kane, from Salon and Newhouse News Service covering middle-class economics, and Laura McGann, also from Talking Points Memo and the Associated Press, serving as the Independent’s managing editor. In the coming days more talented people will be joining us, and we’ll chronicle their arrival on the Independent’s site.

Each of these high-impact journalists understands what an important difference our model will make — The Washington Independent will be fed and sustained by a growing network of state operations. This is not an “inside the Beltway” operation attached to the Web, but a state-driven organization with a new and participatory approach to the news. We’ll present our work vividly, with facts and opinions clearly expressed, shorn of the mysterious language of Washington, with a relentless focus on what the news really means to our readers and the lives they lead.

We accomplished all of this with generous and growing financial support. To all of our supporters: we say thank you.

Thus concludes the report. Not a word about our vacations, our growing and happy families, or our prayers for world peace. We simply offer our best wishes for a great holiday season.

David S. Bennahum
President & CEO
The Center for Independent Media