Reporters finish groundbreaking work amid layoffs, mergers
By Nadia Hamdan, Reveal
Alexia Fernández Campbell was in Baltimore when she got the news.
It was March and she was attending the NICAR 2024 conference, where her colleague, Pratheek Rebala, would be on a panel to talk about the big project they had been working on together, “Forty Acres and a Lie.” At the time, the now award-winning series was in the final few months of production and, as is common for any big deadline, everyone on the team was running on empty.
Fernández Campbel, Rebala and their fellow Center for Public Integrity colleague April Simpson had spent two years unearthing historical records that expanded our understanding of “forty acres and a mule,” a Reconstruction-era program that is widely considered to be this country’s first attempt at reparations. CPI reporters did this with shoe leather reporting, but also with an innovative use of artificial intelligence. Hence, the NICAR panel. People were curious to learn how Rebala, a data reporter, did it.
Fernández Campbel remembers how excited she was to talk to people about the project. But that memory has since been eclipsed with another: half of her colleagues got layoff notices during the conference. Two weeks later, she, Simpson and Rebala were laid off too.
“It’s still hard to talk about everything that happened at CPI while we were trying to finish… 40 Acres and a Lie,” said Fernández Campbell.
CPI was founded in 1989 by Charles Lewis – a former producer for ABC News and CBS News 60 Minutes – and its stated mission was “to counter the corrosive effects of inequality by holding powerful interests accountable.” It won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 2014 and the Edward R. Murrow Award for General Excellence in 2023.
But one year later, CPI was facing a $2.5 million budget shortfall and it would eventually lay off its entire staff.
“I checked my email on my phone and saw the notice,” said Simpson. “For months, I had been worried about what it would mean for me to lose my job, and what my options might look like in that worst case scenario. When I got that email, there was some peace in knowing that the end had come for me too.”
Thanks to a union contract, Fernández Campbel, Simpson and her colleagues were given two months’ notice, plus severance. But they needed more than two months to finish the 40 acres project. Not to mention: they now had to rush to find a publishing partner.
Even before the layoffs at CPI, the 40 Acres project had been hit by another newsroom crisis, this one involving my organization, The Center For Investigative Reporting — another storied, non-profit newsroom. In 2022, we began working with the CPI team to create a 40 Acres investigative 3-part audio series for our weekly radio show and podcast, Reveal. But our organization had been suffering budget deficits for years, and in 2023 we too were hit by layoffs.
CPI and CIR were among hundreds of news outlets suffering from layoffs during this period. The Washington Post laid off nearly a hundred journalists, or 4% of its workforce. The Associated Press announced it would lay off about 8%. Similar stories were playing out at NPR, Buzzfeed, Vox, the LA Times and more. Vice Media, valued at nearly $6 billion in 2017, filed for bankruptcy in 2023. More than 3,000 news industry jobs were lost that year – the highest since 2020, when the industry saw over 16,000 job cuts.
For the journalists working on 40 Acres, it was a nerve-wracking time. Fernández Campbel admits that once she was laid off, she struggled to fully focus on the project because while worrying about how she would pay her bills.
“I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should spend each day searching for a job,” she said.
But despite all of this, Fernández Campbel, Simpson, and their colleagues were committed to getting this reporting out into the world.
“I was never worried about us not publishing 40 Acres,” Simpson said. “I think the core team was committed to finishing the project, regardless of the circumstances.”
While CPI was winding down its operations, CIR merged with another investigative nonprofit that had managed to maintain stability during this tumultuous period in journalism: Mother Jones. As the merger conversations began, recalls Robert “Rosey” Rosenthal, CIR’s then-CEO, a key topic was “that we were going to get this story done.”
Monika Bauerlein, Mother Jones’ CEO at the time (and now the CEO of the merged organization) says both CIR and Mother Jones understood the challenges facing journalists at outlets across the country and knew they had to adapt to meet the moment.
“For nonprofit newsrooms like us, the north star is serving our mission and our audiences. It was clear that by putting together these two storied investigative newsrooms, we could do that better,” she said.
Bauerlein said from the very beginning of merger talks, she knew that the 40 Acres project was at risk of not seeing the light of day.
“It was also clear that it deserved a true multiplatform treatment, with everything from extraordinary audio storytelling to a great digital presentation and data tool to video and a magazine cover package,” she said. “The reporters and editors at CPI had worked so hard to create an incredible long-term asset for everyone wanting to understand the nation’s legacy. There was no way we could not try to make sure it got out there in the most powerful way possible.”
The first step was to raise money. Fernández Campbel and her team would need to keep working on the project even after their CPI employment ended, and the CIR/Mother Jones team wanted to make sure they would be paid for that time. As Mother Jones editorial director Jamilah King pointedly noticed, “on a project about slavery, no one should work for free.”
Rosenthal reached out to the Wyncote Foundation, a longtime funder of both CPI and CIR, which supported the project with a grant.
“They really graciously stepped up …to make sure the CPI staffers got paid as they continued to work, even after they lost their jobs,” said Rosenthal.
The next step was for Mother Jones to get caught up on two years of reporting in roughly two months. Enter King and her skillful crew of article editors, art directors and web designers. They saw the project as a major multiplatform initiative, and together they were able to create a Mother Jones magazine cover package and a customized digital presentation. They also worked with former CPI senior editor Jennifer LaFleur and news developer Rebala to launch the digital tool the CPI team had built, allowing the public to search Reconstruction era documents on their own.
“You really have to make a commitment. Not just say you’re gonna do it, [but] have the people in place to manage it,” Rosenthal said. “[King] was incredible.”
Fernández Campbel and her fellow CPI reporters managed to squeeze in countless production meetings for the radio show and podcast, while also writing four different articles for the online package.
“Those two months were agonizing,” she said. “We had to cram six months of work in that time frame.”
The Forty Acres and a Lie project launched online, in audio, and across Reveal’s and Mother Jones’ digital platforms in June 2024, less than three months after CPI reporters lost their jobs.
“A huge amount of credit goes to everybody [involved in those] circumstances to get this done.” Rosenthal said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Since last June, the project has gone on to win two Investigative Reporters & Editors Awards, a duPont-Columbia Award and a National Magazine Award for best podcast, among others. It was also a 2025 Pulitzer Finalist for Explanatory Reporting.
In a note to staff, CIR editor in chief Clara Jeffery made a point of acknowledging the incredible circumstances that led to this moment.
“When we first started contemplating merging our two organizations, there was a very real fear that, were we not to do it, especially given the headwinds that CPI faced, years of hard work on 40 Acres that had already taken place might never come to fruition. It was a moral imperative to make sure that it did. So, like so many other accomplishments of the past year, this award is a testimony to the incredibly hard work that everybody on staff has put in to make the merger happen—and succeed beyond our wildest dreams.”