In a long term project like this, you go so deep, you encounter so many obstacles, legal and otherwise, that it's really good to have someone like FIRE seeing what we were doing, how important it is, how under covered, how much difference it could make: somebody on our side. Someone to keep us on track, too—especially when we’re in so deep that we’re finding everything interesting.

As freelancers, we normally would never have access to that sort of support. The Virtual Newsroom has been crucial for the story. FIRE helped us organize a huge trove of public records and go after a second round of public records—not only advice on what to request but also feedback on our specific language. It has resulted in more effective request letters, ones more likely to get a positive result and that was really helpful.

But it was also crucial for us personally. We're doing this story on our own. [FIRE provides] a reminder that people care and it reinvigorates you. There was recognition of who we are and what motivates us.

It requires a special kind. In some cases freelancers have more passion than reporters who have the plum assignments. We're doing it because we feel we have to. If you're a reporter aware of the abuse out there in this country, people denied liberties and freedoms—people living in some cases literally with a boot on their throat—then you understand how horrifying it is how many stories may have died simply because the reporter didn't get enough support.

Freelancers are not as cute and cuddly as the imperiled pandas, but we are essential in this bigger ecosystem. We're asking questions that not everybody is trained to ask and we're looking at documents in a way that not everybody's looking at them. We're piecing together pieces of a puzzle.  A lot of this work is being done by people like us. But it's really tough, draining, and exhausting.  It's hard enough to hold people in power account in the best of circumstances. Even the places that have committed reporters on the beat, they’re working in such challenging conditions that imagine what's going on when you’re alone, in the places off the beaten path.

We're far away from the action, we're encountering the difficulty of getting there, and we are running up against the normal obstacles in taking on a very powerful institution. Even putting the aside material stuff, like scraping up the money for a plane ticket: When you're out there with no health benefits and no steady salary and fearing a lifetime of lawsuits or retaliation, your spirits can get down. It’s then that we worry about all of those lost stories—about the desperate people whose voice can’t be heard because a reporter ran out of money or just encountered just too much resistance. 

People like us need support to finish our stories. A little bit of financial, moral, and logistical help really goes a long way. To know that there's a group like FIRE out there, to keep freelancers going when the going gets rough, is I think invaluable. It’s really hard to overstate their importance. Throughout American history, who enabled the changes that have held us true to our founding promise? It wasn't legislators and it wasn't non-profit organizations and it sure as hell wasn’t like social media companies. It was journalists bringing to light stories that shocked the American imagination and reminded us of how far we had to go, and that resulted in the kind of changes that make us more accountable to what we promised everyone, back in 1787."