Who we are

Inspired by Ida Tarbell, the muckraking 20th century journalist whose investigative work led to the breakup of the Standard Oil trust, we aim to return journalism to its roots as a force that works on behalf of the public, speaking truth to power. Today, that looks a little different than it did back then. Supporting accountability journalism requires repairing the information ecosystem right along with it.

This includes documenting and combating disinformation, investigating policy obstruction across borders, particularly with respect to climate and democracy, and amplifying the voices of those impacted by pollution, climate change, and corruption. In other words: Creating better information and better stories and a distribution system to spread them.

HOW WE WORK

We do that by equipping independent journalists with the infrastructure of a newsroom. Ida’s founders created the multimedia reporting project Drilled and in doing so built a podcast production arm, editorial team, newsletter ecosystem, social media strategy, business model, fact-checking and legal review process, and broad ecosystem of partners that will now sit under Ida, its infrastructure providing the backbone for other independent journalists to build similar sorts of projects.

As a team of journalists, creatives and impact strategists who work collaboratively across borders and across disciplines we turn accountability reporting into the many cultural touch points required to shift public opinion and policy while ensuring that liability and legal issues are minimized, coverage is expanded, and cohesion is built between Global North and Global South narratives. This includes not only partnering with international mainstream media companies but also arming frontline communities and citizen journalists with the tools and information they need to make a difference at the local level.

theory of change

Our theory of change starts with the way we see the information ecosystem: as a multi-tentacled octopus that includes the media, universities, management consultancies, PR and advertising agencies, think tanks, and law firms, with corporations currently acting as the nerve center, controlling not just the creation of information, but the framing of narratives, and the distribution of both. Everyone knows if you cut off an octopus's tentacle, it just swims away and regrows it. The same is true here, to fix the disinformation problem currently threatening democracy and stalling climate action, we have to go after the nerve center: the corporations and elites that have transformed an ecosystem intended to inform the public into one that manipulates us. A core component of the disinformation industry’s strategy to weaken democracy has been to discredit and disable the press, and to build an alternative media ecosystem to compete with and drown it out. As mainstream media has become both less financially viable and less trusted, independent journalism is exploding, but while independent journalists might easily start a newsletter or a podcast, they quickly burn themselves out trying to handle all of the things that a newsroom might. By providing that support and infrastructure, and seeding exactly the sort of accountability journalism, narrative culture work, thought leadership, and, importantly, offline community building that scared the corporate titans into creating the disinformation industry in the first place, we aim to strengthen the press, re-educate the public, remind them of their real enemy, and dislodge the corporate stranglehold on information.