# States Newsroom A national **501(c)(3)** network of statehouse newsrooms, with offices in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Washington, D.C. It has staff covering **39 states** directly and works with established nonprofit outlets in the other 11, giving it reporting from all 50 state capitals. It also runs **Stateline**, the national service that The Pew Charitable Trusts transferred to it in 2023 along with $3 million. It was formed in **2019**, growing out of NC Policy Watch — a progressive North Carolina policy outfit founded in 2004 — and used the Hopewell Fund as an incubator in 2017. Its president is **Chris Fitzsimon**, who founded NC Policy Watch. Its state affiliates appear as sources throughout this wiki, including [[Ohio Capital Journal]]. ## Why it matters Statehouse reporting collapsed over the last two decades, and most of what this wiki needs about state legislatures — model bills, committee votes, administrative rulemaking, state-level corruption — is not covered by national outlets at all. This network is one of the few organizations that fills that gap at scale, which makes it both useful and worth understanding. It also sits inside a fight traced here from the other side: **who funds local news, and what that buys.** The right has built its own network of state-level outlets, and the critique each side makes of the other is substantially the same critique. ## The partisanship dispute This is contested, and the honest version is that both the disclosure and the criticism are real. **What the network does:** it accepts **no corporate donations**, and has publicly named every donor giving $1,000 or more since 2019 — a disclosure standard stricter than most commercial outlets meet. It describes its news coverage as nonpartisan and bars opinion pieces from candidates and officeholders. **What critics say:** that its labeled commentary leans left and its funding came from ideological philanthropy. Fitzsimon has himself said the editorial board is "on the liberal side." NewsGuard labeled the network a partisan outlet designed to look apolitical, pointing to a $1 million Wyss Foundation grant in 2020. *Axios* has described it as among the more strategic politically motivated sites presenting as local news. **What defenders say:** that the comparison to fabricated "pink slime" local-news operations does not hold, because the newsrooms employ real reporters doing verifiable work. The *Columbia Journalism Review* has made that argument; PolitiFact defended the Missouri Independent as a legitimate news organization after a sitting governor called it propaganda; and the Nieman Foundation briefly labeled the newsrooms hyperpartisan in 2020 and then retracted it. > [!warning] How this wiki uses it > The distinction that matters for citation is between the reporting and the commentary, which these outlets label separately. A committee vote, a bill number or a filing reported by a state affiliate is checkable against the primary record and is used that way here. An opinion column is not a source for a fact. The funding critique is recorded because it is a real dispute, not because it discredits the reporting. ## See Also - [[Ohio Capital Journal]] — the affiliate most cited here - [[Media Hub]]