(C) Idaho Capital Sun
This story was originally published by Idaho Capital Sun and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Today is our fourth birthday. Here's how your support of our work informs all of Idaho. • Idaho Capital Sun [1]

['Christina Lords', 'Becca Renk', 'Chuck Malloy', 'More From Author', 'March', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar']

Date: 2025-03-31

The first conversation I had with Andrea Verykoukis, I was sitting in my car in the parking lot of a Boise Eyemart Express with my cellphone on speakerphone on a cloudy day in late January 2021.

I had just gotten out of an eye appointment, having picked out a new set of blue, thick-rimmed glasses. That’s because, two days before, I had just been fired from the Idaho Statesman and needed to renew my prescription before I lost my health insurance. (If you don’t know that story, maybe I’ll tell it to you over a beer someday; if you do, know I am still a fierce Excel advocate and an advocate for making sure our reporters have the tools they need to do their jobs.)

Andrea, along with Chris Fitzsimon and a host of other talented journalists, had been hard at work launching or partnering with nonprofit news organizations focused on state politics and policy in all 50 states through States Newsroom, now the Idaho Capital Sun’s parent nonprofit and the reason our outlet exists.

I have to be honest here. After the firing, and after 12 years of journalism — 11 of them at newspapers in Idaho — I wanted out. I was looking at master’s programs to go be the librarian my mom always thought I should be and applying to public relations jobs I thought might fit.

But Andrea asked one question: What is going under covered and under reported in Idaho? And then she went quiet.

I think I rambled on for about 30 straight minutes about how public education has been chronically underfunded and our educators have been demoralized here, about how the shortages our health care workforce we faced even before COVID were in dire straights now, about how wildfire and mismanagement of federal public lands were threatening the places I grew up visiting, about how the Idaho Legislature every year comes with legislation to make it harder for Idahoans to cast a ballot or run a citizens initiative in our elections.

And I’ll never forget what Andrea said: “Well. It sure seems like you have more stories in you to tell. What do you think about launching a nonprofit focused on state politics in Idaho through States Newsroom?”

Then she explained that as a nonprofit news organization, States Newsroom allows any other media outlet to pick up our work — for free — with proper credit and attribution.

I thought of all the times sitting around the conference room at my first reporting gig covering local government and crime at the Moscow-Pullman Daily News and praying that larger news organizations could report on some of the tips and stories that we just couldn’t get to with our small, young staff. Of all the times I had to say no to stories worth pursuing at the Post Register in Idaho Falls as I stumbled my way through my first legislative session in 2013 because there just weren’t enough reporters to get them all done. And of all the times at the Idaho Press when I was assistant editor where we lost good, young reporters that we had spent years building up their reporting chops, figuring out complex local government systems and backstories, just to see them forced to take a PR job because journalism wasn’t paying their bills.

If we could help other Idaho newsrooms — and by extension, their Idaho readers — by providing in-depth coverage of the Statehouse, maybe, I thought, we could make an impact.

I took a week to talk myself out of it. I dove alone to Balanced Rock in Twin Falls County to explore somewhere I had never been in Idaho, to hike, to watch Salmon Falls Creek sweep by me, to see our farm fields laid out as far as the eye could see, to think. It was there I decided there was some journalism still left in me, and I was compelled to try.

I thought for sure we’d launch the Idaho Capital Sun, it wouldn’t work, and in a year say, well, we tried.

But that’s not what happened.

While Idaho newsrooms are very competitive and want to be first, right and contextual, they also understand Idahoans have a right to know how their tax dollars are being spent, and who is making the decisions that affects their daily lives and their futures.

The very first newsroom to pick up one of our stories, on the first day we launched, March 31, 2021 — four years ago today? The Idaho Statesman.

But it certainly wasn’t the last. To States Newsroom, the measure of our success isn’t tallied by click quotas for reporters or page view website traffic. It’s how many of our stories are good enough and helpful enough to be picked up by other newsrooms, so we track those metrics instead.

Just this month, the Idaho Capital Sun’s stories were picked up online by other news outlets 240 times, largely in Idaho but some also nationwide. And 62 of our stories this month have made it into print. And that’s just what we can monitor and categorize, likely a huge undercount of just how far our work travels.

Our work is picked up everywhere by the fine folks at the the weekly Sandpoint Reader to my hometown TV news station KPVI in Pocatello. By the Rexburg Standard Journal, by the ever-expanding BoiseDev online, by the Twin Falls Times-News and by another newspaper I called home for four years, the Idaho Press in Nampa. The Idaho Capital Free Press picks up our work in Grangeville, and so does the News-Examiner for their readers in Bear Lake and Caribou counties. Our work traveled across the country this month in publications like USA Today; the Adirondack Daily Enterprise in Saranac Lake, New York; Spokane Public Radio; and the Fox 26 TV station in Medford, Oregon.

And we return the favor. At the bottom of every one of our newsletters, the Sunrise, which you can sign up for online for free, I include a collection of links to the work of other Idaho news outlets the produce every day. I think a lot about our state’s news ecosystem, and we aim to bring to the forefront the hard work, under tough economic and political circumstances, that reporters are providing to the Gem State and her residents.

As I mentioned before, the Idaho Capital Sun is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so donations from readers like you are what keep our lights on. It’s what keeps not only our readers informed at IdahoCapitalSun.com, but it also keeps the tens of thousands of readers of other hardworking Idaho news organizations informed, too.

YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE. SUPPORT

I never thought we’d last a year. Now, among the most chaotic and challenging news cycle and political climates I have ever faced in the 16 years I’ve been a professional journalist, I’m reminded every day just how essential our role is to meeting this moment. Because we have reporters originally born and raised here or who have lived here for decades, I’ve never felt more capable of reflecting the things Idahoans experience and want to know about in our work. I’ve never felt more “sure in my skis,” as they say, never been more confident in our ability to make change and help people understand their world around them.

If you’ve ever sent a note of encouragement or supported us financially over the last four years, through donations large or small, one-time or recurring, thank you for helping us grow and thrive. You are the reason we are celebrating our fourth anniversary today. If you’re new to the Idaho Capital Sun and our work, welcome. We hope you find value in what we do here.

And especially to our hard working reporting staff, Mia Maldonado, Kyle Pfannenstiel and Clark Corbin, our senior reporter who has been with us since the day we launched, thank you for waking up every day and fearlessly heading into spaces to shine the light of truth. I’m the luckiest editor in Idaho to work with people like you.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://idahocapitalsun.com/2025/03/31/today-is-our-fourth-birthday-heres-how-your-support-of-our-work-informs-all-of-idaho/

Published and (C) by Idaho Capital Sun
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/idahocapitalsun/