What it takes to make FERN run

By Samuel Fromartz

Over the years, I have often written to you about our stories and the impact they’ve had, but what I don’t often reveal is the behind-the-scenes work that it takes to create them. As part of our summer fundraising plea, we asked three of our reporters – staff writers Bridget Huber and Teresa Cotsirilos and long-time freelance contributor Esther Honig –  to talk about the role FERN plays in their reporting. So in the coming days, you will hear from them about their most recent stories. But first, I thought I’d explain FERN’s overall editorial process.

I want to underscore four points in particular and why your support of FERN is so crucial to our reporting on food, agriculture and the environment, especially as I pass the baton to FERN’s new Editor-in-Chief Theodore Ross.

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Concept. Before we pursue a story, we spend a lot of time honing the idea. Do we have the characters who can tell the story? Is the idea strong and significant enough? And do we believe the reporting will bear fruit? Sometimes this pre-reporting takes weeks, with a lot of back and forth with our editors. 

Partners. We work to find the right partner for a story, whether a news site (like National Geographic), a magazine (like Mother Jones), or an audio outlet (like KQED in San Francisco). These outlets work with us because our editors are deeply knowledgeable about our subjects and adept at collaborative work. But it takes time to find and develop those editorial relationships, and then create stories.

Support. In this age of media downsizing, often the first thing to go is travel, then freelance budgets, followed by staff. FERN has continued to spend on all these areas because we know we can only produce great work if everyone gets the support they need to dig into a story. And if a story takes longer than expected, which is often the case with investigations, we can adjust. None of this is easy. We have annual budget targets we need to meet, but at FERN great stories get the money they need.

Photography. For a long time, we’ve felt that great images are crucial to our biggest stories. So we go out of our way to find the best freelance photographers and pay them to illustrate our stories. I can’t tell you how rare that is these days.

All of this work takes time and money, and most of the news organizations we work with, even ones that have huge audiences, are no longer willing to invest significant resources into this kind of reporting. And that’s where you come in. Through your generous financial support, we’re able to bridge the gap and perform all the behind-the-scenes work that gets these stories done. We can’t do it without you, and we need to raise $30,000 between now and the end of July. Please give and help us reach our goal. Our work depends on it.