This is our newsletter, Hard Reset. Sign up here. Donate to BigIfTrue.org here.

As 2021 creeps out the back door, it’s hard not to think of the future. So I’d like to share some things BigIfTrue.org has planned for the new year.

Since 2020, we’ve covered economic inequality, often through a housing lens. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how a small nonprofit like BigIfTrue.org can advance reporting on inequality in ways you, our readers, find the most useful.

We don’t want our coverage of this vital topic to feel heavy and hopeless. We want you to leave our site and newsletter feeling informed and energized to tackle inequality issues in your communities.

This year, we asked you how we can improve our coverage of this issue. We got feedback through a survey and about a dozen conversations with our donors and newsletter subscribers.

To better meet your information needs, we’re making a few tweaks in 2022.

Focus areas

Our journalism in the new year will focus on our two most-requested subjects. The first is housing, which we’ve covered since 2020 through stories about eviction during the pandemic and access to affordable housing.

Our second focus area will be criminal justice. You shared urgent concerns with us regarding incarceration, jail and prison conditions, policing, and prosecution in your communities. I previously covered criminal justice issues, including incarceration and police accountability, as a reporter at The Clarion-Ledger in Mississippi and The Amarillo Globe-News in Texas, and I look forward to digging into this important topic.

The types of stories we’ll write

Since the fall of 2020, most of our stories have been in-depth pieces that we published each month, like this one about how landlords evaded eviction bans.

In the new year, we’re shifting gears. We’ll pursue shorter stories driven by your interests. Since these stories will take less time, we’ll be able to report more of them.

We’re going to experiment with a few different story types that our readers and donors said they would find most useful.

What you’ll see:

• Stories that provide a deeper look or a different angle on recent breaking news in housing and criminal justice.
• Solutions-based stories that show how people have tackled a housing or criminal justice issue in their communities, with ideas on how you can help.
• Explainers that break down how you’ll be affected by new policies or other developments in the news related to criminal justice and housing.

How you can help us

Our tiny nonprofit has been chugging along since 2019, and we wouldn’t be here without the generosity of our readers, who funded all our journalism this past year.

If you think journalism that brings attention to inequality should exist, I hope you’ll invest in our future with a tax-deductible gift. Donations from our readers are the only reason I’ve been able to continue my work with BigIfTrue.org. They’re the only reason we could report anything during 2021, like this story about public defenders’ hefty case backlogs or this one about how misdemeanor charges can upend people’s lives.

If you can’t afford a donation, you can help us by sharing our stories and newsletter with someone who you think may like them. A follow on Twitter and Facebook and sharing our work on those platforms would also help us a lot.

Thank you for being a Hard Reset subscriber! We’ll see you in 2022!

Mollie Bryant
Editor, BigIfTrue.org