Behind our reporting: what we built together in 2025

You helped fuel 90+ stories, new audience growth, and stronger watchdog reporting across the Midwest.

A look at what your support helped us achieve so far in 2025

Lauren here with Investigate Midwest! One of the clearest lessons I’ve learned in my first year here is that your support is what makes growth possible. Every new subscriber, every donation, every shared story adds up to fuel the investigative reporting our rural communities need.

In 2025, we’ve grown in big ways: new signups for our newsletter jumped considerably this summer and donations so far have nearly quadrupled compared to last year thanks to our first-ever summer fundraising campaign!

With your support, we’ve also been able to strengthen how our newsroom connects with readers:

Our first virtual panel, held on Sept. 18, drew strong interest, with 100 registrants and 60 live attendees. The full recording is now available on YouTube. Our goal is to create even more spaces where reporters, lawmakers, advocates and community voices can come together. Stay tuned for more on that.

We streamlined our donation process and expanded options on our site to Apple Pay, Google Pay and Stripe, so your contributions — and those of new supporters — go farther, with less friction. We still accept Paypal as we always have.
We launched our re-branded Data Harvest series and brought you Rooted to give our core supporters richer updates on the newsroom’s initiatives.
Social media engagement has more than doubled.

These may sound like small changes, but they represent something bigger: your support has enabled us to build a stronger newsroom, one that can reach more people, hold more Big Ag companies and institutions accountable, and provide communities with the kind of investigative journalism they deserve.

In 2025 so far, our reporting team produced more than 90 stories.

Here are some of the most-read, highest impact investigations made possible by donors like you.

These stories haven’t just lived on our website. They’ve been discussed on news radio shows, republished by trusted media outlets, and shared across communities that are too often left out of the national conversation. That reach and impact happened because you chose to invest in watchdog journalism for the Midwest.

This year also marked the start of two major reporting initiatives supported by grant funding. We published the first two stories in a three-part series examining immigration and farm labor, looking closely at how federal enforcement and local realities collide. And early next year, we’ll publish our cancer investigation, a multi-story project exploring the potential link between pesticides and how health outcomes are being shaped across the region.

Looking ahead, our goals are ambitious and they remain centered on you.

We want to deepen our relationship with our audience with more behind-the-scenes access to our reporters, from Q&As to previews of upcoming investigations. We will experiment with new ways of engaging with you, whether through polls or more live conversations. Most of all, we will keep delivering the kind of reporting that can shift conversations, strengthen communities, and push powerful institutions to answer for their actions.

Thank you for believing in our mission and for standing with us.

— Lauren Cross, assistant editor & audience engagement manager