On Adam Ganucheau‘s first day at Mississippi Today a decade ago, there was no Wi-Fi, and he used an upside-down cardboard box as a desk.
These days, things look a little different. What was once a fledgling nonprofit newsroom is now a Pulitzer-winning powerhouse and one of three newsrooms that make up the Deep South Today network, along with two in Louisiana: Verite News in New Orleans and, as of last year, The Current in Lafayette. (The Garrison Project also folded into Deep South Today last year, and founder Ethan Brown is now Deep South Today’s special projects editor, leading criminal justice-focused work across the three newsrooms.) This fall, Deep South Today will launch a fourth newsroom, Arkansas Today.
Ganucheau, a Magnolia State native who was the first reporter Mississippi Today hired, became the publication’s editor-in-chief in 2020 and is now the first executive editor and chief content officer for Deep South Today. The network has more than 80 employees, and a budget that surpasses $10 million. Earlier this year, it launched an investigative reporting center in partnership with The New York Times. A $3 million donation from board chair Andy Lack supports that effort and will establish a video operation called Deep South Today Studios.
Deep South Today’s leaders believe their network model — independent editorial operations that share infrastructure including payroll, tech, and business and audience staff — is critical to bringing more reporting to an underserved part of the country. “I think it’s the only thing that can work in a region like the Deep South that is under-resourced and is also serving a population that doesn’t have as much access to capital and financial resources,” said Deep South Today CEO Warwick Sabin.
Philanthropy is Deep South Today’s biggest revenue stream, Sabin said. “We’ve been looking at the philanthropy in these early stages as seed capital to build the infrastructure that allows us to maximize the revenue from the other sources,” he said. That includes growing memberships and earned revenue. Deep South Today wants to keep its reporting free to access, however, and securing grants will remain crucial.
Mississippi and Louisiana have the highest poverty rates in the country and some of the lowest levels of median household wealth. Regionally, the South’s nonprofit sector has fewer assets compared to the rest of the country. In that local economic context, philanthropy — specifically, national philanthropy — “is always going to be a really important part of what we do,” Sabin said.
Ahead of the launch of Arkansas Today, I spoke with Ganucheau and Sabin about the lessons they’ve learned so far and how they think about sustainable growth.
Plans for Arkansas
Sabin, a University of Arkansas alum who lived in Little Rock for almost two decades, “was already aware of the need for more local news in the state based on my own personal experience and observations,” he said. In 2024, the team conducted an analysis of existing media in the state, with support from the American Journalism Project. Sabin, Ganucheau, and other Deep South Today leaders have spent the past two years visiting the state and listening to Arkansas residents and journalists. “We’ve had a lot of conversations with the existing media in Arkansas to make sure that, first of all, we understood the needs even from their perspective, and where we could be complementary and additive, and definitely not disruptive or competitive,” Sabin said.
A civic information needs census the newsroom conducted this summer in partnership with Civic News Company indicated low levels of satisfaction with local information on topics from housing to political information. Nearly three-quarters of respondents said they thought news organizations in the state should do more investigative reporting. Respondents also said they preferred formats like social media posts and short videos over long-form text investigations.
The media makeup of Arkansas reminds Sabin of Mississippi when Mississippi Today was founded in 2016, he said. The dominant legacy media organization has been diminished by cuts — Sabin compared Mississippi’s Clarion-Ledger to Arkansas’ Democrat-Gazette – and large swathes of the state are undercovered or uncovered. (Of the state’s 75 counties, four do not have a news source and 46 have only one, according to Medill’s 2025 State of Local News report. Arkansas has 8.1 Local Journalist Equivalents per 100,000 people, putting it in the middle of the pack in this year’s Local Journalist Index.) Beyond serving as its own destination for news, Sabin thinks Arkansas Today can prop up smaller rural newspapers around the state as a sort of wire service, as the Mississippi newsroom does, since the AP no longer has a presence on the ground in either state.
Deep South Today sees need and demand for local news and information across the state, but plans to begin with reporters in Central and Northwest Arkansas. Although Northwest Arkansas is a wealthier, fast-growing part of the state, Sabin says the region’s sources of local news have not kept up with its growth. (Access to local news varies by county, and current local news providers in the region include The Bentonville Bulletin and an Axios local newsroom.)
Ganucheau expects to announce Arkansas Today’s editor-in-chief this month. “We’re going to let [that person and the team they hire] be the architects of what this ultimately becomes in both staff structure, in beats, in coverage areas, in workflows, in all of it,” Ganucheau said. “It’s going to be their show to run, and we’re handing them not a blueprint, but a lot of research, a lot of findings, and a lot of connections and relationships that we’ve built over these past couple years.”
Staffing plans include an Arkansas-based audience editor and video editor, as well as a full-time investigative reporter, data journalist, and New York Times fellow. On the business side, Deep South Today has hired a managing director of sales and a senior director of development and partnerships.
“With Arkansas being this blank canvas,” Sabin said, “we’re able to pilot some things that we could then end up scaling across the rest of our network if they’re successful.”
The network, he added, is “aggressively looking at other places to expand.”
Doubling down on video
In 2024, Mississippi Today’s political team spent nearly six months investigating a powerful committee chair in the state legislature and published a multi-part series about how he helped steer millions in state taxpayer dollars to his own backyard. The series, Ganucheau said, got around 50,000 pageviews total, which he called both “a fine number in a state like Mississippi” and “a little disappointing to me.” So an editor got the lead reporter in front of an iPhone camera to read a 90-second script summarizing the investigation’s findings, and added some B-roll and charts.
Within 48 hours of posting that vertical video across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube, it had roughly 600,000 views, Ganucheau said. Now, he said Mississippi Today is averaging 300,000 to 400,000 users on its website per month, and more than 5 million video views across platforms per month.
Early video experiments were successful enough that Sabin was able to fundraise off the increased engagement, first to expand Mississippi Today’s video work, then to replicate it at Verite.
The work in those newsrooms led to the creation of Deep South Today Studios. While individual newsrooms have their own video teams and products, Deep South Today leadership now want to provide more centralized resources to supercharge newsrooms’ work, including creating more capacity for experimentation. Deep South Today board chair Andy Lack, former chairperson of NBC News, agreed to back the idea.
Ganucheau said he’s excited by indications that video can reach and engage new audiences. Deep South Today’s video viewers skew younger and more diverse than its text audience.
“I used to be very afraid of going to read the comments sections,” he said. “But going to Mississippi Today’s TikTok or Verite’s TikTok accounts right now and reading the comments under those videos is one of the greatest joys of my career so far — we’re seeing deep-level engagement with our journalism, with our reporting, in conversations with people who we’ve struggled to reach forever and struggled to get their actual engagement with the work in this way forever.”
As enthusiastic as he is, though, Ganucheau knows there’s a catch.
“The way that we can reach people in ways that we’ve never even dreamed of before is unbelievably amazing,” he said. “And I have no idea how to monetize it, shy of going to get grants and donations from people who see that success and that potential for what it is.”
Deep South Today, along with the rest of the industry, is “scrambling…to figure out how can we monetize this work in a way that’s not totally reliant upon these tech companies that we don’t control.” To this end, the remit for the Deep South Today Studios director includes developing a video monetization strategy.
Lessons learned from Mississippi
Before becoming part of Deep South Today’s central leadership team a year ago, Ganucheau served as Mississippi Today’s editor-in-chief for five years. “It took us a few years at Mississippi Today to get our legs under us — to figure out who we needed to be for Mississippians, who we wanted to be collectively as a newsroom and as a team serving the state,” he said.
One challenge was figuring out the right staff structure. When Ganucheau became editor-in-chief in 2020, the reporting staff had grown from the six or seven in the original launch plan to around 16, while the editing team had stayed the same size, making Ganucheau one of two editors for the 16 reporters. He added a third editor to try to correct the ratio, but it took another year or two to figure out that the right structure for the newsroom was a teams-based model, with designated editors for beats including education, healthcare, and government and politics, and each editor guiding teams of no more than four to five reporters.
“It sounds so simple or easy to think of it this way now, in retrospect,” he said. “But we really battled [over] what is that right staff structure that’s going to support the type of journalism that we want to do, and how can we sustain it?”
Mississippi Today, with its focus on accountability reporting, has faced a challenge that’s familiar to many newsrooms specializing in investigative deep dives: How much daily, breaking coverage should they do?
“I think that there were moments when we probably could have or should have done more daily or breaking news coverage than we ultimately did,” Ganucheau said. “Whether you’re a big national newspaper or a small startup nonprofit, every newsroom leader struggles with how [to] strike the balance between the quantity of output, the number of daily stories you do, versus the depth and quality reporting that takes more time and energy and resources over the long haul.”
Part of the challenge of getting that balance right, Ganucheau said, is that it requires staying on top of a constantly shifting local media landscape. Like most of the country, Mississippi lost daily coverage and newspapers between 2020 and 2025. (In 2022, the state had three counties with no newspapers, and 62 with just one; by 2025, it had five counties with no newspapers and 66 with just one, according to Medill’s data.) Ganucheau says he was too slow to see and respond to those changes with his predisposition toward prioritizing investigative stories over daily coverage. He credited the Mississippi Today editor-in-chief who succeeded him, Emily Wagster Pettus, a former Associated Press reporter, with improving that balance.
One strength of the network model, in Ganucheau’s view, is it harnesses Mississippi Today’s hard-earned lessons into a head start for Deep South Today’s other newsrooms. But it’s critical to him, and to the network’s leadership, that story ideas come from the local newsrooms, not from the top down.
For-profit newspaper chains loom large for Ganucheau as a case study in mistakes to avoid. “We have seen over time what’s happened when these companies regionalize a copy desk, or regionalize editing support, or regionalize story selection…It’s not local once you do that,” he said. “What we’re trying to do and build at Deep South Today is the opposite of how all of that has worked in the for-profit legacy world, and to me, the way that we avoid that is to let our individual newsroom leaders truly lead on behalf of their audiences.”
Looking ahead
Ganucheau and Sabin are both wary of taking Deep South Today’s success for granted.
“I think that we are all eyes very wide open about how this could go in the wrong direction,” Ganucheau said. “I think that the biggest risk that we face in this particular moment is trying to do too much too quickly.”
That, he continued, is “a weird reality for us — we are trying to plug these enormous holes in local news in a region of America that just needs it so desperately, and we’re trying to do it in a sustainable way.”
Deep South Today strives to maintain a startup-like culture. “We’re trying to be as lean and mean as humanly possible,” Ganucheau said. As the organization grows, they need to assess almost constantly what additional support to add, and how to fund it sustainably — an exercise that needs to happen “almost week by week at this point — it feels like if you wait a month to take a step back, it could be too late in some moments,” he said. “It’s [the] constant threading of that needle.”
“I don’t think tomorrow is certain,” Sabin agreed. “There’s too much change happening in the industry and in technology and in consumption habits. The economic landscape is always uncertain whether you’re talking about the business of journalism or the philanthropic landscape, so I think we’re all going to have to keep hustling and adapting and evolving according to circumstances.”
