As you can see, our top story this morning came to us via mtvigilante.org, which just went live yesterday—Dec. 12.
This is good news for Montanans. The founding editor is Shane Castle, who published the Helena Vigilante, an alternative newspaper in the state capital, for three years before pulling the plug on the print edition this fall in order to work on getting mtvigilante.com up and running.
You can read all about the new site here, but we’ll give a few details, starting with this admirable mission statioment:
As corporate media outlets around Montana and the United States continue cutting newsroom staff and critical investigative content in their pursuit of short-term profits, mtvigilante.org aims to address the informational vacuum by producing investigative reports that expose behind-the-scenes corporate, political and bureaucratic schemes and shenanigans too often overlooked when media outlets don’t take their watchdog role seriously. In order to increase the prominence of such reporting and tacitly shame moneyed outlets for their self-serving priorities, mtvigilante.org will make its investigative reports available for free to small, independent media outlets.
We’ve never been more pleased to think of Last Best News as a small, independent media outlet.
We also admit to having some of the same defects as the mainstream media, in that we are a for-profit digital newspaper and therefore feel obliged to keep a steady stream of copy flowing onto the screens of our readers. This necessity of “feeding the daily beast,” as it is described in newsrooms, has made it more difficult than we anticipated to do as much in-depth reporting as we’d like to do.
Hell, we’re so short on people around here that the sole proprietor has taken to referring to himself as “we.” But the point is, mtvigilante.com, which is a nonprofit, will be helping us and other independent news sites provide the kind of long-form, important stories that readers deserve.
Here’s another beautifully worded excerpt from mtvigilante’s “About” page, a statement with which we are in full agreement:
At mtvigilante.org, we value accurate, fully contextualized, unflinching reporting that matters. Our stories are independent, nonpartisan and fair. However, we reject the he-said-she-said model of reporting and the kind of false equivalency that inevitably, if unintentionally, gives credence to crackpots and crackpot ideas.
We look forward to a fruitful partnership. Please visit the mtvigilante site, read up on it, bookmark it, and tell your friends.
