Dear reader:
After our first full year at The Frontier, we’re proud of the success we’ve achieved and the impact we’ve had on our community. We’re also humbled by the support from you, the members, and the general public.
We want to continue growing and serving the public through our journalism, so we’ve made a strategic decision to transition to a nonprofit model beginning Tuesday.
If you’re a monthly member of The Frontier, we hope you continue at or above your current level of support. Even if you’ve just purchased a story one time, we’d appreciate your continued support, and it’s tax deductible under our new model. Click here to visit our donation page.
If you have any questions about our transition or your account, please contact Bobby@readfrontier.com.
Why aren’t we sticking with the for-profit model? We’ve made it work for more than a year and could have continued operating as a for-profit, but we want to expose our stories to a wider audience. Ultimately, the kind of journalism we produce is a public service, and it’s important the public has access to it.
In our first year, The Frontier was honored as a finalist for Best New Website in the 2016 Great Plains Journalism Awards. We also partnered with local, state and national media outlets for groundbreaking investigative projects. Our partnerships, including those with NewsOn6 and News9, allowed our stories to reach more people across the state and nation.
Our website achieved rapid growth, with more than 1 million unique visitors in August.
We also experimented with new ways to tell stories and reach our audience. During this year’s primary and general elections, the staff provided six hours of real-time coverage with candidate interviews, commentary and up-to-date results.
Our stories have uncovered the truth and made a difference:
- We detailed corruption at the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office, which led to the indictment and resignation of Sheriff Stanley Glanz and an overhaul of the agency.
- Our investigation into the disciplinary case against a local surgeon uncovered political interference by two governors and led to ethics complaints against Gov. Mary Fallin’s staff.
- Our investigation of the Tulsa Police Department’s custom of “buying rank,” a practice where officers paid supervisors to retire early, led to reforms and new city policies to ensure fairness in promotions.
- The Frontier’s coverage of two civil rights stories -- the death of Elliott Williams in Tulsa’s jail and the police shooting of Terence Crutcher -- generated more than 600,000 unique visits to our website from across the nation.
- We’ve quickly become one of the state’s leading advocates for transparency in government, fighting for access to records on the public’s behalf. The Frontier’s editor-in-chief, Ziva Branstetter, is a plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking records on Oklahoma’s death penalty process. The Frontier has also filed a lawsuit seeking access to jail videos.
Though we are taking down our paywall, your continued financial support is more important than ever and now it’s tax deductible.
Your contributions will allow us to grow our staff so we can continue serving as a watchdog and expand our coverage into new areas. The new model will allow us to continue serving as a nonpartisan, independent source of news.
The change in our model will provide an opportunity for The Frontier to partner with Tulsa’s vibrant philanthropic community in exciting new ways. Also, the nonprofit model will allow you, the members, to continue supporting vital investigative and enterprise reporting.
The kind of independent, fearless journalism The Frontier has become known for is more important than ever. Since 2008, the number of working journalists has been cut by more than half nationwide. Journalism is under attack from government officials and interest groups who don’t believe they should be subject to scrutiny.
Again, we sincerely thank you for your support. As we transition to our nonprofit model, we hope you share our stories and encourage those in your network to consider donating to The Frontier. To support us, click here.
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