Deep South Today, a nonprofit network of newsrooms in Louisiana and Mississippi that will soon launch a new newsroom in Arkansas, is pleased to announce it has received a $150,000 grant from Local News Hub to increase its coverage of women in politics across the communities it serves.
“We are very pleased to be able to build upon our strong track record of nonpartisan political reporting to strengthen our coverage of how women participate in government and are impacted by it,” said Deep South Today President and CEO Warwick Sabin. “This focus is particularly important during a time of rapid political evolution in our region, and we are grateful to Local News Hub for providing the resources to make it possible.”
With this new support, Deep South Today will deepen and enhance its reporting about redistricting, statehouse races and local elections in Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas, allowing each newsroom to sustain coverage of how these events affect women’s political participation and representation.
“Women have long been under-represented in politics in the Deep South, for a wide range of cultural and political reasons, and the challenges are especially steep for women of color,” said Mississippi Today Editor-in-Chief Emily Wagster Pettus, who started covering politics in the state in the mid-1990s. “One mission of our nonprofit newsrooms at Deep South Today is to examine how political systems affect people’s lives, and our coverage of women in politics is an important part of that.”
Deep South Today will coordinate enterprise projects across all of its newsrooms, including a series examining how the post-Callais redistricting landscape is reshaping the pipeline of women entering public office across Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas. That reporting will track which districts are being redrawn, what those changes mean for women — particularly Black women — and what communities are doing in response. In conjunction with this work, Deep South Today will create interactive databases of who represents our states in the legislatures and the courts, focusing on how many women are elected to these influential roles.
About Deep South Today
Deep South Today is a nonprofit network of local newsrooms that includes Mississippi Today, Verite News, and The Current. Its new Arkansas Today newsroom will launch in fall 2026.
Founded in 2016, Mississippi Today is now the largest newsroom in the state, and in 2023 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. Verite News launched in 2022 in New Orleans, where it covers inequities facing communities of color. The Current is a nonprofit news organization founded in 2018 serving Lafayette and southern Louisiana.
With its regional scale and scope, Deep South Today is rebuilding and re-energizing local journalism in communities where it had previously eroded, ensuring its long-term growth and sustainability.
About Local News Hub
The mission of Local News Hub is to support the essential work of local and independent news organizations across the country by providing consultations and advice, distributing grants, and acting as a fiscal sponsor. Local News Hub operates as a program of the Lexington Observer under the Lexington Observer’s non-profit tax status.
Through fiscal sponsorship and re-granting efforts, Local News Hub has distributed funds to nonprofit newsrooms in Arizona, Colorado, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin through an invitation-only grant-making process.
Local News Hub’s role as an adviser, grant giver and fiscal sponsor is due to the support of partners such as Pivotal Ventures.
