Collaboration: 2023 Annual Report

Our award-winning investigative collaboration with ProPublica celebrated its third year. Bringing our high-caliber journalists together continues to be a win-win. It enables us to share expertise and ensure WBUR's journalism reaches a wider range of people.

Our strong relationship with El Planeta, Boston's Latino Daily, continues. Our editorial teams collaborate and El Planeta makes much of WBUR’s journalism available to Spanish-language readers.

This year, WBUR forged two new partnerships with nonprofit journalism organizations: The Trace, which reports on gun violence, and The Marshall Project, which covers criminal justice. Combining the subject-matter expertise of these organizations with WBUR's editorial rigor and mastery of audio, we launched two podcasts: The Gun Machine and Violation.

In The Gun Machine, Alain Stephens, an investigative reporter with The Trace, explores the political history of the gun industry in America. Stephens, a military veteran and gun owner, brings his editorial expertise and personal experience to each episode.

Violation examines the parole system through one case: the conviction of a 16-year-old who killed his summer camp roommate in 1986. Veteran criminal justice reporter Beth Schwartzapfel is the host. She digs into everything from mental health and power and privilege to victims’ rights. She also explores questions around who gets to decide how much prison time is warranted when someone commits a terrible crime.

WBUR rigorously edited and crafted the unique sound of both shows. The podcasts are strong examples of how WBUR is leveraging its editorial skill and working with journalists to produce singular reporting you can't hear anywhere else.

Two early career journalists joined the WBUR newsroom for fellowships in 2023: Irina Matchavariani and Jacob Garcia. The program cultivates recent graduates or early-career journalists with a demonstrated commitment to advancing issues of voices underrepresented in public radio.

Before coming to WBUR, Matchavariani was a print journalist in her native home, the Republic of Georgia. Garcia has worked as a documentarian and multimedia journalist.

The WBUR News Fellowship cultivates recent graduates or early-career journalists with a demonstrated commitment to advancing issues of voices underrepresented in public radio. While in our newsroom, Matchavariani and Garcia received hands-on experience producing a variety of stories on air and online. Over the course of the year, the fellows rotated through WBUR, gaining experience from our local news magazine, Radio Boston, the local newscast and a variety of digital projects.

Matchavariani's work included the story of a Ukranian teen who fled her home and competed in the Head of the Charles Regatta, the story of Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran, and the opium trade's connection to some major Boston institutions.

Garcia's work included a video explaining PFAS chemicals, a deep dive into the band The Q-Tip Bandits and how a group creates spaces for people with autism to be themselves. He produced two episodes of our podcast Endless Thread — one debunking Grand Canyon folklore and another on the spooky side of the mechanical stuffed animal, Furby.