WPLN’s criminal justice reporter Paige Pfleger will partner with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network for a year-long investigative reporting fellowship.
With the help of ProPublica’s editors, data team and research department, Pfleger will publish accountability stories throughout the year that examine the impacts of Tennessee’s gun dispossession laws. She’ll work under the leadership of WPLN special projects editor Tony Gonzalez.
This will be the second collaboration between ProPublica and WPLN News. Meribah Knight and ProPublica’s Ken Armstrong co-reported a series of stories investigating Rutherford County’s juvenile justice system. That reporting resulted in major reforms to the county’s system, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2022.
ProPublica launched the Local Reporting Network at the beginning of 2018 to boost investigative journalism in local newsrooms. It has since worked with more than 70 news organizations. The network is part of ProPublica’s local initiative, which includes offices in the Midwest, South and Southwest, plus an investigative unit in partnership with The Texas Tribune.
This fellowship class includes Pfleger, as well as B. Toastie Oaster with High Country News and Stephannie Stokes with WABE, the NPR station in Atlanta.
Since joining WPLN’s newsroom in 2021, Pfleger’s work has centered on the people who are impacted by policy — she followed one family’s journey through Tennessee’s struggling Department of Children’s Services, explored how a gun stolen from an unlocked car changed the lives of two teenagers, and uncovered the loopholes that one woman fell through while trying to protect herself from an abusive husband. Tennessee lawmakers have used those stories to push for change and reform.
Her coverage of the deadly impacts of Tennessee’s gun dispossession laws earned a first-place award from the Public Media Journalists Association.
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