inewsource hires investigative reporter to cover federal impact

Hello there, 

I’m Jake and I am thrilled to be joining inewsource this week as a Report for America corps member covering federal impact. This may not be the first time you’ve seen my byline here.

As a freelancer I wrote about how independent spending from developers was influencing the board of supervisors race, hydrogen sulfide monitoring in the south bay and a local church that was pushing attendees to vote for Donald Trump, probably in violation of IRS rules. Now I’ll get to continue covering local issues through a wider lens.

While many reporters consider the impact of federal policy when covering their beats, the current administration’s rapid and drastic policy changes call for a dedicated approach to cover it fully.

 As a reporter and a new San Diego resident, I’ve found myself constantly wondering what the latest big headline policy from the Trump administration means for my life and the city without clear answers in sight. 

When will tariffs kick in, or have they already? What will they do to the price of goods and the availability of jobs in San Diego? Are deportations up in San Diego? Who is being deported and are their rights being respected? What groundbreaking scientific research has had its funding cut? What nonprofits can no longer provide services? How are city and county budgets being rebalanced to accommodate a loss of funding? 

These are just a few of the questions I’m eager to look into.

In my career I’ve covered a wide range of topics that have prepared me to take on this complex beat. I’ve written about the abuse of political prisoners in Nicaragua, the persecution of environmental activists in Colombia, shortages in housing for migrants in New York City and the failure of the coroner system in the U.S to accurately count COVID-19 deaths in rural areas.

Most recently I was working in New York City at Columbia Journalism Investigations reporting on misconduct by prosecutors. We couldn’t find the kind of data that answered our questions, so the team and I built a database from scratch by poring over thousands of pages of court documents and entering the data by hand.

We were able to show that prosecutors rarely were held accountable for violating standards meant to protect defendants’ civil rights at trial, even if they did so in more than one case. In some of those cases, prosecutors failed to share evidence with the defense that left defendants behind bars for decades, only to be exonerated when the evidence came to light.

As an investigative reporter, I strive to uncover hidden documents, data and insights that are in the public interest and make sense of them for readers. 

This kind of painstaking accountability reporting is very time-consuming and costly to produce. There are few newsrooms left that can do this kind of reporting, and even fewer that do it at the local level. 

I am proud to be working in one of them. 

inewsource does serious investigative reporting with a focus on accountability and providing utility to the community. They don’t try to cover every story. Instead, the newsroom focuses on delivering the best reporting possible for the stories they choose to dig deep on, ensuring each piece provides unique value to readers. Every bit of information has been rigorously checked by editors and reporters before it is published. We seek to inform, not merely inflame and enrage readers. We don’t do clickbait. 

This is my first post on this beat and I am hungry for story leads. If you have information you would like to share or there is something you would like to see covered, I want to hear from you. Please reach out to me at jakekincaid@inewsource.org or through the tip line in our federal impact stories

P.S. Check out our Good for All campaign if you haven’t already. It’s the best way you can continue to support my work.