Weekly newsletter: January 14, 2026

View in browser | Forward to a friend | Subscribe

Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk wins Collaboration Award from LION Publishers

Executive Director Sara Shipley Hiles accepts the Collaboration of the Year award at the 2025 LION Independent News Sustainability Summit St. Louis, Missouri.

Editor's Note: This week, we wanted to share a nice write-up from the folks at Mizzou on our recent win at the LION awards. We find ourselves in great company with other winning journalism organizations, and we're so glad to do this work in the Basin! –Michael Crowe, Ag & Water Desk

By Austin Fitzgerald, University of Missouri School of Journalism

COLUMBIA, Mo.  — The Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an environmental journalism collaborative based at the Missouri School of Journalism, has won the Collaboration of the Year Award from nonprofit news consortium LION Publishers.

Part of the 2025 LION Sustainability Awards, the honor recognizes the Ag & Water Desk for its inherently collaborative projects with nearly two dozen partner newsrooms. It adds to a growing chorus of acclaim for the journalism network, which provides coverage of the nation's largest watershed for free to news organizations all over the country.

"This award celebrates the power of partnership to deliver crucial information to communities, especially in areas where there are gaps in local coverage of agricultural and environmental issues," said David Kurpius, dean of the School of Journalism. "It's why we remain committed to supporting innovative models like the Ag & Water Desk that drive the industry forward."

The Ag & Water Desk launched with support from the School of Journalism's Reynolds Journalism Institute and the Walton Family Foundation and began to publish stories in 2022. Since then, several large-scale, collaborative projects have examined issues ranging from the impacts of flooding on the Mississippi River Basin and the threats facing America's wetlands to the consequences of fertilizer runoff for marine wildlife and fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico.

The projects — alongside a regular stream of smaller-scale stories — typically feature a combination of work from students at the Missouri School of Journalism, contributions from Report for America corps journalists at newsrooms throughout the Mississippi River Basin and other partnerships with news organizations, alongside further financial and editorial support from the Desk. They have won a variety of awards (and grants) from national and international journalism organizations, both for the projects themselves and for related work from students associated with the Desk.

This time, the award came not for any one project, but for the organization's approach to producing and disseminating environmental coverage.

"The Ag & Water Desk collab is so impressive because it shows how a well-designed network can amplify the strengths of many small newsrooms while solving problems none could tackle alone," read a statement from the LION judges. "The Desk brings together local outlets, early-career journalists, mentors, funders and national partners in a way that's highly coordinated, mutually beneficial and deeply mission-driven."

That structure is no mere side effect of the Desk's work but a cornerstone of successfully supporting a vital segment of the industry, according to the Desk's executive director, Sara Shipley Hiles.

"Collaboration is the opposite of coercion or division," Hiles said. "It happens because people recognize we can do more working together than we could alone. Climate, agriculture and environmental issues are big and complex, and it takes a team to cover them well."

The Desk is preparing to recruit five new newsrooms, each of which will host a Report for America corps member. Applications are open through Oct. 20 on the Report for America website and are open to newsrooms in any of the 31 states across the Mississippi River Basin.

For more information about the Desk or to sign up to republish its stories for free, click here.

The Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk is an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation. Click here for a map of the basin and our partner newsrooms.

Reach us at info@agwaterdesk.org or by replying to this email.