“One day this past March, residents received an unfamiliar newspaper…”

This week, Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Floodlight, and ProPublica copublished an investigation: “Fossil fuel interests are working to kill solar in one Ohio county. The hometown newspaper is helping.” The story examines the latest example of how “the oil and gas industry and power companies have exploited a struggling news industry and a fraught political process to fight the transition to clean energy and maximize profits.” Neel interviewed Floodlight’s Miranda Green, a coauthor of this week’s piece, earlier this year.

The “hometown newspaper” featured in the piece is Ohio’s Mount Vernon News, which featured in an article Nieman Lab published in March: “A company linked to a large ‘pink slime’ network is being hired by big publishers like Gannett.” That story followed reporting by the progressive outlet Raw Story on how an executive named Kyle Barnett, affiliated with the Mount Vernon News, was hired as a journalism lecturer at Tennessee Tech University. (He is still teaching there.)

Editing our March piece was difficult, in part because — no offense, pink slime journalism — a lot of this stuff is convoluted and dry and the associated executives often refuse to talk. (Our March story, by freelancer Steven Monacelli, is notable in part because Monacelli got Barnett on the record.) It is hard to track the way various blandly named companies are affiliated, and hard to write about them in a way that’s interesting to readers who don’t already care. (Initial research also suggests few people actually read ink slime sites — though this may change if its purveyors buy more local papers, like the Mount Vernon News.) This isn’t a new problem for investigative journalism. But it is something I’ve been thinking about when it comes to reporting on “pink slime” networks and their web of entanglements.

I think the Tow Center/Floodlight/ProPublica piece does a great job of bringing in the voices of residents of Mount Vernon and including details like the fact that the local university’s new sports complex is named “after the chemical formula for methane.” That on-the-ground reporting of impacts on regular people is something we don’t have enough of; it takes pink slime out of the realm of bland corporations and media-speak, giving it a shape we can wrap our heads around. If you have other ideas for keeping reporting on pink-slime-and-pals interesting, I’d love to hear them.