Newsworks Lab involves all of us as an investigative newsroom focused on building a future for local reporting — and for the communities it serves.

We’re launching it at Trib Total Media after I spent a decade experimenting with strategies for local journalism through the Center for Media Innovation at Point Park University.

Newsworks Lab will put ideas into practice, produce impactful investigative reporting, give back to communities across Western Pennsylvania, and create opportunities for young people to stay.

My grandmother often told me, “Never forget who you are and where you come from.” With Newsworks Lab, her words feel less like advice and more like a call to action.

Newsworks Lab

I like Newsworks Lab because it breaks the mold.

As a public-benefit company, it has no higher mission than producing accountability journalism that improves the lives of people across Western Pennsylvania.

We will marry shoe-leather reporting with new technology. When we discover strategies that work, we will share them widely so others may learn.

Newsworks Lab will collaborate with other news organizations to engage you wherever you live.

We will meet you across multimedia platforms and in community conversations. We know no one speaks more authentically about this region than its people.

Deep roots

I grew up here. I was born at Magee-Womens Hospital, and we first lived in Squirrel Hill. My parents moved us to Penn Hills, to Churchill and then Greensburg. They ran a commercial interior design business out of old Hose Company No. 7, and now live near Ligonier.

My wife and I live in Pittsburgh’s Duquesne Heights.

I spent childhood weekends on my grandparents’ farm in the Mon Valley, close to Charleroi. My grandfather worked at Wheeling-Pittsburgh’s Allenport Works sheet-steel plant.

After graduating from Greensburg-Salem High School and going to Dickinson College, I earned a first paid byline in the Trib, for a story about studying abroad in the Soviet Union’s final days.

After graduate school at Columbia University and reporting jobs in Washington, Florida and Cincinnati, I wanted to move back home. No one was more surprised than me.

Pulling no punches

When I started at the Trib in 2001, I promised Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy I would never pull any punches, but I wouldn’t take any cheap shots either. He seemed to respect that.

I joined investigations when Luis Fabregas, now executive editor, asked me to help prove doctors were giving liver transplants to people who did not yet need them. The science backed up our claims, despite the doctors’ protests.

I was covering casino gambling when a source passed us a bag of secret documents under the table. I once was embedded with the U.S. Army War College to learn about cybersecurity. Another time, I set up an offshore bank account in Belize to prove anyone could.

When I covered the Penguins’ bid for a new hockey arena, more of you tuned in than ever before. One radio station had me on so often, they paid me with gift cards for barbecue.

Future of news

At the Center for Media Innovation, we have tried ideas like…

• Founding a community newsroom in McKeesport that helps residents tell stories;

• Creating a national fellowship to support enterprise reporting;

• Forming the Pittsburgh Media Partnership, a collaboration among 40-plus newsrooms for shared reporting, training and networking;

• Opening a co-located Downtown newsroom that houses a half-dozen outlets;

• Building a teaching newsroom to hire recent college graduates;

• Forming the local chapter of a national movement called Press Forward to focus foundation support; and,

• Starting Newsapalooza, an annual celebration of journalism.

I couldn’t have done this without Point Park University, a close-knit team of employees, and partnership from foundations and corporations.

These efforts make Southwestern Pennsylvania more resilient when journalism feels threatened — and more encouraging when we work together to grow local news.

Trib Total Media

As I think about how best to serve local news, I cannot imagine going anywhere but Trib Total Media.

President and CEO Jennifer Bertetto accomplishes good works through journalism, with a deep commitment to local news and the people it serves.

She helped the Center for Media Innovation launch an ongoing marketing campaign that has reminded more than 1.5 million people how we have hundreds of journalists “at work, every day, for you.”

The Trib’s new weekly Pittsburgh edition ensures the city has robust reporting and a paper of record, no matter what.

Its newly formed community advisory panel lets the people who live here shape their news.

The Trib has the resources and entrepreneurial spirit to try new things — and to do them in ways that benefit us all.

We will honor my grandmother by remembering who we are and where we came from — and by working together, with you, to build the Trib’s Newsworks Lab.

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