When the 83rd session of the Nevada Legislature gavels in, The Nevada Independent will have three reporters assigned to live in Carson City and cover the 63-member body full time.

That’s a claim that no other news outlet in the state can make. 

The Nevada Independent has long placed a premium on covering the Legislature, starting from our launch just before the 2017 session. Maybe it’s because our founder and CEO, Jon Ralston, has covered sessions for nearly 40 years. Or because it was a formative experience for us early in our careers and we’ve now been covering sessions or editing coverage on them for more than a decade.  

We think it’s crucial to stay on top of developments that will resonate for years to come in the quality of life in Nevada, the quality of our school system and so much more.

But what makes The Indy such an asset to the state is not that we care about the session. Many outlets do. It’s that we’re maintaining and even expanding our investment in coverage while others are pulling back.

After decades of local journalism struggling to find a foothold in an increasingly online world, it’s no surprise that legislative reporting positions were first on the chopping block. A legislative press corps that was small but mighty 10 or 20 years ago in Carson City now counts noticeably fewer permanent members.

But our time in the legislative trenches made us appreciate what good legislative and state government reporting is worth, especially because the Legislature exempts itself from Nevada’s public records and open meeting laws. That means that more often than not, major decisions affecting the rest of the state are quietly hashed out in back rooms before being fast-tracked across the legislative finish line.

It’s why we believe in the power of deeply sourced reporting on the legislative process. Done correctly, the “scoops,” exclusive stories and deep dives we write give the public more time to understand what lawmakers are actually doing and have their say in the process, rather than finding out in mid-June what exactly happened in Carson City.

So, during the next few months, if you find yourself learning something about the Legislature that you wouldn’t have known otherwise, just know it did not emerge from a vacuum. It came about because we at The Indy made the conscious choice to invest a large amount of time and our limited resources into covering this legislative session.

• We’ve cross-trained our entire team on how to cover the session, so far more than just our core trio in Carson City will be pitching in. 
• We are profiling every freshman legislator. 
• We’ll be running our legislative newsletter twice a week. 
• We’re tracking the broad contours of the session through our Policy Tracker. 
• We’re tracking Gov. Joe Lombardo’s commitments through our Promise Tracker. 
• We’ll be analyzing contributions to lawmakers through our Follow the Money Series. 
• We’ll be giving special attention to how developments affect the Latino community and presenting that in English and Spanish. 
• We’ll be fact checking claims with fact briefs. 
• And you’ll probably see more visuals out of the session from The Indy than anywhere else, thanks to the hard work of veteran legislative photographer David Calvert.

As always, we appreciate any financial support you can offer, but just as important, our work only matters if people are reading it. Please tell friends, coworkers or anyone else civically engaged about The Indy, and let them know about our work (and especially our legislative newsletter, Behind the Bar).

In this increasingly uncertain time, know that we will continue to be a light for high-quality, paywall-free journalism on the most important issues that face you and your state — for the next 120 days and beyond.