IT’S A CHILLY MARCH morning in Manhattan—the kind of grey, slushy Wednesday that can make even the most optimistic New Yorker wonder if winter will ever end. But for Bill Keller ’70, it might as well be spring.

The previous weekend, Keller’s former employer, The New York Times, ran a 7,500-word article about the brutal beating in 2011 of an inmate by guards at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Three of the guards were scheduled to stand trial on Monday for multiple felonies, including first-degree gang assault. All had rejected plea bargains.

The story was reported by investigative journalist Tom Robbins for The Marshall Project, the nonprofit digital news outlet dedicated to criminal justice issues that Keller has edited since it launched in November of last year; and it was posted to the Times and Marshall Project websites before appearing on the front page of the newspaper’s Sunday print edition, complete with striking photos by Times photographers Chang Lee and Damon Winter. (Keller, who has been a trustee of the College since 2000, says he spent “a lot of time” dashing in and out of a board meeting in Claremont the previous Friday, shepherding the piece through publication.) On Tuesday, Robbins and Times reporter Lauren D’Avolio filed another story: all three guards had suddenly accepted a deal from prosecutors, pleading guilty to a single misdemeanor and quitting their jobs in order to avoid jail time.

From a purely journalistic perspective, the two articles packed quite a wallop, reverberating across the Internet and stimulating commentary in a variety of other media. And it’s not inconceivable that the first, lengthy story helped create the environment that made the second, shorter one come to pass; maybe, Keller mused in his Midtown office, a series of masks representing former Russian leaders gazing down at him from the wall, the guards decided to accept a plea deal because the weekend feature made it clear that prosecutors had a strong case against them.

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The Marshall Project was founded by Neil Barsky, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, documentary filmmaker, and hedge-fund manager whose interest in criminal justice was piqued a couple of years ago by two books: Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which examines the mass incarceration of African Americans; and Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove, about Thurgood Marshall’s defense of four young black men who were falsely accused in 1949 of raping a white woman. (The Marshall Project was named for the late Supreme Court justice.) Barsky was raised in a politically active household—both parents were involved in the civil rights movement—and he retains a belief in the power of journalism to effect social change. He also feels that the American public has become inured to the fact that the nation’s criminal justice system is, as he says, “scandalously messed up.” So he decided to use digital journalism to lend the subject of criminal justice reform the urgency it deserves. “The status quo is not defensible,” Barsky says. “The country needs to see this issue like the house is on fire.”

Barsky didn’t know Keller personally, but in June 2014, he shot him an email to see if he might be interested in signing on as editor-in-chief. The two met for breakfast; Keller agreed; and then, as Barsky puts it, “all hell broke loose.”

“Bill’s hiring put us on the map right away with funders and with other reporters and editors who wanted to work with us,” Barsky says. It also stirred up a great deal of media attention, with articles about Keller, Barsky and The Marshall Project appearing long before the site actually launched.

This should come as no surprise. Keller is one of the most familiar and respected figures in American print journalism: Over the course of his 30 years at the Times, he won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the fall of the Soviet Union; served as bureau chief in South Africa during the end of apartheid; held the position of executive editor for eight years; and ended his run at the paper as a columnist. His decision to move to a nonprofit digital enterprise evoked comparisons with Paul Steiger, who left his job as managing editor of the Wall Street Journal to found ProPublica, now the largest and best-known nonprofit digital newsroom in the country; and it generated a commensurate amount of buzz.

For Keller, running an editorial staff of 20 after several years of solitary column writing represented a welcome return to what he calls the “adrenaline and collegiality” of chasing news. Just as importantly, it meant working in an area where there was a real opportunity to effect change—there is broad bipartisan support for criminal justice reform these days—and to practice accountability journalism, probing public institutions to see if they are fulfilling their responsibilities. This, he adds, is distinct from advocacy: The Marshall Project does not promote specific legislative reforms, nor does it take a moral stand on issues like drug policy or capital punishment. (He does admit, however, that walking the line between advocacy and accountability can sometimes be uncomfortable, and says that he must occasionally keep his staff from crossing it; but as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once memorably said of pornography, Keller claims to know advocacy when he sees it.)

Bill Keller ’70 at the New York office of the Marshall Project

There was also, Keller says, a certain appeal to building an organization from scratch, without the ample safety net afforded by The New York Times, and in managing a relatively small operation. “I can talk to pretty much everyone on my staff if I want to, which is nice,” Keller says—and presumably quite different from the Times, where he edited a staff of 1,250.

In fact, Keller had just come from The Marshall Project’s weekly editorial meeting. A clutch of reporters and editors crowded into Barsky’s office in his absence, some sitting on the floor, others taking up positions on top of a low-slung filing cabinet. Keller presided with genial authority, asking questions, soliciting opinions, and sifting the criminal justice news of the day for potential stories.

That news, as anyone with eyes to see or ears to hear can attest, has been coming thick and fast of late. The Marshall Project was conceived before Eric Garner died while being subdued by police officers in New York City; before Michael Brown and Walter Scott were fatally shot by police officers in Ferguson, Mo., and North Charleston, S.C.; and before Freddie Gray died of injuries sustained while in police custody in Baltimore. And it came into being as those and similar events sparked what has been described as the most significant American civil rights movement of the 21st century, inspiring a concomitant deluge of stories about crime, punishment and America’s failure to manage either one particularly well.

But criminal justice has always represented an unusually rich vein of material for investigative journalists, and that, too, appealed to Keller. The sheer scope of the topic was evident at the Wednesday meeting: Andrew Cohen, who edits “Opening Statement,” the site’s morning e-newsletter, talked about the release of a report by the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing; news editor Raha Naddaf described a possible collaboration with a highly regarded print magazine on deteriorating conditions at New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex; and Keller brought up the case of the Kettles Fall Five, a group of medical marijuana growers in Washington State who face federal drug charges. There was talk of immigration law, of data-driven reporting, and of recent revelations regarding just what kinds of information federal prosecutors are obliged to share with defense attorneys.

Several of those stories would make their way onto the site over the next month or so, as would a dizzying array of others. Indeed, in a single week in late April, The Marshall Project ran pieces that dissected the career of Baltimore police commissioner Anthony Batts; examined the treatment of transgender inmates and investigated standards of care for diabetic ones; considered the miserable record of the FBI’s forensics labs and the long-term efficacy of reforms imposed on local police forces by the Department of Justice; and invited readers to take a quiz to find out which are killed more humanely: pets or prisoners. (Answer: pets.) “For a niche subject, this is a very big niche,” says Keller, who together with staff writer Beth Schwartzapfel filed a story in mid-May about Willie Horton, the convicted murderer and rapist whom George H.W. Bush used to pummel Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election.

Much of the site’s original reporting covers topics that remain underreported elsewhere, or provides added context to ones that are already trending. There’s no denying that the latter have proliferated wildly over the past year or so: “Opening Statement” typically includes links to pieces produced not only by other criminal justice outlets like The Crime Report and The Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, but also by publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Guardian; a host of independent blogs and progressive news sites; and just about every major newspaper in the United States.

The attention currently being paid to criminal justice represents a sharp reversal following years of declining coverage. That decline, says Stephen Handelman, who edits The Crime Report and directs the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, resulted from two principal phenomena: falling crime rates, which made the topic a “spectator sport” for many middle-class Americans; and turmoil in the news business, which led to a reduction in resources, including the number of reporters with the knowledge and experience required to tackle complex criminal justice stories. Despite the proliferation of digital tools for gathering and distributing news and information, solid investigative reporting still requires old-fashioned shoe-leather, which in turn requires both time and its correlate, money. And investigative reporting that focuses on criminal justice stories that may unfold over weeks or months or even years—stories that require reporters to scrutinize sprawling institutions like the federal court system or state correctional facilities and that involve untangling the complex web of legal, social and political factors at play in issues like the mass incarceration of black men, the detention of undocumented immigrants, the war on drugs and the use of prisons as holding pens for the mentally ill—requires a lot of both.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the “nonprofit” part of “nonprofit digital news outlet.” The word is by no means a synonym for impoverished; some of the most robust news organizations in the country (NPR, The Associated Press) are nonprofits. Nonetheless, there are concerns about the long-term prospects of the smaller digital nonprofits that sprouted like mushrooms in the wake of the Great Recession, when the short-term prospects of traditional news media appeared to be particularly dismal. A 2013 study of 172 nonprofit digital news outlets by the Pew Research Center suggested a guardedly optimistic attitude, with most reporting that they were in the black. But the study also found that many of those same outlets were reliant on one-time seed grants from foundations, and lacked sufficient resources to pursue the marketing and fundraising activities that could help them become more financially stable. “Nonprofit journalism isn’t going away any time soon,” says Jesse Holcomb, a senior researcher at the center who worked on the report. “But that doesn’t mean there’s been a tipping point in terms of achieving a sustainable approach.”

Research by the Knight Foundation indicates that the most successful nonprofit news organizations seek to diversify their funding; invest in marketing, business development and fundraising; and build partnerships with other organizations to expand their audiences and bolster their brands. Judging by those criteria, The Marshall Project appears to be on solid footing. The site has a long list of donors, some of whom have committed funds for two or three years, and a dedicated business staff. Keller and Barsky are considering a wide range of alternative revenue sources, including memberships, conferences, and sponsorships—though advertising might be a tougher row to hoe. (“Advertisers aren’t dying to advertise their products next to stories about prison rape,” Keller says.) And thanks no doubt in part to the Keller Effect, the site is not hurting for partners.

In addition to the Attica piece, The Marshall Project has published stories in conjunction with The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Vice, which Keller describes as “a direct pipeline to a younger audience.” It also has projects in the works with 60 Minutes and This American Life, and is in talks with several other outlets, including Stars and Stripes, The Weather Channel, and the statistics-driven news site 538.org.

In some ways, Keller says, it’s easier to do everything yourself. But collaborations with other outlets help build the site’s credibility, and allow it to leverage the resources of different organizations. (The Times, for example, contributed photography to the Attica piece, which can be costly, while other partners might provide legal services or help cover travel expenses.) Most importantly, such partnerships ensure that The Marshall Project’s reporting, which Keller describes as “journalism with a purpose,” will reach the largest possible audience.

“The aim,” says Keller, “is to get these issues onto the larger stage. And for that, you need a megaphone.”

GET HER GOING, and Jessica Ladd ’08 will talk effusively about her many positive Pomona memories, from late-night sponsor-group discussions about free will to sunny study sessions on Walker Beach.

In many ways, Pomona directly inspired her career path. She created her own major in public policy and human sexuality, writing her thesis on condom distribution in California prisons and jails. She turned The Student Life’s often-lewd sex column into a thoughtful exploration of topics such as virginity, safe sex and consent.

Perhaps most pivotally, and certainly most traumatically, Pomona was also the place where she was sexually assaulted.

The incident itself was harrowing, but its aftermath was in some respects even more traumatizing. Ladd found herself unsure of how to go about doing basic things like finding emergency contraception and confidentially getting tested for STDs. Worse still, in reporting the assault she felt like a passive and helpless participant, from the tone of campus security’s questioning to uncertainty about how her answers would be used.

“Instead of feeling empowered, I left the situation on the verge of tears,” she says. “It made me realize that many of the tools for improving the process didn’t exist, and sowed the seeds for wanting to create a better way.”

As founder and CEO of Sexual Health Innovations (SHI), Ladd has developed a tool called Callisto that is aimed at making survivors feel more comfortable reporting their experiences. This fall, two institutions will adopt the technology, including the very place where Ladd’s frustrating but illuminating journey first started.

Sexual assault is consistently one of our country’s most under-reported crimes, with upwards of 80 to 90 percent of incidents going undocumented. The reasons range from logistical, to social, to psychological. Victims may be afraid people will think they are lying or exaggerating; they may worry that accusing their acquaintances will ostracize them from social circles; and they may be scared to publicly re-live the experience in a trial where their credibility and character are continuously questioned.

“Because survivors have had their agency stripped in such a severe way, they often feel hesitant to give information to authorities if they think they might lose that agency all over again,” says Ladd, who herself took over a year to report. “We’re trying to create a trauma-informed system that gives them total control over the process.”

Callisto- a tool to help with reporting sexual assault

Callisto lets users file an incident report that can be sent directly to authorities or archived for later. Users can also choose a third option: saving the report such that it only gets filed if their attacker is separately reported by another user.

It’s a clever feature, and not a trivial one. Ladd often cites a 2002 study which found that 90 percent of campus assaults are committed by repeat perpetrators; she’s confident that Callisto has the potential not only to improve the reporting process, but perhaps even to reduce the number of assaults that happen in the first place.

“If authorities could stop perpetrators after their second assault, 60 percent of assaults could be prevented,” Ladd says. “Callisto isn’t the complete answer, but I think it can be a valuable piece in the puzzle.”

One reason to bet on Callisto is that it was developed with direct input from more than 100 college sexual-assault survivors and advocates, in the form of several months’ worth of surveys, focus groups and interviews.

Among the participants was Zoe Ridolfi-Starr, who last year organized a Title IX federal complaint against Columbia University arguing that the institution treats survivors and alleged assailants unequally. She says that, with Callisto, it was clear from the start that SHI truly understood its audience’s needs.

“Survivors can find it overwhelming enough to try to maneuver through all that red-tape before you even add things like PTSD and depression into the mix,” she says. “SHI has shown that they want to go about the process in a way that’s inclusive, intuitive and intentional.”

Callisto’s sleek interface is designed to make it easy to wade through the murky waters of bureaucracy. Questions have explanatory “help text” to clarify why they are being asked and how answers will be used, while the language is chosen with care and sensitivity. For instance, a question about how much the victim had been drinking is couched in reassurances that such answers do not put her or him at fault and will not, say, get her or him in trouble with the school for violating its alcohol policy.

The system’s development has coincided with sexual assault emerging as perhaps the most-discussed issue in all of higher education, from President Obama’s recent “It’s On Us” initiative to the Columbia University student who carried a mattress all year to protest the school’s handling of her assault allegations.

“As far back as 2013, we realized that if there ever was a time for schools to change their programs, it’s now,” Ladd says. “In the past, adopting this might have seemed like an admission that assault is prevalent on campus. Today, it’s seen as forward-thinking.”

The issue has gained prominence even beyond academia, particularly with the many allegations against comedian Bill Cosby. Ladd says that, while such visibility can be valuable, the growing list of women who have spoken out only further highlights the importance of systems like Callisto for survivors who don’t want to go public, or whose assailants aren’t famous entertainers.

“People shouldn’t have to out themselves to the world to get justice,” she says. “Callisto is a service that we’d eventually like to make available to anyone who needs it.”

Ladd’s interest in sexual health evolved from her upbringing on San Francisco’s Castro Street, where she says that it “always seemed like the city around me was dying of AIDS.” An early clouds-parting moment happened in a high school production of “The Vagina Monologues,” when she first learned that there was such a thing as a clitoris.

“It felt as though the world had been conspiring to not let me know about it,” she says. “It made me wonder, ‘what else are they hiding from me?’”

Since then she has dipped her toes into several different sexual-health-related sectors—as an educator, an academic, a policy advocate and even a White House intern—but says that she became disenchanted with all of these approaches as means to actually effect change.

Instead, she looked at companies like Facebook and Google, and realized that a key way to influence people was through technology.

“The Internet allows people to do things that they would normally find socially awkward, from looking at porn and buying sex toys to propositioning threesomes on Craigslist,” she says. “We’ve harnessed that power to make ourselves happier, but why not use it to make ourselves safer and healthier, too?”

Callisto is the flagship initiative for SHI, which Ladd founded while enrolled full-time in Johns Hopkins’ public-health MPH program. SHI has grown from a makeshift website coded by volunteers to a full-fledged 501(c)(3) nonprofit with bi-coastal offices and more than a quarter-million dollars in funding from Google.

This fall, in efforts that are more than a year in the making, Ladd will launch Callisto at two “Founding Institutions”—Pomona and the University of San Francisco.

“We want to make sure that students feel comfortable reporting sexual assaults when they happen,” says Pomona Associate Dean and Title IX Coordinator Daren Mooko. “Callisto is a very creative mechanism for doing so, in a way that puts a lot of control in the survivor’s hands.”

Ladd says she didn’t come into SHI with particularly entrepreneurial intentions, but simply with a problem that she wanted to solve.

“This is something that I have long believed should exist in the world,” she says. “At a certain point I realized that, while I can’t change what happened to me, what I can do is build something that will hopefully help the next person who’s in that same situation.”

Untitled, from Manresa, by David Kinch with Christine Muhlke (Ten Speed Press 2013, 336 pages, $50.00)

THE TWO SIDES of Eric Wolfinger’s profession, photography and food, took years to converge, but when they did, something very special happened, like flour and water morphing into bread—an apt metaphor for a man who once spent years learning to bake a perfect loaf.

A political science major at Pomona, Wolfinger ’04 traces the first step in his journey to becoming one of the world’s leading photographers of fine cuisine to his work as a food columnist for the student newspaper, The Student Life.

“When I wrote that food column,” he recalls, “I had my first vision of what I actually could see myself doing post-college. Up until then, I had no clue what direction I was going. I was like, oh my God, food writing—that’s something that people do and get paid for.”

By that time, many of his classmates had already punched their tickets into graduate school or had jobs lined up. Wolfinger had nothing waiting for him and liked it that way. He dreamed vaguely of buying a pickup truck and driving around Mexico working on a cookbook. Moving to the Bay area, he ran into a high school friend who was working at a restaurant, having already worked her way up from kitchen apprentice to sous chef.
“I realized right then and there—I don’t want to write any more, for now,” he says. “I want to cook. If I ever do write I want to write from the perspective of somebody that I would respect. I don’t want to just have an opinion. I want to have a skill and an expertise in this field.”

Starting as an apprentice at an Italian restaurant, Wolfinger quickly discovered what it felt like to be clueless. “I came from Pomona where adults treated me like I was smart and like I had something to say, and it was worthwhile. I started working in a kitchen, where I was the village idiot.”

Untitled, from Flour+Water: Pasta, by Thomas McNaughton (Ten Speed Press 2014, 288 pages, $35.00)

He learned fast, but after a couple of years, he was convinced the life of a chef wasn’t for him. Writing still beckoned, but there was one more thing he wanted to accomplish before moving on. “Before I leave San Francisco and leave cooking,” he told himself, “I want to learn how to make the Tartine croissant, which was the most amazing thing I’d ever tasted and the most amazing thing I could afford, working on a cook’s salary of $8.25 an hour.”

So in 2005, Wolfinger took a job at Tartine Bakery, a place where bread sells out within an hour of opening. In master baker Chad Robertson, he found both a mentor and a surfing buddy, and he quickly fell in love with the deceptive simplicity of baking. If restaurant cooking is a science of efficiencies—“How do you set up your station so that when an order comes in, you can bang out that salad in 25 seconds instead of 30?”—baking, he says, is an art—“What is my dough doing today, how is it behaving, and what small tweaks to my process do I need to do to bring this amorphous dough to the bread that I have in the back of my head, that I know is the ideal loaf?”

At Tartine, he practiced the art of baking for five years. But the memory of his original plan—driving around Mexico seeking recipes for a cookbook—occasionally made him restless. All through college, he’d spent his summers traveling in Latin America, exploring cultures and polishing his Spanish. But working life had left him with little time or money for travel. He told his mentor he needed some time off. Robertson agreed, and Wolfinger made plans to head for South America, where his brother was living at the time.
“Days before leaving, it occurred to me that nobody was going to give me my dream job of a travelling food journalist,” he says. “I was going to have to give it to myself first and kind of prove that I could do it.”

So he bought a digital camera and started a traveling food blog.

Thou-sand-year-old quail egg, potage, ginger, from Benu, by Cory Lee (Phaidon Press 2015, 256 pages, $59.95)

“I was like, I’m just going to do a blog and tell stories of the people that I meet, the recipes that I find, and the experiences that I have,” he says. “Obviously, I wasn’t trained as a photographer at all. I knew that to tell a decent story, you needed pictures. So I got a digital camera, and I thought, ‘I’ll teach myself along the way, and I’ll figure it out.’”

He followed his taste buds from Chile to Columbia to Peru to Bolivia, taking pictures of the food he found and posting them in his blog. As time went on, however, his blog didn’t seem to be opening any doors. “Gourmet magazine did not call me and tell me they wanted me to write a feature for them.” But when he got back to the States, the opportunity he’d been waiting for came from an unexpected source.

It seemed that his mentor and surfing buddy at Tartine Bakery had followed his blog with interest. Impressed by his food photography, Robertson, who was preparing to write a cookbook of his own, had an epiphany. “Coming off of an experience of a previous cookbook that he did with his wife,” Wolfinger recalls, “he realized that rather than having a professional photographer come in and shoot for two weeks, why not have his buddy—who takes beautiful pictures, who knows his bread better than anybody else in the world—do the pictures while we’re baking?”

Wild bamboo fungi and shoots, from Benu

Before that, Wolfinger had never allowed himself to take photography seriously, but after two years of shooting at the bakery and “making every mistake in the book,” he began to think of himself as a real photographer. “Just the process of making this book from start to finish really gave me a clear sense of how publishing works, how you tell a visual story, how to be really ruthless with yourself and with your own work so that you are putting your best foot forward,” he says. “While I was doing that book, I was doing little side projects. The next thing I knew, I was working as a photographer.”

But it wasn’t until the book came out that his career really took off. “The photography u in that book was nominated for a James Beard Award, which is kind of like the Oscars of food,” he says. “It was a huge deal. Since that first year, things have gone gangbusters, really—beyond my wildest dreams.”

Since then, he’s worked with celebrity chefs like Hubert Keller and David Kinch. He’s done mass-market cookbooks, like Williams-Sonoma’s Home Baked Comfort, and classy, one-restaurant books like Corey Lee’s Benu. He and his camera have circled the globe, from Vietnam to Uruguay, from Italy—where he spent 12 days with chef Thomas McNaughton, taking pictures of pasta—to Thailand, where he ate some of the most interesting food of his life, including a delicacy called ant’s egg salad. (“Ant eggs taste like lemongrass, and ants themselves taste like fresh lime. So we ate this salad, and it only had ant eggs, salt and mint, but it tasted as if there were lime juice and lemongrass in the salad. It was surprisingly delicious.”)

Untitled, from Mallmann on Fire, by Francis Mallmann (Artisan, 2014, $40.00)

He attributes his meteoric success not only to his hard-earned skills behind a lens, but also to the fact that he understands the dynamics of the kitchen as only an experienced cook and baker can. “For me, food has a feeling,” he explains. “There’s a story behind it. There’s a person who made it. I see food a little differently—not as an object to be photographed but as a story to be told. Chefs call me because they’ve cooked something and they want a pretty photo of it. I think they sense in me an understanding of where they’ve come from and what they’ve put into it.”

Eric Wolfinger ’04

Looking back, he also believes Pomona played a huge role in preparing him for the unique challenges of his chosen profession. “I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing and it wouldn’t be going as well if I hadn’t had that rigorous, yet very open-ended education at Pomona. You learn not to put anything out but your best. Even if that means I’m shy a few photos, I’m not interested in putting out anything but my best.”

But when he remembers his college years, what he thinks back to most often isn’t the classroom—it’s his three years as a member of the improvisational comedy group, Without a Box, which he spent, he says, in a constant state of terror.

“What you learn in improvisation is not necessarily how to be funny on the spot but how to think creatively under enormous amounts of pressure. And how to trust that instinct of where you think a scene should go. So many times I’m on set and a problem arises, and if you listen for that inner voice—what if I did this?—it’s helped countless times as I’ve moved forward as a photographer. I’m always improvising in this business.”