Its website states that it is a professionally staffed newsroom focused on independent investigative reporting and in-depth explanatory journalism while providing hands-on training to university students.
As the first step in the effort, it hired award-winning investigative reporter Marc Perrusquia as Distinguished Journalist in Residence and director with Louis Graham, former The Commercial Appeal editor.
[5] The Institute was created around the same time an online-only newspaper called The Daily Memphian emerged, which had a paywall with subscribers paying $7 per month.
[8] In 2022, Laura Faith Kebede was brought on as the third full time staff reported, serving as coordinator of "Civil Wrongs", a serialized reporting project that will investigate unsolved and unresolved murders of the civil rights era as well as historical and modern abuses ranging from environmental injustice to voter suppression and police oppression.
The City responded to the lawsuit by creating a new written policy that all administrative investigations in which a Memphis police officer is found to have used excessive force would be referred to the Shelby County District Attorney.