Searchlight New Mexico

Stories published at searchlightnm.org and distributed free to a network of more than 30 partner outlets statewide, including The Santa Fe New Mexican, the Albuquerque Journal, the Taos News, and KOAT-TV.

History and Founding

Searchlight New Mexico was founded in 2017 by Ray Rivera, then editor of The Santa Fe New Mexican and later a Pulitzer Prize–winning editor at The Seattle Times; Scott Armstrong, an investigative journalist and former Washington Post staff writer; and William deBuys, a New Mexico author and conservationist. The project originated with deBuys' vision for an intensive, multi-year focus on child well-being in New Mexico — a state that consistently ranks among the worst in the nation on measures of child poverty, food insecurity, and school dropout rates. The late Rob Dean, a former editor at The New Mexican, played a major role in the organization's launch, and The New Mexican provided newsroom space for Searchlight in its early years.

The newsroom began publishing in January 2018 under founding executive editor Sara Solovitch, distributing its stories free of charge to local partner outlets rather than building a subscription base — a model similar to the co-publication approach used by other regional nonprofit investigative outlets. Searchlight went its first several years without a published correction, a point of pride for its early editorial team given persistent "fake news" attacks on the press.

Coverage and Content

Searchlight's reporting concentrates on New Mexico's most persistent structural problems: child welfare and foster care, education, health care access, criminal justice and policing, government transparency, and the state's oil and gas industry. Its investigations have frequently combined data analysis with sustained, on-the-ground reporting in rural and Native communities, including extensive coverage of the Navajo Nation.

Notable investigative series and stories include "Nowhere to Go," produced with ProPublica's Local Reporting Network, which exposed New Mexico placing vulnerable foster teens in homeless shelters; "Eviction Epidemic," which documented landlords wrongfully evicting tenants during the COVID-19 pandemic in violation of government mandates; an investigation into a dark-money group, New Mexico Safety Over Profit, that lobbied against medical malpractice reform while concealing its donors — reporting that led the New Mexico State Ethics Commission to sue the group, which settled and disclosed its funders; and ongoing coverage of Memorial Medical Center in Las Cruces, where reporting on the denial of cancer care to uninsured patients helped prompt an Attorney General investigation and a subsequent county lawsuit against the hospital.

The newsroom has also produced deep investigations into human trafficking and unlicensed cannabis operations on the Navajo Nation, the placement of foster children on unmonitored psychiatric medications, an EPA mine-spill disaster affecting Diné farmers, and predatory practices in New Mexico's outpatient vascular-treatment industry.

Awards and Recognition

Searchlight has won the Poynter Institute's Frank A. Blethen Award for Local Accountability Reporting (2018 and 2019), the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the MOLLY National Journalism Prize from The Texas Observer, multiple William S. Dixon First Amendment Freedom Awards from the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, and repeated first-place honors at the Top of the Rockies Excellence in Journalism Awards and the Institute for Nonprofit News' Best of the West competition. Its "Nowhere to Go" series, produced with ProPublica, was a finalist for the Online News Association's Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award. In 2026 it introduced the Bob Johnson Award, honoring reporting on the intersection of money and political power, named for a longtime executive director of the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government.

Structure and Recent Transition

Searchlight operated for its first several years as an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit. In August 2025, Searchlight's board of directors and The Santa Fe New Mexican announced a merger combining Searchlight with The New Mexican Public Service Journalism Fund, a philanthropic initiative of the 175-year-old New Mexican that is fiscally sponsored by the New Mexico Foundation. Under the agreement, Searchlight's board formally dissolved the standalone nonprofit corporation and transferred its assets to the New Mexico Foundation for the benefit of the combined fund, with New Mexican executive editor Bill Church taking on the additional role of Searchlight's executive director.

Editorial note: As of this merger, Searchlight New Mexico continues to publish under its own name and masthead at searchlightnm.org as an editorially distinct initiative, but is no longer a separately incorporated nonprofit — it now operates as a project of The New Mexican Public Service Journalism Fund, with shared executive leadership.

Rivera, who remains a Searchlight board member, said in a statement that he expects the merger to allow the newsroom's investigative mission to continue largely unchanged: "This merger with The New Mexican and the public service journalism fund is ideally suited to continue and expand that legacy."

Access and Funding

All Searchlight content is published free of charge, with no paywall, and is available for republication by other outlets under a Creative Commons license, subject to attribution requirements. The newsroom is supported by reader donations, foundation grants, and — since 2025 — the infrastructure of The New Mexican Public Service Journalism Fund and the New Mexico Foundation, a 42-year-old statewide philanthropy. Searchlight has also hosted Report for America corps members covering the state's oil and gas industry.