How The Marshall Project turned its archive into an audience-growth engine

This is the final post in a series highlighting how independent newsrooms are putting Civic Studio strategies into practice. Tammy Galarza, audience and engagement coordinator, and Brandon Wall, audience director at The Marshall Project, share how they revisited and repurposed archival video to reach a wider audience. Read the full series here.

The Marshall Project is no stranger to doing things differently.  The nonprofit newsroom dedicates all of its reporting resources exclusively to criminal justice and immigration enforcement, partners with local newsrooms and national news organizations to co-publish investigations, and views incarcerated people as a key part of its audience. Through initiatives like the print publication News Inside and the video series Inside Story, it makes its journalism available to thousands of correctional facilities across the U.S. free of charge.

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that The Marshall Project entered the News Revenue Hub’s Civic Studio pilot with a different approach to audience growth. Instead of creating more video, the team looked for ways to optimize and repackage work it had already produced.

For Audience and Engagement Coordinator Tammy Galarza, Inside Story Director Donald Washington Jr., and Audience Director Brandon Wall, that meant taking a fresh look at the archive of Inside Story, a video series initially produced for television and distributed to correctional facilities. Audience Engagement Strategist Ashley Dye helped lay the groundwork for the repackaging sprint, coordinating a spring 2025 consultation that informed the team’s video-length strategy and identifying the archive segments they would revisit.

Working with Hub staffers and Civic Studio coach Lauren Saks, co-founder of LNI Media and the former deputy head of video at The Washington Post, the team experimented with ways to package those existing videos for YouTube. They tested titles, thumbnails, descriptions, keywords, publishing cadence, and short-form clips, while digging into analytics to understand what was resonating with viewers.

The work required something newsrooms rarely have: time to slow down and focus on the small details that can make a difference.

The Marshall Project couldn’t change the production of videos already in the pipeline. But it could control how those videos were packaged and distributed, Saks said, and the team was committed to finding ways to encourage growth.

“I really appreciate having that dedicated time to sit down in a smaller group and just really dive into a specific challenge,” Wall said. The conversations gave him a chance to step away from the day-to-day work and “talk shop” about the rapidly changing social and video landscape.

For Galarza, working with Saks also provided a confidence boost.

“She brought such an expertise to the table that eased any anxiety that might have been brought up for me,” Galarza said. “It very much felt like, yes, she was my coach but there were also moments where we were just like peers.”

One of the team’s biggest breakthroughs came from repackaging an existing Inside Story segment featuring Tyra Patterson, who was formerly incarcerated. Published in February 2026, the video reached more than 61,000 views and generated more than 1,300 hours of watch time with a 5.2% click-through rate. 

The video, titled, “She Made a False Confession at 18 and Served 23 Years in Prison,” features a thumbnail image of Patterson looking skyward paired with a powerful quote from her interview. 

“We learned specifically how the thumbnail and the title worked with one another,” Galarza said. “That one was a driving force.”

The Patterson video outperformed every similar recut the team had produced, giving them a concrete example of what was possible — and a benchmark for the work that followed.

The team began applying those lessons more systematically, thinking about how the image, thumbnail text, and title could work together to create an emotional hook and encourage viewers to stop scrolling.

They carried that approach into the third season of Inside Story, which launched in June, while also rethinking how short-form videos could support longer episodes.

Rather than treating vertical clips solely as trailers for full-length videos, the team began thinking of them as standalone pieces of journalism, too — videos that could offer viewers something useful or meaningful even if they never watched the full episode.

“We definitely want that to serve as an enticing teaser or trailer that gets somebody to come watch the longer episode,” Wall said. “But at the same time, we recognize that’s not how everybody scrolls vertical videos on their phone.”

The shift reflects a broader philosophy that emerged from Civic Studio: Meet audiences where they are, rather than expecting them to come to the newsroom.

“You want to be able to reach your readers or your viewers wherever they are, wherever they are spending their time,” Wall said. “We can’t always expect them to come to us.”

Saks reinforced that an audience-building mindset requires patience. “We love a viral hit,” she said, “but really what we’re after, especially in a newsroom, is building a long-tail audience — audience members that will stick with the newsroom and hopefully become loyal viewers and supporters.”

For The Marshall Project, one of the biggest opportunities may be sitting in its archive.

“The archive can really be one of your biggest growth engines,” Galarza said.

Instead of treating the archive as a collection of stories that have already had their moment, The Marshall Project is looking at it as a source of future audience growth — a body of work that can be repackaged, resurfaced, and introduced to people who may not have seen it the first time.