In Shasta County, California, Annelise Pierce is the founder of the nonprofit news outlet Shasta Scout, where she covers underreported stories in her region of Northern California.

This past March, she published a story about a music producer associated with Bethel Church, an evangelical megachurch in Redding, California, who was producing a documentary series about recalling Shasta County supervisors (“Follow along as we drain our local swamp”).

Pierce published the story with the assistance of Lawyers for Reporters, a nonprofit collective that is a little over a year old and provides pro-bono legal support to local news outlets across the United States. They reviewed the story before publication and, Pierce said, helped ensure that she did “not accuse anyone of anything that they haven’t actually documented that they’ve done.”

Lawyers for Reporters is a joint venture of First Look Media’s Press Freedom Defense Fund and the Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice of the New York City Bar Association.

“We felt it was very important to try to figure out a way to provide the kinds of legal resources that aren’t otherwise provided to these hyperlocal, social justice-focused, and other media outlets,” David Bralow, the legal director at the Press Freedom Defense Fund, said. That includes advice on basic corporate governance, working with freelancers, and how to create privacy policies.

Read the full article about free legal help for journalists by Hanaa’ Tameez at Nieman Lab.