We are thrilled to announce that the News Integrity Initiative has awarded us a $250,000 grant over 18 months to support the technical side of the merger between DocumentCloud and MuckRock and support the expansion of all our services beyond journalism.

MuckRock is currently available to anyone seeking to file and track freedom of information requests. DocumentCloud is available only to journalists.

The NII grant will allow us to scale our offering far more quickly and provide access to DocumentCloud (and related products like Quackbot) to reporters, academics, citizen journalists, bloggers, activists, NGOs, archives, libraries - any person or organization with a need to analyze, annotate, and publish source documents in the public interest.

When those changes roll out, we’ll also be rolling out new plans that allow us to support and continue to improve those services for years to come, including limited free accounts for journalists and paid accounts that help individuals and newsrooms tackle large projects more easily than ever. The NII grant will help fund the technical infrastructure necessary to merge our platforms and provide users a seamless experience and increased interoperability among DocumentCloud and MuckRock services.

Thanks to the NII grant along with an earlier grant from the Knight Foundation, we will be launching paid plans for organizations and individuals sometime in early 2019. We will be soliciting feedback, including through a user survey, and announcing the details of those plans soon - to be the first to know, register for our newsletter.

The NII grant will also allow us to make some long-overdue improvements and updates to DocumentCloud, many of which are underway

Over the past few months, our team has been rebuilding core parts of the service. What you will see as this new infrastructure comes online will be a faster, more reliable service, better documentation, a refreshed look and feel and more responsive support. We are also making improvements to the account management system and exploring ways to improve OCR, search, and more.

We are beyond grateful to the News Integrity Project and all of our funders for helping ensure that we can not only continue but expand our mission of transparency and accountability. If you have any questions at all, feel free to get in touch and sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date on all the exciting improvements coming soon.