The Kingfish Project is an accountability journalism newsroom covering central Louisiana. The name is Huey Long turned inside-out: Long earned the nickname "the Kingfish" by paying ferociously close attention to Louisiana power and bending it to his will. This outlet pays the same close attention and points the light the other way — at the institutions, not from them. The founding manifesto is titled "Every Man a King."
This page explains how the site is built and how to use it, so you can find what you need and check the work yourself.
The one rule
Everything here runs on a single principle: claims link to documents. If we say a board voted a certain way, spent a certain amount, or made a certain promise, the sentence carries a link to the record that proves it. Requests are tracked publicly. Meetings get permanent pages that we keep updating. And you can verify the underlying documents yourself. You should not have to take our word for anything — that is the whole idea.
The six kinds of pages
Investigations are the long-form accountability reporting, organized as series or cases rather than one-off articles. An investigation is a hub: a running body of work on a single subject that grows as we learn more, with the individual stories, records, and documents that feed it linked in one place.
Records are the heart of the operation. Every public records request we file gets its own living page — one page per request — tracked in the open. Each carries a status badge so you can see exactly where it stands: pending, partial, fulfilled, denied, appealed. As an agency responds, we update the page. You can watch a request move through the system in real time, including when it stalls. A denied request is not a dead end; it is part of the record.
Meetings get one living page per public meeting. Before the meeting, the page holds the agenda. After, it holds the video, a transcript, and a plain-language summary of what happened. Because it is one canonical page that updates, you always have a single place to go for a given meeting rather than chasing scattered notices.
Explainers are evergreen, plain-language guides to the institutions of central Louisiana — what an entity is, who controls it, and what powers it holds. The pieces you may have read on the England Authority, the police jury system, and the public records law are explainers. They are meant to stay useful and to be linked from news coverage that assumes you already know the basics.
Briefs are short quick hits between the big stories — a single development, a document worth flagging, a heads-up on something coming. They include a weekly Records Desk roundup of what we filed, what came back, and what changed.
Documents are the primary sources themselves: the PDFs behind the reporting. Each is cryptographically signed and carries a verification page, so you can confirm that a document is authentic and has not been altered since we published it. If a file's signature checks out, you know you are looking at exactly what we published, byte for byte.
Why it works this way
Most news asks you to trust the reporter. This outlet is built so you do not have to. When a request is tracked in the open, you can see whether an agency is cooperating or stonewalling. When a meeting has a canonical page, the record does not disappear when the livestream ends. When a document is signed, it cannot be quietly swapped later. And when every claim links to its source, the reporting is checkable line by line.
That is the standard central Louisiana power should be held to, and it is the standard we hold ourselves to. Every man a king.