Investigative reporting lives and dies by the reputation of the outlet doing the sleuthing. If the public can’t trust your sourcing and methods—or worse, has no idea who the heck you are—even the most damning investigation can land with barely a whimper.

So it comes as great news for the folks at the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), a nonprofit journalism outfit based in the Bay Area, that a leading creative agency is creating a free branding and marketing campaign.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco—part of the Omnicom Group—has signed on to help the CIR and get it’s name out in front of the public. For free. The principals at the agency, Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein have a long history with Phil Bronstein, the executive chairman of the CIR dating back to his time as a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner.

Bronstein said the problem was that even though the public knows what the CIR does—investigative reporting—they had no idea who they were. And that can be a major hurdle when the CIR is working with news outlets like CNN:

“Anderson Cooper was mentioning ‘the CIR’ 18 times” during a recent report, Bronstein said, “and who knows what the CIR is?”

Part of the new identity is a new logo: a document redacted by black bars, where on the words “the,” “center for,” “investigative,” and “reporting” are visible.

Read More: The New York Times

Brief Take: As broadcast news outlets rely more on outside news providers, it has become more important than ever for them to develop clear branding and identities for their newscasts and news gatherers.

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