Ian Donnis, a longtime political reporter, has been covering the recent failure of a highway ramp in Cranston that disrupted travel for motorists and Amtrak passengers.

Last Friday, part of a bridge in poor condition fell onto a railroad track, surprising transportation officials who said there had been no prior signs of trouble.

The infrastructure issue comes amid ongoing criticism of the Washington Bridge closure. The westbound span failed in December 2023 and has remained closed to traffic.

The Cranston bridge failure comes about 10 years after the state unveiled RhodeWorks, an expensive and controversial infrastructure program designed to upgrade roads and bridges statewide.

The law also created the state’s truck toll program, which was tied up in court for years after being challenged by a truckers association.

The state ultimately won that legal fight, but resuming toll collection has been delayed, in part because the infrastructure used to collect tolls has become outdated.

Donnis examined the program’s balance sheet and found it is currently underwater after a decade in operation.

Later in the show, Kim and Eli discussed the “stories we wish we wrote,” including:

• ‘Scorched-earth’ deed restrictions are making food deserts worse. Woonsocket, R.I., is feeling the impact by Jonmaesha Beltran, ecoRI/Boston Globe
• 24 purifying hours by Greta Shuster, Warwick Beacon

• No discipline after Fall River police Facebook warrant investigation by Dan Medeiros, The Fall River Herald News
• Site where Benny’s used to be gets OK for re-development by Ryan Blessing, The Westerly Sun

David Cicilline, who served in the U.S. Congress, said he remembers a time when there were regional and Washington bureaus of The Providence Journal. Today, those no longer exist, and he said the shrinking of the industry has resulted in an erosion of civic health among Rhode Islanders.

The Rhode Island Foundation, which helps support “Behind the Story,” is leading a national initiative locally called Press Forward Rhode Island, which will provide grants to nonprofit and for-profit news organizations that come up with ideas for how to improve access to news, address information gaps and increase sustainability.

“I’ve watched this significant decline in the presence of local media,” Cicilline said. “You see news organizations just shrink or just go away completely. And the reason it’s particularly pernicious is because you think about the role journalists play in exposing corruption, mismanagement, bad decisions by those in local and state and federal government. And that’s important oversight and sometimes the only way the public learns about those things.”

Cicilline also talked about a recent survey Press Forward Rhode Island published showing 89% of Rhode Island respondents saying they still placed value on local news and trusted those news sources more than national organizations.

But the research also showed Rhode Islanders are concerned about misinformation, and nearly two-thirds of respondents said they felt like local news lacked diversity in viewpoints.

“The responsibility of journalists and news sources is to report facts and not to give you what you want to hear or to support your opinion, and to distinguish between stories that are facts and opinion pieces,” Cicilline said.

“But that’s where civics education matters,” he added. “Making sure people understand this is a place where you can go when you want to know what the facts are. And if you want opinions on something, go to the opinions page or go to the program that’s talking about opinions, not news, but really educating people about the differences between those two things.”

Later in the show, Dan and Eli discussed the “stories we wish we wrote,” including:

• Providence’s Largest Primary Care Provider Searches for New Leadership. What’s Next for Patients? by Eric Halvarson, The Providence Eye
• Newport Grand remains abandoned. Is there hope for redevelopment? by Savana Dunning, Newport Daily News

• Climate change is driving scallops north. That’s good news for New Bedford by Brooke Kushwaha, The New Bedford Light
• Rehoboth fire chief fired over alleged ethics violations in connection to solar farm by Stephen Peterson, The Sun Chronicle

The story, “Working the Night Shift,” appears in this month’s issue of Rhode Island Monthly.

Lauren Clem, a senior editor, and Jonathan Pitts-Wiley, a photographer, shadowed workers in fields including hospitality, health care, policing, fishing and restaurants.

“I am not normally working the night shift, so we had some very sleepless few weeks,” Clem said. “The majority we did on separate nights, and we tried to line them up chronologically within the feature.”

Pitts-Wiley, a North Providence-based portrait and documentary photographer, partnered with Clem to capture moments experienced by those featured in the piece. He said he aimed to respect the dignity of his subjects while using light in different ways to capture compelling images.

“For me, it just came down to what is visually interesting and trying to create images that are compelling irrespective of having all the context,” Pitts-Wiley said. “The viewer is not in the room with you. They don’t know the smell, they don’t have the context, they only have the image.”

Later in the show, Kim and Eli discussed the “stories we wish we wrote,” including:

• Family Travel by Lauren Clem, Rhode Island Monthly (currently only available in print edition for April)
• Has 'Real Housewives' helped one cast member's RI business? We found out by Paul Edward Parker, The Providence Journal

• Three-part series on homelessness by Jim Hummel, Hummel Report
  Part 1: Out in the cold
  Part 2: Finding shelter
  Part 3: What's the plan?
• Vineyard Wind sues GE Renewables to block it from abandoning project by Anastasia Lennon, The New Bedford Light