Journalism as national service
The crisis in local journalism is catastrophic. And it will get worse. More than 1,300 communities across the United States are without local news coverage, and thousands more have inadequate journalism. At the next recession, the collapse will accelerate.
Studies have now validated what we all know intuitively: The disintegration of community journalism leads to greater polarization, lower voter turnout, more pollution, less government accountability and less trust.
This problem is not going to be solved by a new phone app or an increase of a few pennies in digital ad rates. It’s time to try something dramatically different.
The local media ecosystem of the future must have a much bigger role for nonprofit media and philanthropy. We accept this reality in the worlds of education and health care. It’s time to embrace it for local journalism. We believe people have an obligation to support libraries and symphonies. Now they have to support good accountability reporting.
But let’s do this in a way that improves on what came before.
Report for America started almost two years ago on the premise that journalism had as much to learn from the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps as it did from big media companies like Gannett, Sinclair or GateHouse. Local journalism needs national service.
Report for America, an initiative of the GroundTruth Project, runs two competitions. In one, talented emerging journalists make a case for how they can have substantial impact. We had 940 applicants for 50 slots this past year. Meanwhile, news organizations, including nonprofits, identify civically important gaps in their news coverage, such as health care, the environment, schools, criminal justice or whole regions or communities, for which they would use a Report for America reporter.
We then split the funding for an entry-level salary. We pay half. The other half is paid by a combination of the local newsrooms and local donors. By drawing new local dollars off the sidelines, we hope to enable these positions to persist for years to come.
We now have 61 reporters in 50 newsrooms across 30 states and Puerto Rico, and plan to deploy 250 next year, with an ultimate goal of placing 1,000 reporters in the field across the country.
This approach helps with both the spiritual and financial crises of local journalism. These young journalists commit one or two years to these communities because they believe local journalism is a public service, just as much as being a teacher or a nurse. By being on the ground, and present, they let the community see reporters as their advocates, in it for the right reasons. Trust will improve.
Report for America reporters have already helped communities in significant ways. One of our first reporters in Kentucky, Will Wright, wrote about the lack of clean reliable drinking water in the eastern part of the state for The Lexington Herald-Leader. His pieces stoked public outrage, and unleashed several million dollars to help repair the system.
Other stories by corps members include an account of a raft of mysterious deaths in the Mississippi prison system, a report that explained why South Dakota has the highest rate of young children not attending school, and an account of how trade wars would affect the uranium mines in Johnson County, Wyo.
By significantly reducing the cost of employing a reporter, the program enables news organizations to do what they wanted to do all along: cover crucially important, neglected areas. For instance, six of the beats in the second Report for America class involve covering Native American communities for newsrooms in Wyoming, Utah, Montana, Idaho and California, an overnight quadrupling of the number of reporters exclusively covering Indian country for mainstream media outlets.
We’re now taking applications from newsrooms for the next class of 250 reporters who will hit the field in 2020.
Report for America isn’t the only solution. We need more nonprofit news outlets. We need public radio to improve its efforts to do local journalism and to reach a broader range of people. We need commercial media to continue to improve their business models.
But Report for America can provide much of the people power and, more important, a new spirit—local journalism as public service.