Winner of ‘GroundTruth Award’ announced at Report for America national gathering

The GroundTruth Project, home of Report for America, announced today the winner of this year’s GroundTruth Award, a recognition of a story produced by a Report for America corps member that embodies the spirit of our organization of on-the-ground reporting that exposes truths that are better understood through human narratives.

The winner for this year is Quinn Glabicki, a corps member covering climate and the environment through text and photography for PublicSource in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His work, titled “Hollowed Out” combines powerful photography, strong reporting and writing and a creative use of graphics and medical records to document the impact of a large fracking operation on one community in West Virginia.

Through seven months of immersive reporting supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center, Glabicki and his colleagues at PublicSource documented the lives of four families who have seen their health deteriorate and their concerns go unheeded by the Pittsburgh gas giant EQT and their pleas for help unheeded by local officials.

“Hollowed Out” was selected by a panel of judges composed by the GroundTruth editorial team and Report for America leadership, who evaluated stories on the depth of their reporting, proximity to their subjects and impact on the communities they cover.

The award was presented to Glabicki by GroundTruth founder and editor-in-chief Charles Sennott during Report for America’s national gathering at the University of Minnesota on Friday, July 19th.

“The GroundTruth award recognizes reporting that is close to the ground and that focuses on exposing truths that are more deeply understood through the human narratives,” said Sennott in presenting the award.

Glabicki’s extraordinary work “captured that spirit of reporting that is embedded in the concept of ground truth.”

About The GroundTruth Project

The GroundTruth Project is an award-winning nonprofit journalism organization dedicated to rebuilding journalism from the ground up. GroundTruth serves under-covered communities by supporting the next generation of journalists to do on-the-ground reporting and to advance sustainability, innovation and equity in journalism worldwide. GroundTruth’s flagship programs — Report for America and Report for the World — place talented, diverse local reporters in the newsrooms that need them most.