Why do we call Report for America “national service”? Of course we think local journalism IS public service. That’s sort of the point of Report for America. But we also see this program as a synthesis between two different movements – the efforts to reform journalism, and the national service movement. At our training for
Report for America corps members write occasional essays about their experiences, curated by the GroundTruth Project. Here’s the first one from Molly Born, the Report for America corps member at West Virginia Public Broadcasting. BY MOLLY BORN CHARLESTON, West Virginia — The sea of striking teachers gathered in the Capitol here was dotted with red bandanas.
Report for America corps members write occasional essays about their experiences, curated by the GroundTruth Project. Here’s the first one from Caity Coyne, the Report for America corps member at the Charleston Gazette-Mail BY CAITY COYNE CHARLESTON, West Virginia — This town’s daily newspaper, the Gazette-Mail, is housed in a classic 1920s building made of steel, brick
PIONEERING PUBLIC SERVICE PROGRAM PLACES TEN MORE JOURNALISTS IN NEWSROOMS ACROSS THE COUNTRY TO REPORT ON UNDER-COVERED TOPICS AND UNDER-SERVED CORNERS OF AMERICA NEW YORK — Report for America, a non-partisan national service program that places journalists into local news rooms, has announced its complete Class of 2018. Report for America is an initiative of The GroundTruth Project,
This article is adapted from one in the Chronicle of Philanthropy By Steven Waldman and Charles Sennott At a recent conference on local news, the veteran broadcaster Bob Schieffer praised the Texas Tribune — the acclaimed nonprofit website — but then added that it was just “a Band-Aid.” His reasoning: In the long run, real
By Will Wright INEZ, Kentucky — In this sleepy town in rural Martin County, in the heart of coal country, residents endured weeks without running water in the dead of winter, a local crisis that went largely unnoticed outside of the hills and hollers of this community. That is, until their plight was picked up
Excerpted from a Q&A in StreetFightMag One of our first journalists is Will Wright, a talented young man who is embedded in the newsroom of the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky. When he got to Eastern Kentucky, the paper had one reporter covering 24 counties in that part of the state. In his second week, he did a
Why do Americans trust libraries and the military but not the media? At the recent Knight Media Forum, Tony Marx, the CEO of the New York Public Library, had a compelling answer. “There is an image of them as selfless,” he said. “If you think they’re doing it only for themselves, it’s harder to trust them.” This
The application window for Report for America has closed, and we received a stunning 740 applications for nine slots. We’re thrilled that so many emerging journalists want to do a year or two of service working inside a local newsroom, reporting on critically under-covered topics or communities. As a point of reference, our first class
What we love most about Report for America model is the public service spirit. It will help restore the soul of journalism, not just the pocketbook. But in this piece I want to go full-wonk and explain it in entirely economic terms, to show how it potentially creates a new “business model” for local news. A