Program will place 28 corps members in newsrooms in 2019 -- thanks to new support from Google News Initiative, the Ziff family and others   September 12, 2018 Report for America, the national service program that places talented journalists into local newsrooms, announced today that it would be doubling the size of its corps for 2019, due to strong funding support and stronger-than-expected interest from news organizations and reporters. This growth has been...

National service program to provide second class of talented journalists to local newsrooms CONTACT: Maggie Messitt, mmessitt@reportforamerica.org   August 14, 2018 Report for America announced today that the applications are open for New York and Connecticut news organizations interested in hosting journalists to report on criminal justice issues in 2019 - 2020. With support from The Tow Foundation, Report for America is able to support two full-time reporters in selected New York and Connecticut...

National service program seeks to invigorate local journalism AUGUST 1, 2018 CONTACT: Maggie Messitt, mmessitt@reportforamerica.org, 412-352-6309   Report for America announced today that the applications are now open for news organizations interested in hosting journalists in 2019-2020. Click here to learn more and apply. This corps of journalists will join newsrooms across the country in June 2019. If a news organization is selected and a corps member is placed in their newsroom, Report for America pays half the...

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 the 2018 corps at the Poynter Institute, I walked through some of the history of the...

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. Teachers and their supporters knotted the bright kerchiefs around their necks, wore them as headbands or tied...

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 and Indiana limestone. On the banks of the Kanawha River in downtown Charleston, the Gazette-Mail was...

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, a nonprofit news organization that trains young journalists to cover the most important stories in...

This article first appeared 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 journalism can be sustained only if it’s part of a commercial enterprise. Stated another way, local news will...

In a narrow sense, Report for America is focused on plugging the gaps in “news deserts.” But as ambitious as that sounds, our long term goals are much bigger – to systematically change the nature of local news, and thereby create a healthier democracy. Four seismic shifts have to happen. We must: Dramatically expand the non-profit role in local media. Even if local commercial media improves its revenue model, it will not...

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 by local reporting here, with regional media, including the Lexington Herald-Leader, running stories on the crisis...