“Why does Report for America place reporters in for-profit newsrooms? Shouldn’t those places cover the communities adequately — on their own dime?” We get this question occasionally. I want to address it head on because we believe strongly that Report for America corps members should partner with a full range of models, including both nonprofit
We often talk about the closures of newspapers over the past few decades. Of course this is all happening at a time when the population has increased. So the number of journalists per American has declined even more. If you view local reporting as a public service, that means there’s been an even sharper decline
Report for America was created to help save local news. It was launched long before COVID-19, yet the signs of local journalism’s collapse were quite evident even in 2014. The pandemic has accelerated the decline and created an imminent crisis. Even before COVID-19, local newspapers had lost more than half their jobs since 2008—about the
In The Atlantic, we wrote about several ways society can save local news as it collapses. Here I’m going to elaborate one: The federal government can significantly help local news to better inform their communities during the COVID-19 crisis by dramatically increasing their spending on public health advertising, and funneling a good chunk of that