Any news organization that is committed to providing objective, civically important local journalism.  That could include public radio stations, newspapers, digital narrative sites, commercial TV stations, community media centers, or journalism schools providing direct journalism.  The organization can be nonprofit or commercial.

These are the main criteria:

Is there an important need? (Are there under-covered topics, communities or geographic areas?)

What is the beat you’ll create to deploy RFA corps members to help fill your news gap?

Can you provide the local match? (see below)

Do you provide good editing and mentoring?

Other factors include having the following:

• A way to distribute the content for maximum impact
• A good plan for assessing success
• A commitment to trust-building behaviors (transparency of process, transparency of article types)

This term refers to the money you raise in the community to support this reporting position. One of the goals of this program is to encourage local philanthropy to support journalism in a bigger way. We also believe that successful news organizations will have to build stronger community support in general whether its through membership, subscriptions, events or philanthropy. So we strongly encourage news organizations to involve the community to support the RFA corps member.