Rural communities

Mountain State Spotlight

This new investigative and enterprise hub was launched in 2020 and is led by longtime West Virginia journalists Greg Moore, a former editor at the Charleston Gazette-Mail, and Ken Ward Jr., a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant winner for his longtime work covering coal mining and other polluting industries. The staff includes four current RFA Corps members.

Vermont Public Radio

VPR knits Vermonters together with its statewide network, as well as serving “Vermontophiles” in surrounding states, Canada and around the world. We provide a variety of local and NPR and other programming, including two daily news programs, “Morning Edition,” and “All Things Considered,” a daily talk show “Vermont Edition” and our people-powered “Brave Little State” project. Our reporters generate dozens of newscast items and in-depth stories a week. And we maintain a robust website. We are a respected institution in our state, and recognized for innovation in serving our mostly-rural audience. As Vermont’s daily newspapers and commercial broadcasters are struggling and reducing staff, VPR is determined to work with our partners to preserve great reporting in all parts of our state.  

KUCB

KUCB is a public radio and television station in Unalaska, Alaska. We are owned and operated by Unalaska Community Broadcasting, a non-profit formed in 1985 with the mission to inform, educate, entertain, and engage by providing news and arts and culture programming. Our signal serves a community of about 5,000 people. Our stories, however, have a much broader reach: We're surrounded by some of the most productive fishing grounds in the country, and we're in the middle of an international shipping corridor. Our station is located in the Aleutian Islands, the ancestral territories of the Unangax Peoples, who have lived in this region more than 9,000 years. Our newsroom is staffed with two local reporters, and they cover stories from all over our thousand-mile region.

Statesman Journal

The Statesman Journal covers the middle section of the Willamette Valley between Oregon’s coastal mountain range and the Cascade Mountains. The Gannett-owned newsroom is based in Salem, the state capital, about an hour from Portland and the Oregon coast. Its primary mission is governmental accountability and watchdog reporting in and around Salem and state government.

WSKG Public Telecommunications Council

WSKG is a public radio station serving the Binghamton, N.Y., area with educational programming and news. Its areas of focus include the arts, culture and heritage of the region as well as other matters of local importance. It is an affiliate of National Public Radio. The station seeks to represent diverse viewpoints to help listeners reach better conclusions that can be clearly explained, effectively defended or, when appropriate, revisited and revised.

Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting

The Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting is an independent, nonpartisan and collaborative nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide, data-driven investigative reporting. AZCIR’s mission is to produce, foster and promote investigative journalism through original and collaborative reporting, often using data, and by training the next generation of investigative journalists.

Bozeman Daily Chronicle

The Chronicle has evolved over more than 100 years into Montana’s fifth largest newspaper. The newspapers that eventually became today’s Chronicle started with Bozeman’s first, the Montana Pick & Plow in 1869. That soon changed hands and title to the Avant Courier. A competing paper, the Bozeman Times, perhaps had the most notable “scoop” of the day: “Custer’s Battle and Death” was the headline for the Extra edition produced on July 3, 1876. Today, the Chronicle has a print circulation of about 15,000 and a total audience, including online readers, of more than 51,000. The Chronicle's website generates more than 1 million page views per month.

Kansas City PBS

Kansas City PBS has a long tradition of public service that has laid the foundation for expanding its news gathering relationship with our community. Our content platforms — television, radio, digital, social media and educational outreach — exist to serve the diversity of our region. We explore complicated issues with thoughtful reporting. We share the diverse stories of people, places, and progress in our community. We advance conversations through community engagement and social media. Specifically, Kansas City PBS operates four KCPT-related public television channels; KTBG 90.9 The Bridge, an NPR-affiliated AAA music station; and FlatlandKC, an online digital magazine; in addition to social media and community events.  

KERA / The Texas Newsroom

NPR and Texas public radio stations collaborated to form the Texas News Hub. It’s the first step in a systemwide collaborative project to create a nationwide virtual public radio newsroom of 1,000-plus journalists. The collaboration includes two daily, hour-long statewide programs (Texas Standard and Think) and will soon include six daily statewide newscasts, and a statewide digital news desk. The Hub is working to hire and train freelance and small station reporters to provide news service to underserved communities in the state’s news deserts.

The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead

The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead has a proud history of serving its audience critical information for more than 130 years. The news organization, the largest in North Dakota, serves community members in both North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota. A Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper, The Forum is continually recognized with awards by professional news organizations for excellence in news, sports, feature reporting, design, advertising, opinion writing, editorial cartoons and photojournalism. The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead is part of the Forum News Service, which gathers and distributes content from news organizations throughout the region.