This summer, we’re celebrating a milestone at Report for America: The journalists we’ve placed in local newsrooms throughout the country — some 750 to date, in every state — have produced 100,000 stories for their communities.
It’s not just the number we’re celebrating, though sheer quantity of local news is important to bolster newsrooms across America. No, with every one of these stories, we’re reminded of what good local coverage does: introduces neighbor to neighbor, holds city hall and the school board accountable, distills how federal actions affect local businesses, and informs folks that the food pantry’s shelves are bare, so residents know to help fill them.
Local news makes folks feel informed, which makes them more active citizens, which makes their communities vibrant.
For eight years now, Report for America has been partnering with local newsrooms — nonprofit and for-profit, print, digital only, radio and TV — some 430 newsrooms in all. They tell us their biggest news gaps, and we recruit for them talented journalists with the skills these newsrooms need, train and mentor them, and pay a good chunk of their salaries for three years (collectively, $36.5 million to date). We also coach newsrooms, helping them raise money from local donors.
Our partner newsrooms have had success with this approach, and we’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way. Here are a few of them, about communities, local journalism and journalists:
Create better journalism, and support will follow. We’ve found that people will pay — as subscribers, members, advertisers, donors — for journalism that only you provide. That means creating better and more stories, and selling that content, not cutting staff and news to nothingness. That formula — leading with improved journalism and pitching that — has enabled us to help our partner newsrooms raise $60 million since we started fielding journalists in 2018.
There will never be one “right” business model for local news. We’ve seen successful nonprofit newsrooms and good for-profit newsrooms. Terrific startups and solid legacy newsrooms. What’s critical for newsrooms is engaging with the community and being flexible so they cover what audiences want to know, in the mediums they prefer: A TikTok feed? Text alerts? An email newsletter? Weekly newspaper? We do believe that even for-profit newsrooms need to embrace fundraising these days, because advertising and subscriptions alone seldom cover costs. That’s why we also provide free fiscal sponsorship for our for-profit partner newsrooms to accept donations.
The key to the future: Pay reporters a living wage. Listening to our corps of bright, service-oriented journalists has helped us evolve on this issue. At first, we were OK with partner newsrooms offering low salaries to corps members — a few, less than $30,000 — because we envisioned our journalists as a one- to two-year service corps, in the spirit of the Peace Corps, a noble but poorly paying cause. But with student loan debt and the overall cost of living, the math obviously didn’t work. Now, we insist that our host newsrooms pay at least a living wage. If we want to attract top talent to this profession, who will create that better journalism, and keep them in the field, we’ve got to ensure that salaries can allow them to live and support their families.
What’s next? Eight years in, we’re happy to be helping support the next generation of journalists and newsrooms. A hundred thousand stories later, we see that America needs exponentially more local news to help communities stoke civic engagement, bridge divides and rebuild trust among neighbors.
It might seem like a losing battle, since local newsrooms are disappearing at the rate of more than two per week, and as a new study shows, the ratio of local journalists per 100,000 population is lower than ever. Even as we’re awash in misinformation, disinformation and a colossal lack of local information in many communities, too many folks don’t realize there’s a local news crisis — and that good, trustworthy local news is a solution to these problems.
One hundred thousand stories later, the work itself tells us something about America: That governments need watchdogs, that residents are passionate about their communities, and will jump in to help when they know what’s going on, that you might share more common ground with your neighbor than you realize, if you could only get to know them.
