About Foothills Forum

Foothills Forum

Foothills Forum is an independent, nonpartisan nonprofit news organization based in Washington, Virginia, the county seat of rural Rappahannock County. Founded in 2014, it researches and reports fact-based, in-depth news for the residents of Rappahannock County and the surrounding region, working in a formal journalistic partnership with the weekly Rappahannock News, which publishes its stories, photographs, graphics and video in print and online.

Foothills is unusual among American nonprofit news startups in one important respect: it was created to supplement a newspaper that still exists, not to replace one that died. Its experienced freelance journalists give a short-staffed weekly the capacity for deep, explanatory reporting on issues such as broadband, housing, health, education and the rural economy — and its model has been cited nationally, including in a Harvard Kennedy School playbook for launching local nonprofit news outlets.

Origins in a Coffee Conversation and a County Survey

Foothills Forum grew out of discussions around a monthly coffee and discussion gathering convened by the Rappahannock News, known as Fourth Estate Friday, where residents talked about the limits of local reporting resources. Among those involved in the conversations that led to Foothills were Bill Dietel, who had run the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Larry Bud Meyer, a former Knight Foundation executive and Miami Herald senior editor, who became Foothills' founding chair.

Before launching, the founders did the groundwork. They held months of discussions with more than a hundred current and past elected officials, longtime residents and newcomers, clergy, fire hall leaders, artists, journalists, farmers, ranchers, nonprofits, funders, entrepreneurs and educators. With support from the University of Virginia's Center for Survey Research, they conducted a community-wide survey, mailed on paper in large envelopes to more than 3,000 households, and received an astonishing response rate of about forty-two percent.

What the Survey Found

The survey asked Rappahannock County residents what issues mattered most, and the answers set Foothills' reporting agenda. At the top were poor internet and cell service — still a vexing problem in the county — and maintaining the beauty of a largely unspoiled place in one of Virginia's smallest counties. Limiting taxes, a burning issue elsewhere, ranked much lower, around seventh.

Rappahannock County, about sixty-five miles west of Washington, D.C., had roughly 7,400 residents when Foothills was formed: farmers who had lived on the land their whole lives, newcomers seeking refuge from city life, environmentalists and people seeking quiet. Designing a news organization for a county that politically and culturally diverse required trust, and the founders concluded that deep, factual issue reporting — not daily news competition — was the contribution residents wanted.

How the Partnership Works

Foothills Forum was established in 2014 as a content provider for the Rappahannock News under a legal agreement. The newspaper always makes its own decisions about what to publish; it is not obligated to use Foothills stories, and it retains discretion to edit them. In practice, the partners say, the relationship has been highly collaborative, with Foothills reporters treated much like staff or regular contributors.

There is a practical reason the money was not simply given to the newspaper. The Rappahannock News is a private business with local investors, so direct outside contributions outside an ownership structure were difficult. The separate nonprofit model let community donors support in-depth reporting without becoming entangled in the newspaper's business — while the paper supplied distribution, local knowledge and a century-old place in county life. Foothills also shares its articles free of charge to other news organizations in nearby communities, such as the Fauquier Times and the Culpeper Star-Exponent, and makes its journalism available free to outlets across the region.

Who Does the Reporting

Foothills' journalists are largely experienced freelancers, many with long ties to Rappahannock County and careers at prominent national and regional news organizations, paid by the story or on modest retainers. The organization also helps pay for a graphics designer, a photographer and an editor, and shares the cost with the Rappahannock News of a veteran journalist who edits stories and helps coordinate coverage.

Reporter Randy Rieland illustrates the profile: more than twenty years as a newspaper reporter and magazine editor, including the Pittsburgh Press, the Baltimore Sun, Pittsburgh Magazine and Washingtonian, followed by digital work launching Discovery.com and writing for Smithsonian and Johns Hopkins Magazine, with Foothills stories that have won numerous Virginia Press Association awards. In 2023 Foothills hired Ireland Hayes, a recent University of Georgia journalism graduate, as its first full-time reporter — a milestone it marked as expansion in its tenth-anniversary year.

Coverage: Deep Dives, Not Daily News

Foothills covers education, agriculture, business, government, health, transportation, housing, history and the other topics that affect Rappahannock County residents, but its signature form is the multi-part deep dive. In early 2024, for example, it organized and oversaw a three-county package of stories, produced over four months with reporters from neighboring newspapers as well as its own, on how the nationwide housing crisis has affected its part of Virginia. Later that year its journalists researched, documented and photographed the challenges young people across the region face relating to mental health.

Other signature subjects have included broadband and cell coverage — the survey's top concern — the county's shrinking number of physicians, public safety, the environment and the villages of the county, whose histories Foothills collected into a keepsake magazine publication for its tenth anniversary. Public forums to discuss findings have been part of the model from early on, bringing reporting back to residents in person.

Awards and Recognition

The partnership's quality is documented in awards. Foothills and Rappahannock News reporters and photographers have repeatedly won large hauls of Virginia Press Association awards — forty-three in one recent year cited in its fundraising appeals, twenty-eight journalism awards in 2024, and twenty-one awards for original community reporting in 2022–23 — and Foothills helped the Rappahannock News win the association's award for the best weekly newspaper of its size in Virginia for six consecutive years, including a sweepstakes prize in 2024.

Meyer and Dietel have been described as journalism innovators by the Virginia Press Association. Nationally, the Foothills model has been adapted by other news operations in the region — it inspired a similar group of concerned citizens in neighboring Fauquier County to found a counterpart organization — and cited as an approach that might be replicated in other communities, including in the Harvard Kennedy School's Playbook for Launching a Local, Nonprofit News Outlet and in national coverage of rural news renaissance efforts such as the Radically Rural summit.

Funding and Community Support

Foothills Forum, based at 311 Gay Street in Washington with a mailing address of P.O. Box 153, Washington, VA 22747, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit supported by generous individuals and organizations in its community. It participates in Give Local Piedmont, the regional giving day, where a board member's $5,000 matching commitment has been used to double donations. Charity Navigator has rated it three stars, with an accountability and finance score of eighty-four percent, a fully independent board and a strong share of spending on programs.

The organization also invests in the county's own storytellers: it runs a countywide storytelling contest that has drawn record numbers of local high school and middle school entries. That combination — professional deep-dive reporting plus community participation — reflects its belief that local news is connective tissue for a community, not just a product.

Ten Years and a National Stage

Foothills marked its tenth anniversary in 2024 with a special anniversary logo, a seven-minute anniversary video, updated collections of its feature work and an annual gathering with roughly double the previous year's attendance; co-founder Bill Dietel, who died before the anniversary, was remembered by his daughter Betsy and by Meyer at the event. Executive Director Emily Oaks and Board Chair Andy Alexander, a longtime Washington journalist, led the organization in that period.

In 2025 Foothills hosted Judy Woodruff, the longtime PBS NewsHour anchor, as keynote speaker at its annual gathering in Washington, where she was interviewed by Foothills reporter Tim Carrington and warned that nothing good happens when a newspaper dies. That a county of a few thousand people could convene that conversation says something about the standing Foothills has built.

Why Foothills Forum Matters

Most American nonprofit news organizations are replacements — founded after a newspaper closed or was hollowed out. Foothills Forum, publishing at foothillsforum.org and through the Rappahannock News, is a reinforcement: community philanthropy deliberately strengthening a surviving weekly before it became a news desert.

Its founders argue that the conditions for community-supported local news probably exist in more rural American communities than people realize. A decade of award-winning reporting, a working partnership model now copied by neighbors, and a county that answered a survey about its own future at a forty-two percent rate make Foothills Forum one of the most instructive small news organizations in the country.