Report for America
Report for America is a New York-based national service programme that places journalists in local newsrooms across the United States to report on undercovered issues and communities. Launched in 2017 as an initiative of The GroundTruth Project, a nonprofit media organisation, it was modelled on national service programmes such as Teach for America and the Peace Corps, applying the service model to the crisis in local journalism. Report for America recruits corps members, helps fund their salaries, and supports them with training and mentoring, while the journalism they produce is published by their host newsrooms — newspapers, radio and television stations, and digital and nonprofit outlets in all fifty states, Puerto Rico and Guam.
Founding and Launch
Report for America was founded by veteran journalists Steven Waldman and Charles Sennott and launched in 2017. Sennott is the founder and chief executive of The GroundTruth Project, which had run reporting fellowships for emerging journalists around the world. Waldman had written the landmark 2009–2011 Federal Communications Commission staff report on the information needs of communities, which documented the decline of local reporting, and became the programme's president.
The founding diagnosis was that the collapse of local news advertising had left hundreds of communities with little or no professional coverage — news deserts in which public bodies went unobserved and residents lacked basic civic information — and that this was simultaneously a crisis for local democracy. The announced pilot aimed to place its first reporters in early 2018, beginning with a small class and building toward adding more than a thousand local journalists over five years. Google News Initiative, the Knight Foundation, the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and other foundations and donors supported the launch; the programme is donor-financed and is not funded by the government.
How the Model Works
Report for America runs two selection processes. Journalists apply to become corps members and must persuade selectors that they have both reporting skill and a commitment to public service. News organisations apply separately to host a corps member and must show they will deploy the reporter on civically important, undercovered beats. Successful pairings place a reporter in a host newsroom for a service term, typically one year with the possibility of renewal up to three years.
The funding is shared. In the original model, Report for America paid half of a corps member's salary, the host newsroom paid a quarter, and local donors and philanthropy in the community raised the remaining quarter. The structure was designed to make an additional reporter affordable to a small newsroom — supporters made the case that a local contribution of around $10,000 could help make a reporter position happen — while building community investment in the position so it might outlast the subsidy. Each corps member also undertakes a community service project, such as helping a local high school start or improve a student news site or newspaper.
Growth of the Corps
Demand at launch exceeded the pilot's scale: the first cycle drew some 740 reporter applications and applications from 85 local news organisations for nine openings. The first class, announced in May 2018, placed twelve reporters in eleven news organisations, including placements covering communities in Appalachia and other underserved regions. The programme then expanded class by class. By the early 2020s, roughly 300 Report for America corps members were working in more than 200 newsrooms across the United States, Puerto Rico and Guam, with just over half of host newsrooms being nonprofit outlets. Kim Kleman, the programme's senior vice president, described a corps in which almost half of members were journalists of colour and two-thirds were women, alongside military veterans and bilingual reporters recruited to serve particular communities.
Beats and Editorial Focus
Corps members report on undercovered themes and communities rather than general assignment news. Recurring beats include criminal justice, the environment, education, health, inequality, rural affairs, local government, and coverage of communities of colour, veterans, older people and working families. Host newsrooms define the beat with Report for America, and the reporting itself is edited and published by the host outlet under its own standards; Report for America does not direct coverage. The programme's role is to make the position possible, recruit and train the reporter, and study the results.
The work has produced accountability reporting with measurable local effects — for example, early corps reporting in eastern Kentucky, where a reporter placed with the Lexington Herald-Leader covered Martin County, a community whose water system failures had gone largely unexamined, and collaborated on investigations into coal companies' unpaid taxes.
Training and Support
Corps members receive orientation and continuing training, including digital and data journalism instruction; at launch, the Google News Lab provided in-depth training and equipment including Chromebooks, cameras and phones. Report for America maintains regional managers and mentors drawn from experienced journalists who support corps members in the field, and its staff includes leaders from both journalism and national service organisations. The programme also evaluates its placements, publishing research on the state of local news and on the model's effects on coverage and community trust.
The GroundTruth Project
Report for America is an initiative of The GroundTruth Project, an independent, nonpartisan nonprofit news organisation dedicated to developing the next generation of journalists in the United States and around the world. GroundTruth had supported some 150 reporting fellowships in its first years, in places from Myanmar, Egypt and Somalia to Kentucky, Minnesota and Montana. Report for America applied that fellowship experience domestically, at larger scale, and with the service-year structure. The parent organisation's base is in Boston, while Report for America operates nationally with staff and corps members distributed across the country; the organisation is listed in this directory with its New York presence.
Geographic Scope
The programme's scope is the whole United States, with deliberate emphasis on places the market no longer supports: rural counties, small cities, faded industrial towns, border communities and neighbourhoods within larger cities that metropolitan outlets rarely cover. Placements span newspapers, public and commercial radio, television stations, digital-only sites and nonprofit newsrooms, reflecting the mixed ecology of surviving local media.
Debate and Context
Report for America emerged within a wider philanthropic response to local news decline that also produced funder collaboratives, nonprofit newsroom startups and university partnerships. Its service framing attracted both enthusiasm — as a patriotic call to service for a new generation of journalists, in Sennott's words — and discussion within the industry about whether subsidised positions can become permanent, how host newsrooms sustain beats after support ends, and how to ensure corps members are integrated as staff rather than treated as temporary help. The programme's published aim is to build a sustainable system: positions seeded with shared funding that communities and newsrooms continue because the coverage has demonstrated its value.
Digital Presence
Report for America operates at reportforamerica.org, where it publishes corps announcements, application information for journalists and host newsrooms, research and stories drawn from corps members' work. The journalism itself appears on the platforms of host newsrooms, and the programme maintains an active presence in journalism trade media, where each year's corps class and host list is announced and covered.
Significance
Report for America is significant as the largest attempt to rebuild American local reporting through national service. Rather than founding a news outlet, it created a labour and funding mechanism that many outlets could share, placing hundreds of reporters on beats that would otherwise have gone uncovered and demonstrating demand — from journalists and communities alike — far beyond its initial capacity. Its shared-funding model influenced subsequent local news philanthropy, and its corps has become a recognised entry route into professional journalism, particularly for reporters committed to serving specific communities.
