Since the rise of the internet, newspapers have been decimated in the United States And as reporters have slowly disappeared news deserts have began to emerge — especially in rural areas.
That hurts the community as a whole, according to Steve Waldman, co-founder and president of Report for America, an initiative that takes a service model and applies it to journalism.
Earlier in his career, Waldman worked as a journalist and then was a senior advisor to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, where he wrote a study about the future of the media.
He concluded that the impending collapse in local news is going to be a big problem in our country’s future. So, he came up with Report for America. It’s modeled after AmeriCorps and aims to install 1,000 journalists in understaffed newsrooms by 2022.
Right now, the program is in its pilot stage. They’ve placed three reporters in Appalachia and have chosen nine more — from 740 applicants — to be deployed across the country in June.
Report for America is an initiative of the GroundTruth Project.
