News-Democrat will add two reporters in 2020 with Report for America grant
The Belleville News-Democrat will add two reporters and expand local coverage as part of the nationwide Report for America program.
The program announced Monday that it will help fund positions in 164 newsrooms in 46 states in 2020. The BND and nine other Illinois news organizations were among those selected.
Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places emerging journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities. News organizations that apply for the program must describe coverage gaps and proposed beats to address them.
The BND plans to assign one of its Report for America reporters to cover education and the other to cover the East St. Louis area and nearby communities, such as Cahokia and Centreville.
Specifically, the community reporter will cover government, politics, neighborhood issues and how tax dollars are being spent. The reporter will also explore topics such as housing, community development, public safety, the environment, the economy and other issues important to residents.
The education reporter will write about topics that connect with parents, educators and taxpayers, such as the quality of K-12 education in our region, school safety, teacher pay, life inside our schools and other subjects important to readers. This beat will address two other accountability questions: How are education leaders performing and how are tax dollars being spent?
“We cover these important topics now but not nearly enough, due to limited resources that all news organizations face today,” said Jeffry Couch, the BND’s editor and general manager. “Our partnership with Report for America will give us the ability to create two, full-time beats so we can increase our coverage and better serve our readers.”
The BND’s new reporters will join the newsroom in June after completing an intensive training program with other journalists in the Report for America program.
Report for America was formed in 2017 to invest in newsrooms as media companies tackled financial challenges triggered by digital transformation, forcing staff reductions and cuts in coverage.
In all, Report for America will place 250 journalists in local newsrooms in 2020, four times the size of the 2019 class.
“Today’s news marks the single biggest hiring announcement of journalists in recent memory — and comes as a direct response to the worsening crisis in local news across the country,” Report for America said in its announcement Monday.
Report for America is investing more than $5 million to finance its 2020 class of journalists, known as corps members. Philanthropic organizations such as the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Facebook Journalism Project, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Google News Initiative, the Ford Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies and the Tow Foundation made the program expansion possible.
Report for America pays half the salary of each journalist. The organization asks its local newsroom partners to contribute one-quarter of the salary and to support efforts to get regional funders to contribute the rest.
Report for America funds each position for up to two years, with the goal of permanently expanding local staffing.
Each newsroom that partners with Report for America has sole editorial control of all content produced by corps members, who are supervised by local editors. National, regional and local donors have no influence over content decisions.
“RFA is about serving these communities and helping to restore the pipeline for a new generation of journalists,” said Charles Sennott, CEO and editor-in-chief of GroundTruth, which launched Report for America in 2017. “We understand our program may not fix all that is broken in local journalism, but we are honored to be part of a wider community directly confronting the crisis and doing everything we can to restore journalism from the ground up.”
