MINNEAPOLIS – From every corner of the United States, nearly 200 of our Report for America corps members came together here this week for our national gathering, a revival meeting of sorts for the spirit of public service journalism and why it matters more than ever in this post-truth era.
Currently, these corps members are deployed across 198 newsrooms which have produced nearly 20,000 stories in the last year and they have offered public service to some 2,784 students. Two thirds of the corps members are women, and nearly half are reporters of color. And since GroundTruth launched Report for America in 2018, a total of 700 corps members have been assigned to some 400 newsrooms and more than $30 million in direct philanthropic support has been raised to support local journalism. This impressive narrative on the growing movement we are creating around the idea of journalism that is of service to local communities can be found in Report for America’s 2024 impact report.
Guiding this movement is a belief in the idea of “ground truth,” a technical term that refers to a process in which human readings help calibrate the accuracy of technology such as data retrieved from a satellite or AI. And at the gathering this year, we offered The GroundTruth Award for the reporting that best illustrated our news organization’s commitment to the idea of being there on the ground to tell the stories that matter. This is the second time we have offered this award at our national gathering, which was last held in Chicago in 2022.
We are proud to announce that this year’s winner is Quinn Glabicki, a Report for America corps member at PublicSource in Pittsburgh, for his outstanding body of work titled “Hollowed Out” about the impact of extractive industries, specifically fracking, on communities in Appalachia.
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