Herald-Leader wins Report for America grants to report on health, Eastern Kentucky
The Lexington Herald-Leader is one of more than 40 newsrooms chosen to receive Report for America grants in 2019, allowing the publication to hire a reporter to cover health and social services issues in Kentucky and continue staffing a bureau in Pikeville to cover Eastern Kentucky.
Report for America, a national service program that places talented emerging journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered topics and communities, announced Thursday that it will help fund 50 reporting positions in 26 states and territories. It has plans to announce 10 more reporting positions in coming weeks, bringing the total to 60 reporters in 2019. The nonprofit has a goal of helping fund 1,000 reporters by 2023.
Report for America launched in late 2017, when it announced the placement of reporters in three newsrooms covering central Appalachia — the Herald-Leader, Charleston (W.V.) Gazette-Mail and West Virginia Public Broadcasting. That one-year grant, funded by the Galloway Family Foundation, allowed the Herald-Leader to re-establish a news bureau in Eastern Kentucky for the first time since 2011. It has been renewed for 2019.
In June, a second Report for America corps member will join the Herald-Leader to cover health and social services issues in central, eastern and southern Kentucky. The state has the highest rate of cancer deaths in the nation, the nation’s second-highest rate of child abuse and neglect, and the fifth-highest rate of overdose deaths in the nation.
This reporter will focus on producing journalism that explains the region’s health problems, exposes flaws in Kentucky’s social services programs, gives voice to people struggling to care for themselves and their loved ones, and offers potential solutions to problems that have plagued this place for a century.
“The Herald-Leader’s partnership in 2018 with Report for America and the Galloway Family Foundation made a real difference, with in-depth, on-the-ground reporting by journalist Will Wright in Eastern Kentucky,” said Peter Baniak, editor and general manager of the Herald-Leader. “We’re thrilled to continue that partnership with our bureau in Pikeville for another year. And we’re excited to expand our work with Report for America to focus a second reporter on the many critical health and social services challenges facing the region.”
Launched in 2017 and donor-financed, Report for America aims to create a sustainable system that provides Americans with the information they need to improve their communities, hold powerful institutions accountable, and rebuild trust in the media. Report for America is an initiative of The GroundTruth Project, an award-winning nonprofit media organization with an established track record of training and supporting teams of emerging journalists around the world and in the U.S.
Half of each Report for America corps member’s salary is paid by the nonprofit. The other half is covered locally, split between newsrooms and local philanthropists.
Among the 50 reporting positions in the 2019 corps announced Thursday, 18 will be placed in non-profit news organizations, three in weekly publications, seven in public radio stations and more than two dozen in newspapers. Recipients range from the Associated Press in Connecticut to the Buffalo Bulletin in Wyoming. In Kentucky, the Cincinnati Enquirer received a grant to fund local government watchdog reporting in Northern Kentucky.
Applications for the one-year positions, which can be extended to a second year, are open through Feb. 8 at www.reportforamerica.org. Corps members typically have three to six years of experience, while some are accomplished recent graduates. More than half of the current corps members have returned to their home states.
The Herald-Leader and its website Kentucky.com are committed to being Central and Eastern Kentucky’s primary source of news and commentary with the highest standards of journalism. Owned by McClatchy since 2006, the newspaper has won three Pulitzer Prizes since 1986 and has been a finalist in a number of other categories over the years.
Report for America receives financial support from a variety of sources, including: Facebook, the Google News Initiative, the Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, Dirk and Natasha Ziff, Galloway Family Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, The Tow Foundation, Select Equity Group Foundation, the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, The Joyce Foundation, The Steans Family Foundation, Henry M. Kimelman Family Foundation and the Duo Collective.
This story was originally published January 17, 2019 at 9:23 AM.