Our nonprofit status is already improving our journalism
By Scott White
Community Liaison and Report for America corps member
To an extraordinarily close observer, you may have noticed my byline changed with the July 23 edition of the Sun. Now, in addition to being a staff reporter and the Sun’s community liaison, I am also a Report for America (RFA) corps member.
This is a big step for us at the Sun, and one made possible by our conversion from a family-owned, for-profit corporation to the nonprofit Woodford Sun Community Newspaper, Inc. corporation publishing the Sun.
We are owned, as publisher and now Board Chair Ben Chandler says, by the folks in Woodford County.
We will be rolling out lots of new details about our new status in a countywide edition in September. But our partnership with RFA is the first tangible public step on this new journey.
As an RFA corps member, via a grant, I am undergoing the training and education of a college journalism major in a one- to possibly two-year program. As many of you know, I came straight to the Sun from a nearly 40-year practice as a trial lawyer with no formal journalism training.
The portfolio I was given was to work with the existing staff and Ben in an effort to save the paper and keep the Sun publishing on a weekly basis. I’ve made lots of mistakes . . . just ask 30+ year, Woodford County Public Schools Hall of Fame member and Sun reporter Bob Vlach, our editor Lucie Chandler, sportswriter Bill Caine, circulation manager Brenda Stone, layout editor/ad designer Tamara McSorley, copy editor and contributing writer Melissa Patrick and more than a few readers and social media posters.
The reality, then, was we did not have any resources to bring on additional staff or reporters. I’ve learned on the job with lots of help from the aforementioned list of names (particularly Bob), and former reporters who I knew from my days as the Kentucky deputy attorney general or who covered cases I handled, like Kentucky journalist luminaries like Al Cross and Jamie Lucke.
Since March of this year, though, I have been a part of a pilot program with rigorous curricula created and designed by well-known journalist, editor and academic Melissa Newman via a partnership between Press Forward Bluegrass (PFB) and RFA.
PFB, according to its website, is the Kentucky chapter of Press Forward, a nonprofit that is a “national movement (existing) to reinvigorate local news and information as a cornerstone of democracy. Backed by a coalition of funders, this transformative initiative is investing in information ecosystems to: strengthen local newsrooms; close gaps in journalism coverage; advance public policies that ensure access to local news; and build the infrastructure needed for local news to thrive.”
To further this, Newman worked with RFA to create the pilot program I am involved in.
A little about RFA, first.
RFA, a nonprofit, was founded in 2017 by veteran journalists Steven Waldman and Charles Sennott, and is a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities. It is structured to harness the skills and idealism of an emerging group of journalists plus the creative spirit of local news organizations. RFA receives no government funding and is staffed by experienced and usually award-winning journalists committed to RFA’s mission.
Except for the pilot program, RFA works with existing newsrooms to help fund, train, mentor and support new journalism graduates or existing journalists and corps members seeking to work in the types of newsrooms that partner with RFA.
Now, the RFA pilot program and what it means for Woodford County.
In a profile written on Newman by Mark Glaser, a consultant for national Press Forward, Newman said, “This pilot recognizes that the future of local journalism depends not only on professional training, but on belonging. When reporters are rooted in the communities they serve, trust grows, and so does the likelihood they will stay and build long-term impact.”
As the feature summarized Newman, the pilot seeks to identify “trusted community members and give them the reporting skills to thrive in local newsrooms. The program is designed as a research-driven pilot, using qualitative feedback and performance measures to evaluate its effectiveness in improving reporting quality, building trust and supporting long-term sustainability in local news.”
This means PFB and RFA are determined to find folks already in the community who are willing to participate, go through the rigorous training, and then report on their community for an existing news outlet.
Along with the Sun, PFB selected MediaLex and CivicLex, two nonprofit online news organizations, from the pool of applicants and who each have two new “student” journalists. And, we three corps members (we too are identified by RFA this way) have been deeply engaged in the curricula. For example, we have already studied journalistic ethics in varied contexts, the AP Style Guide and will next dive into quoting and sources.
In two weeks, I, along with my two pilot program colleagues, will be going to New Orleans (yes, in August, so it’s no boondoggle!) for a week-long training with the other, traditional RFA corps members. The executive director of RFA, herself a well-known journalist with tons of accolades, assured me I will be the oldest!
When the program ends, the Sun, at very little expense to itself, will have a trained journalist already working in the community who is intimately familiar with the community and all that entails.
And, if the pilot is successful, our hope is to hire another Woodford Countian to become the Sun’s next corps member, and on and on. It is a terrific opportunity for the Sun to add to its staff at minimal expense to better report on Woodford County, which benefits the entire community with an independent, fair and trustworthy newspaper.
Wish me luck!