Editor’s Note: Gazette again selected for Report for America placement

The announcement this week of the 2024-25 placement list of nearly 60 Report for America corps members included great news for our newsroom.

We were successful in securing support from the national service program for an energy and environment reporter. The selection helps us continue the environmental reporting begun by our first corps member Brittney J. Miller, who spent two years reporting on an array of environmental topics in the Mississippi River watershed including water quality, energy, endangered species, environmental policy and impacts of environment on health.

Miller, a Florida native, began an magazine reporting role in her home state earlier this month.

Olivia Cohen will be joining our newsroom July 8. Cohen is completing her journalism degree at Columbia College in Chicago. Cohen has worked on projects looking at nursing home violations during COVID-19, and helped cover the U.S. Supreme Court and federal court system during an internship with Bloomberg Law.

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Report For America has now placed more than 650 journalists with local newspapers, public radio stations, digital platforms and television stations since launching in 2017. The program provides supports for helping grow journalists with coaching and training, and the corps members complete service projects in the community.

The support of Report For America is crucial for our environmental coverage. Our region has faced multiple natural disasters, and energy and environmental changes can have profound impacts on our state’s collective future.

Report For America has been helping build sustainability for local news organizations, which have seen profound changes to the business model in recent years. The number of reporters in news organizations has dropped by about 60 percent since 2004. More than 2,100 newspapers have shuttered. In communities without local newspapers, increased misinformation and polarization occurs, fewer people vote or participate in civic organizations and processes, and corruption increases and government has higher costs to taxpayers.

The program uses an innovative funding model in which Report For America pays for up to half the corps member’s salary, while we work to raise the other half from local funders. The collaborative investment model helps us increase the chances of sustaining the local reporting for the community because the investment is coming from our community.

Subscribing is a crucial part of supporting local news, and I’m truly grateful for each subscriber. But we’ll also be increasing some of our philanthropic efforts, too. We’ve established The Gazette Journalism Fund through the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation. Donations to this fund help sustain our environmental reporting and can be found here: https://bit.ly/3JEinqG

Fundraising and the evolving news landscape will be the subject of additional columns in the weeks ahead. We are tremendously proud and honored to be selected for support, and are absolutely committed to maintaining high-quality environmental reporting going forward.

Thanks for reading and for your support of local journalism,

Zack Kucharski is executive editor of The Gazette.