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Herald Tribune wins Report For America grant

Dear readers:

The Randolph County Herald Tribune has won a Report For America grant from The GroundTruth Project, enabling us to bring a full-time reporter on board to cover Chester and Randolph County, starting this summer.

Report For America is similar to (but unrelated to) Teach For America, which places good young teachers in rural and inner city schools and asks them to stay for a year or two.

This is excellent news, but it will require a commitment from the Chester community as well as the Herald-Tribune and Report For America to pull it off.

It's been pretty clear over the past 10-20 years the perilous situation small-town newspapers are in. In fact, Report For America was launched as a direct response to the loss of 1,800 local newspapers in the United States since 2004.

It was founded by Steve Waldman, a newspaper editor, with Charles Sennott, a former Boston Globe reporter and founder of the Boston-based nonprofit news organization The GroundTruth Project.

In 2018 they started with an inaugural class of 13 young/entry-level reporters, who were deployed around the country.

This year they are determined to place 250 reporters. And one of them is ours.

<b>The way it works</b>

Supported by a $5 million grant over five years from the Knight Foundation to GroundTruth, Report for America pays half of its reporters' salaries for the first year; local newsrooms and local supporters pay the other half.

Report For America interviews and hires the reporting candidates, and they remain on the beat for one or two years - working hard to cover the community they have been assigned. We commit to training and mentoring them.

It's also our job to fundraise and we are trying to raise $20,000 to support this reporter. Candidates for this position come from Southern Illinois University and elsewhere.

Good journalism isn't cheap, but the value it can bring to a community is priceless. If you agree, we'd appreciate your support. Any donation - of any amount - helps us reach that goal.

Go to bit.ly/RFAHeraldTribune to make a donation and become part of Report For America.

Thank you for your support of local journalism.