In a rousing talk to a capacity crowd Sunday afternoon in the old library, Report for America founder, veteran reporter, and Harvard resident Charlie Sennott lamented the decline of local journalism across the U.S. and said it was time to think of community journalism as a community service, an essential ingredient of successful small-town democracy, as vital as the right to vote and government that is beholden to its citizens.
Today, while guarantees of a free press remain enshrined in the U.S. and state constitutions, local news is disappearing—a net loss of nearly 900 papers so far, according to Sennott—a trend that has left a growing number of communities without a paper or other news source focused on issues vital to their residents. The causes are economic and social, but the result is “there is no one covering the workings of municipal government in those towns, no one watching the store,” Sennott observed. For the small daily and weekly papers that remain, the ability to hire full-time professional reporters is severely constrained by the loss of traditional sources of revenue, such as classified advertising, to online competitors. Most reporters of a certain age got their start at local papers before moving on to jobs at major regional and national journals, such as the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal. But the inability of local papers to pay a living wage means that they are no longer a viable way station for young reporters and editors fresh out of journalism school with college debts and families to support.
One solution is for communities to look within themselves for the resources they need to sustain their local reporting, for residents to think of their paper as a community service and of reporting and editing for it as another way to give back to their community, a contribution as essential as volunteering for a town board or organization. In a sense, that’s how we’ve staffed the Press for years. But now, inspired by Report for America, a project co-founded by Sennott, we’re hoping to scale up our efforts and formalize the recruiting and training of journalists from within the community. While Report for America aims to place aspiring journalists at understaffed news outlets in underserved counties and towns, we at the Press believe that the talent to sustain local journalism in Harvard exists within our town. We’re calling our new initiative to nourish that talent Report for Harvard.
The goal of Report for Harvard will be to encourage emerging journalists—high school students as well as motivated adults—to commit to the Press for a period of time in exchange for training and mentoring, which the Press will provide in focused workshops later this fall. We’ll announce details later this month, but our plan is to begin with a pilot workshop shortly after school resumes in September for a select group of committed Bromfield students. Then we’ll apply what we’ve learned to offer a similar workshop later in the year for adults of any age who would like to contribute to their community by contributing to the work of the Press.
It’s a build-it-yourself Yankee solution to a perplexing problem. We hope it can work and provide a new model for sustaining local journalism in towns like Harvard for years to come. And we hope some of you will be inspired to join us in that mission.
