MINNEAPOLIS – From every corner of the United States, nearly 200 of our Report for America corps members came together here this week for our national gathering, a revival meeting of sorts for the spirit of public service journalism and why it matters more than ever in this post-truth era.
Currently, these corps members are deployed across 198 newsrooms which have produced nearly 20,000 stories in the last year and they have offered public service to some 2,784 students. Two thirds of the corps members are women, and nearly half are reporters of color. And since GroundTruth launched Report for America in 2018, a total of 700 corps members have been assigned to some 400 newsrooms and more than $30 million in direct philanthropic support has been raised to support local journalism. This impressive narrative on the growing movement we are creating around the idea of journalism that is of service to local communities can be found in Report for America’s 2024 impact report.
Guiding this movement is a belief in the idea of “ground truth,” a technical term that refers to a process in which human readings help calibrate the accuracy of technology such as data retrieved from a satellite or AI. And at the gathering this year, we offered The GroundTruth Award for the reporting that best illustrated our news organization’s commitment to the idea of being there on the ground to tell the stories that matter. This is the second time we have offered this award at our national gathering, which was last held in Chicago in 2022.
We are proud to announce that this year’s winner is Quinn Glabicki, a Report for America corps member at PublicSource in Pittsburgh, for his outstanding body of work titled “Hollowed Out” about the impact of extractive industries, specifically fracking, on communities in Appalachia.
The judging was by three members of our editorial team at The GroundTruth Project along with RFA Executive Director Kim Kleman and our Groundruth CEO Rob Zeaske as a tie breaker, if needed, served.
A list of finalists for the award was drawn from all of the winners of the RFA local news awards which you can see here. In addition to that impressive list, each judge was also encouraged to bring forward up to one body of work that may have been overlooked by the awards or not really fit in one of the local news award categories.
The winner this year was nominated by a judge as an open-ended immersive piece of journalism that combined writing and photography and the use of graphics in a powerful and impactful way.
“Hollowed Out” stood out to all of the judges and was selected by a strong majority of the vote.
Glabicki is a writer and photographer who uses visual and written mediums to tell stories about how people in Western Pennsylvania and the wider region of Appalachia interact with their environment and how climate change is impacting their communities.
“Hollowed Out” combined his powerful photography, strong reporting and writing and a creative use of graphics and medical records, including an extraordinary diary by a young woman, to document the impact of a large fracking operation on one community in West Virginia.
Through seven months of immersive reporting supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center to Public Source, the work focuses on four families who have seen their health deteriorate and their concerns go unheeded by the Pittsburgh gas giant EQT and their pleas for help unheeded by local officials.
A federal DEP investigation is underway but grinding on slowly while these families continue to suffer. Quinn is staying on the story.
In an interview with GroundTruth, Quinn talked about his work and what the concept of ‘ground truth’ means to him in his work:
“I don’t think there’s any substitute for just being there with people, “Glabicki said.
“I have never been one to report from behind a desk. In fact, I do everything I can to not do that. I love being out with people, hearing their stories, living their stories alongside them. When we talk about writing, you get to take people on a journey from point A to B to C to D in someone’s lives, what they’ve experienced. You get to write that from the perspective of actually having been there. And that’s very different than writing. Calling someone up on the phone and getting their perspective that way. Because when you’re there, you see it, you get those details, you get to photograph that and represent that truthfully. That’s what it’s all about.”
For the last three days, the Report for America corps was assembled in the Hubert Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota where a small museum is dedicated to the memory of Humphrey. As the corps members walked through the museum, they took in the black-and-white photography and political campaign memorabilia from the 1968 convention. The images prompted reflection on the uncanny parallels between then and now.
Samuel G. Freedman, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s legendary professor, and the author of a new book on Humphrey titled, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, was with us to share his research and thoughts on why Humphrey’s place in history is important. And how it can help us understand the current political climate as the country heads toward the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the same city where Humphrey famously was nominated in a smoke-filled hall while the Chicago Police Department unleashed a violent crackdown on student protesters.
The images are seared into the memory of American politics and provide a sharp backdrop to this summer as the Democratic Party will once again be gathering in Chicago for what may turn out to be a brokered convention, just as it was in 1968 when President Lyndon Johnson stunned the world by announcing he would not seek nor accept the nomination, paving the way or Robert F. Kennedy to surge in the primaries before he was assassinated in June 1968. Humphrey was then thrust forward as a nominee by a Democratic Party that found itself in disarray. The history offered a teaching moment for emerging journalists gathered here, a chance to reflect on that history and how it informs the deeply divided time we live in now.
President Biden is fond of quoting the late Irish poet and Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney, who wrote:
“History says, Don’t hope.
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime.
The longed-for tidal wave.
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.”
America is holding its breath to see if Biden, who has been pressured by a growing number of leaders in his own Democratic Party, to step down after a disastrous appearance in a debate with Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, and a growing consensus in the polls that nearly 70 percent of Americans feel he is too old and infirm to serve as president. We are certainly in a moment where it feels like the history of 1968 rhymes with so much that is unfolding around us. But a question remains as to whether or not this is also a moment where “justice can rise up” and “hope and history rhyme.” The history is all around us,it is the hope that seems hard to find.