Report for America, Report about Communities: Local News Capacity and Community Trust

Abstract

This study looks at Report for America’s (RFA) efforts to strengthen the capacity of local news and increase trust from the perspective of two communities: a neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side and a rural county in Eastern Kentucky. Using a communication infrastructure theory framework, we examined RFA’s impact on the local news environment by following 28 residents through two rounds of focus groups, interviewing 15 journalists and RFA staff, and conducting content analysis of local stories from the Chicago Sun-Times and Lexington Herald-Leader. The study illustrates the influence of place and power dynamics in how residents navigate trustworthiness factors. We explore how RFA’s intervention in these two cases has gone some way to offer more complex narratives about communities, but due to a lack of feedback loops, has been limited in its ability to provide coverage for communities.