Serving Barnwell County and it's neighbors since 1852
Since 2017, as the number of journalists and local newspapers has fallen sharply, the national service program Report for America has been placing emerging journalists in areas of the country with not enough news coverage, including Allendale County.
Between July 17–20, The People-Sentinel’s Allendale County reporter Elijah de Castro attended Report for America’s national gathering, which brought together Report for America reporters in Minneapolis, Minnesota. De Castro met with other corps members across the country who cover issues ranging from gun violence to education to climate change in news deserts across the country. The United States is losing two local newspapers a week, according to Northwestern University, and the collapse of local news has been connected to the rise of polarization, democratic backsliding and misinformation across the United States.
At the conference, hundreds of Report for America corps members shared how they cover their communities and discussed the importance of community storytelling.
“You’re part of what we’re starting to call a movement,” said Charles Sennott, the founder of The GroundTruth Project (the parent nonprofit of Report for America) during a keynote speech. “We’re coming up on 700 corps members placed in newsrooms since our founding. This is a growing body of power that is continuing to be effective every day in communities everywhere.”
Although local media as an industry has been in decline for decades, state legislatures have begun passing laws in support of reviving local news. In June, the California state senate passed a bill that would tax large technology companies like Google, Meta and Amazon for data they use in advertising and use the revenues to help support local media; large technology companies bear responsibility for the decline of the advertising model that supports local news as well as the algorithms that spread misinformation on social media, according to research by the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Mass Media.
During the conference, de Castro attended a roundtable discussion with other reporters covering rural communities.
“There’s a lot of problems but there’s also just not a lot of understanding,” said corps member Joshua Yeager of the rural communities he covers in Kern County, California. “Being a reporter located in a place like that, a big part of your job is complicating that image and making sure that people understand what’s going on there from the perspective of the people that live there.”
Building trust with local and rural communities was also a topic of discussion among rural reporters. Sophi Zeman, a corps member who covers education, safety and crime for the Uvalde Leader-News in Uvalde, Texas, spoke of how she earned trust in a community in grief; in 2022, 22 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
“It was really tricky coming into Uvalde because it's been such a focal point of national media attention, … so I think people had a really sour taste related to media,” Zeman said. “They [felt] like, ‘you're some person from a city who's coming in and going to extract from our pain.’ A lot of it was just being there and finding myself amid the spaces where people found themselves. … Sometimes just setting aside the journalist hat is so important.”
Now beginning his second year as Allendale’s RFA corps member, de Castro has covered numerous issues facing Allendale. Gun violence, infrastructure, local government, agriculture, climate change, housing and other issues facing Allendale are all included in de Castro’s rural communities beat.
“Many of the issues that Allendale faces are also present in other rural communities across the United States, and each community has different nuances in the issues they face,” de Castro said. “It’s critical that rural journalists connect with each other to discuss how we can best cover these issues within our communities, especially when rural areas are so frequently misunderstood.”
Elijah de Castro is a Report for America corps member who writes about rural communities like Allendale and Barnwell counties for The People-Sentinel. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep Elijah writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today.
