Report for America, a project of the GroundTruth Project that places journalists in understaffed newsrooms across the country, has announced the names of the organizations that will receive funding to host "corps members" in 2020-21.

The program will provide more than $5 million in direct support to fund two hundred and fifty positions at a hundred and sixty-four news operations across forty-six states, including nine daily newspapers, thirty-nine digital-only sites, thirty-nine public radio stations, twelve local television stations, and five non-daily papers. Nonprofit newsrooms account for 47 percent of the recipients.

Launched in 2018 with support from Google News Lab, the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the Center for Investigative Reporting and Reveal Labs, the Solutions Journalism Network, and the Emma Bowen, Galloway Family, John S. and James L. Knight, and Select Equity Group foundations, Report for America works to bolster local journalism by paying half a corps member's salary while encouraging local news partners to contribute a quarter and local and regional partners to fund the rest. With additional support from the Knight, Ford, Packard, Heising-Simons, Galloway Family, and Tow foundations, the program boosted the number of reporters to be placed in newsrooms from thirteen in 2018 to sixty-one in 2019.

The 2020-21 cohort will include fifty individuals from 2019 who will stay on for a second year; the remaining two hundred corps members will be selected through a competitive application process and announced next April. Corps members selected through the process will cover beats in "news deserts" — including overlooked rural areas and urban communities — as well as veterans and military issues, aging populations, education, the environment, health care, and housing, with nearly a third of the positions designated for journalists fluent in Spanish or other languages. In addition, through a new initiative launched with support from the Joyce Foundation and others, fourteen of the positions at the Associated Press will focus on coverage of state government.

"We offer a pretty simple fix for news holes in communities throughout the country —local reporters on the ground who hold leaders accountable and report on undercovered issues," said Steven Waldman, president and co-founder of Report for America. "The editors we’ve met during our application cycle have shown us amazing passion, commitment, and sharp ideas for how to better serve their local communities."

For a complete list of 2020-21 corps members' host organizations and news beats, see the Report for America website.