Understanding the Impact of Locally Driven, Public Interest Journalism Across the Globe

At Report for the World (RFW), understanding the different facets of “story impact” by their corps members is key to building audience engagement and sustainability around the roles that they are supporting. Their objective is that these roles continue as long-term beats, as they phase out of the three-year partnership cycles. Therefore, RFW seeks to create a stronger eco-system of audience engagement, story impact and economic viability for their newsroom partners and journalists around their most pressing issues of coverage. 

This study analyzes "story impact" that local journalists are producing  through consistent reporting of specific critical beats - climate change, corruption, health and education - as full time staff at local public interest media. The impact will be gauged at individual, network and institutional levels, using a matrix developed by the Capstone team to see how/if the reporting is (1) leading to more consistent coverage of the topic in the newsrooms (2) advancing the career trajectories/ambitions of journalists (3) creating more audience engagement/new revenue stream for newsrooms (4) creating accountability/action/change of attitudes on the issues being reported (5) creating  collaborations among media. The overall goal of this assessment is to allow newsroom partners at RFW to develop a systematic process to build story impact goals into their work - from the initial planning stages to the post-production and publishing phases.