Cascadia Daily News has been selected to host a corps member from the national service program Report for America in 2025–26.
This additional reporter will allow CDN to produce consistent coverage of public health and health care issues in Whatcom and Skagit counties. CDN, which began publishing in January 2022, was one of 100-plus newsrooms awarded a member after a rigorous application process.
The position will be partially funded/supported through donations from readers or foundations. RFA is a successful reporting arm helping newsrooms of all sizes fill key coverage topics.
A public plea for additional consumer-focused coverage of public health and health care issues has consistently topped lists of reader requests at CDN for more than two years.
“We’re thrilled to be able to meet this critical coverage need identified by our readers in Northwest Washington, especially through a partnership with Report For America,” said Ron Judd, CDN’s executive editor. “We’ve made great inroads into this subject with existing staff over our first three years. A full-time beat reporter will allow us to expand that coverage both in scope and quantity.”
Judd and CDN’s managing editor, Rhonda Prast, said they appreciate the RFA program’s emphasis on public funding for a portion of the reporting costs, as it creates community buy-in for the project. Prast previously worked with a corps member who covered the gaming industry at the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Details on opportunities for public sponsorship and involvement will be announced in coming weeks.
This year’s selections in the competitive RFA grants include 66 local newsroom partners and corps member positions, 35 accelerator program participants, with expanded photojournalist and education reporter opportunities still to be announced, according to the announcement Tuesday, Dec. 17.
Report For America was created in 2017 to bring immediate and long-term solutions to the challenges facing local news. RFA is a national service program that places talented emerging journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered topics and communities across the United States and its territories.
Other Northwest newsrooms awarded a member are: InvestigateWest for an investigative reporter covering central and Eastern Oregon; and the Yakima Herald-Republican is getting a reporter to cover education gaps in the Yakima Valley, with a focus on solutions. Reporters will be hired by the designated newsrooms with an aim to be in service by early summer.
Report for America is an initiative of The GroundTruth Project, an award-winning nonprofit journalism organization dedicated to rebuilding journalism from the ground up. New corps members will join an elite group of more than 600 Report for America journalists, more than 82% of whom continue to work in the field after program completion. Nearly half identify as a journalist of color.
The RFA award, Judd noted, is an important step in the transformation of CDN, a privately owned publication, toward a sustainable future marked by cooperative agreements that include outside funding from entities supporting local, independent news outlets.
Earlier this fall, CDN was selected to host a Washington state Murrow Fellow — reporter Sophia Gates joined us in October to cover a variety of topics such as local government, food insecurity and housing, in rural areas of Whatcom and Skagit counties. The salaries of Murrow Fellows are subsidized by state taxpayers with an expressed goal of boosting civic journalism in areas struggling to maintain consistent news coverage.
