Kleman is executive director of Report for America .
If you want to understand the depth of need among America’s local newsrooms — plus their depth of passion for serving their communities — there’s no better way than to read the hundreds of applications they send to organizations like mine, Report for America.
We recruit early-career journalists for local newsrooms and pay a good part of their salaries over two to three years, so they can cover what the newsrooms identify as critically underserved topics or communities. We also teach newsrooms how to fundraise and make themselves more financially sustainable.
In recent weeks our team finished selecting the 50 or so newsrooms we’ll be adding to our cohort next year, for a total of roughly 200. We’ll announce those results in December, but here’s a flavor of the enormous coverage gaps local newsrooms are trying to fill:
From Arkansas: “Today there is not a single ag reporter in the state, yet agriculture is Arkansas’s largest industry. This is crazy.”
From Pennsylvania: “This reporter would also keep an eye on the roughly 8-10 small local governments in our northern area. These councils are usually full of untrained community members with the best intentions. Or, occasionally, bad intentions. One town manager ... was recently arrested for allegedly stealing more than $600,000.”
From Michigan: “Southwest Detroit ... hosts a petroleum refinery and other heavy industry and deals with heavy truck traffic that is about to worsen with the construction of a new international border crossing. Residents struggle with air pollution, asthma, lead paint in homes and lead in water service lines, flooding, heat, and many other environmental and public health threats. ... This community is woefully undercovered.”
News craters like these exist throughout the country — and they’re only getting worse, according to the State of Local News 2023 report from the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University. The report’s November release served as a grim backdrop to our work judging newsroom applications and making agonizing choices. Among the alarming findings:
- More than half of the nation’s 3,143 counties have no local news source or only one remaining outlet.
- The country has lost 2,900 newspapers — nearly one-third — since 2005.
- We’re losing 2.5 newspapers per week, a rate that’s accelerating.
- Alternative local news outlets have not been viable replacements for shuttered papers, especially in non-metro areas.
Bottom line: Our growing news deserts are leaving far too many people without a trusted source of information.
Yes, there’s been positive news lately, namely the Press Forward initiative — $500 million pledged by a coalition of donors to support local news over the next several years.
The Medill report features additional bright spots — newsrooms throughout the country that are doing relatively well. All are privately held, most are locally owned, and all have gone to great lengths to engage with their communities and foster deep local relationships. I’m happy to say that 14 of the 17 newsrooms featured in the report are current or former host newsrooms of Report for America. Our team knows them as generous sharers of their ideas with other newsrooms. A vibrant network effect is key to more widespread adoption of these practices and ideas.
Our team has been doing this work for six years, fielding more than 600 journalists at 340 partner newsrooms. We’ve also helped newsrooms raise more than $21 million from local donors, and we’ve contributed $19 million in salary support. Each year we perform a juggling act, incorporating in our selections rural, suburban and urban newsrooms, for-profits and nonprofits, a variety of mediums and beats, and more. The need is so great, though, that we’ve had to turn away far more newsrooms than we can help.
I wish more people could know what a difference a single reporter can make in a community. That might inspire more people, and public and private institutions, to support local news.
Last year, the application from one newsroom – The People-Sentinel in Barnwell, S.C. – stuck with me above the hundreds of others. “The coverage area is a rural, high-poverty news desert,” wrote publisher Jonathan Vickery, who had recently bought the paper. He proposed to hire a reporter for neighboring Allendale County, which nobody had covered in a decade.
So with our help, The People-Sentinel hired corps member Elijah de Castro. At his first Allendale City Council meeting, de Castro told us he was swarmed by grateful residents. Just last week, he reported that in another town, the outgoing mayor had tried to cancel the meeting at which her replacement would be sworn in.
“I don’t know if I can claim that my reporting made the mayor agree to leave, but people told me that my reporting helped them understand what was going on,” de Castro told me. “Without a voice in local media, they’ve become totally confused as to what is happening around them.”
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.