The Olympian will use grant money to add a reporter to cover housing and homelessness

The Olympian has received some very good news. And I think it’s good news for this community as well.

Last week, The Olympian was awarded a grant from a national service program called Report for America. The grant will help pay for a full-time reporter in our newsroom. The reporter will start in June, and the assignment will last a year, with the option to renew for a second year.

Report for America will field 250 journalists in 164 host news organizations in 46 states in the coming year. This is more than four times the size of Report for America’s 2019 class, who have been reporting in some 50 local news organizations across 28 states and Puerto Rico.

At The Olympian, the new reporter will be hired to cover a wide swath of issues surrounding housing and homelessness. The reporter will be tasked with looking at housing and homelessness issues through a solutions lens, examining the underlining problems that contribute to the growing number of people living unsheltered in Thurston County and in Western Washington. Those range from a lack of housing stock to addiction, stagnant wages to mental health.

The reporter also will look at successful programs in other places that are helping to get people into housing.

And the reporter will follow these issues as the state Legislature addresses them — or doesn’t — in 2021.

As a witness to how much these issues have challenged and divided our communities over the past few years, I am extremely excited to be able to dedicate a reporter to this.

Now to the nitty gritty: There is no such thing as a free reporter. To make this a reality, we will need this community’s help.

A major goal of Report for America “is to bring more local philanthropy in to support journalism,” as RFA says on its website. A portion of the reporter’s salary comes from RFA, a portion comes from our parent company, McClatchy, but the rest will come from community support.

We will be launching a campaign to raise some money from South Sound residents who want to not only support this reporter, but to support this newspaper. The Olympian has just three full-time reporters now — less than 25 percent of what it once had, even though our communities are growing. While our combined readership in print and online is much larger than it was, many of our sources of revenue have dried up over the past 15 years. We have had to turn to subscribers to foot more of the bill of doing journalism.

There will be more details to come on how you can help us fund this reporter. For now: Sign up for a digital subscription if you don’t already have one. For the cost of a latte or less per month, you can support the paper and read everything we produce. We need your support.

This story was originally published December 2, 2019 at 12:02 AM.