Georgia reporter's unpaid, all-night coverage of vote tallying shows the importance of local journalism - Entrepreneur Generations

Robin Kemp at her home office in Forest Park, Ga. (Washington Post photo by Kevin Liles)

When the Clayton News laid off reporter Robin Kemp in April, the suburban Atlanta journalist started her own news website, The Clayton Crescent, the same day. That dedication to covering local news catapulted her into the international spotlight during the election and underscored the importance of local journalism, Reis Thebault reports for The Washington Post.

Kemp, 56, "was the only journalist to watch all 21 hours of Clayton County’s marathon tabulation of absentee votes, from about 9 a.m. Thursday to 5 a.m. Friday," Thebault reports. "During that span, a record number of absentee ballots helped Biden close the statewide gap with Trump. And it was votes from Clayton County — the heart of the late civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis’s old district — that pushed Biden into the lead" and helped him flip Georgia blue for the first time in nearly 30 years.

Through Twitter and Facebook Live, Kemp kept followers updated on ballot-counting and on Republican observers. People began to pay attention. "When she set out that morning, Kemp had just a couple hundred Twitter followers and less than $2,000 in a GoFundMe she started in April. By the next day, she was at well over 10,000 followers and dollars," Thebault reports.

Kemp’s all-night coverage, which Thebault calls "public service journalism in its purest form" is not an unusual workload for her. She "sometimes works 20 hours a day, as both writer and photographer, using a camera she bought used on eBay. She works alone, with no editor and no staff," Thebault reports. She has no savings and her only income is $300 a week in unemployment.

But Kemp keeps going with the Crescent because nobody else covers local issues. The Clayton News, hit hard by the pandemic, mostly publishes wire content now. The Crescent, meanwhile, "already has 38 pages of articles, including coverage of the coronavirus’s toll, crime and zoning issues," Thebault reports. "In an April 28 editorial, she promised Crescent readers three things: hyperlocal journalism, no survey walls to hurdle before reading her stories and no clickbait."

The Crescent "is emblematic of the sort of journalism that is vanishing by the day in the United States," Thebault reports. "Since 2004, more than a quarter of the country’s newspapers have disappeared, according to research by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill journalism professor Penny Muse Abernathy. The coronavirus pandemic has only accelerated that dire trend. In April and May alone, at least 30 papers closed or merged, dozens went online-only and thousands of journalists were furloughed or laid off."

Kemp has received nearly $18,000 in GoFundMe donations, though she won't accept them until she finishes filing the paperwork to make the Crescent a non-profit organization. But the donations are proof that people want more local journalism, according to Richard T. Griffiths, a former CNN vice president and president emeritus of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation who is helping Kemp set up a board of directors.

Griffiths said Kemp's real challenge will be finding local donors to sustain the paper after her viral fame ebbs, though he is confident she can do it. "It is in every community’s interest to have a strong, healthy accountability journalism operation going," he told Thebault.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/3pmTqEK Georgia reporter's unpaid, all-night coverage of vote tallying shows the importance of local journalism - Entrepreneur Generations

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