Charles Sennott: We’re working with the newsrooms to find out what fits best for the local community, but in general, we’re thinking about smart, talented, emerging journalists. That could be people who are straight out of college and have no journalism experience; it could be people who have some expertise. Let’s say you’re pre-med and want to be a journalist for a few years: We want to give people a chance to do that if they can demonstrate interest and skills.

If half of the corps members are from the communities that we’re serving and half come in from the outside, we see great value in both those approaches. We see huge opportunity in someone not from that place, seeing it for the first time, and getting to know a different part of the country. That’s a good skill for a journalist: You come with really fresh eyes, but you also have to know that you’re going to into a community to serve the community. We’re trying to toggle between the two.

Sennott: I’ve been out in communities in different parts of the country, where we’ll be working with the first round of news organizations. We’re announcing very soon where we’ll start this, but I can tell you that the places I’ve been traveling are rural Appalachia, the deep South, the Southwest, and the Rust Belt Midwest.

Sennott: The idea is really that local reporters are assigned to a newsroom. But we will also curate that content on the GroundTruth site — always in coordination with the local newsroom. Imagine if we have these reporters out there in four different regions, writing about their experiences, telling us some of the best stories they’re working on, generating stories about their journey and what they’re finding. We’d love to put that on the GroundTruth website. But the purpose of it is to work for the local news organization.

Sennott: With the GroundTruth project, for almost five years, we’ve been doing trainings around the world and in the U.S. We’ve developed a formula for some basics and some custom-tailored modules that work for the different places we are. We’ve been doing a lot of reporting on climate change, for instance, so we developed modules for that. But we also work with young journalists just to train them on the basics — how to capture standards that are core and essential.

We recently went over to the Podcast Garage [PRX’s studio space in Boston] to train some journalists for a separate project called Crossing the Divide, where we took five journalists from red states and five from blue states and sent them out to cover America. We gave them civil unrest training from the same safety instructor who trained our teams to cover places like Tahrir Square, Burma, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It’s an interesting and sad commentary on our time that a lot of the things we did to train journalists to cover struggling democracies are the kinds of trainings we are providing right now in America to cover this divide. It’s not just basic training for physical safety: We also do trainings around hidden bias, conflict resolution, how to do your job without adding fuel to the fire or causing more of a disturbance.

Sennott: The trainings will be regional, if not specifically local, and members of the host news organizations will be part of the training.

Sennott: We really want to get those from the newsrooms themselves: We want them to drive this and tell us what’s needed and work with them to answer that need. Based on our discussions, though, healthcare comes up as a big issue, education comes up as a big issue, and how the community is being governed. Those are always and forever big topics for local news organizations — so we are going to think about how we can prioritize needs, based on what the newsroom wants to cover. Maybe it will be something it hasn’t been able to cover before.

Those issues will be consistent themes, but another important area is geographic. If a news organization has had to constrict its coverage, because of budget cuts or other circumstances, and forgotten some rural communities, we want to help them go back — maybe reopen local bureaus, do outreach to rural parts of their readership or their viewership or listenership.

Sennott: We want to learn from some of the challenges they’ve faced but also capitalize on the way they’ve built a movement and restored something lost. We’re hoping this can bring in a young, adventurous, maybe idealistic crowd, to see what it’s like to go off into a small town or rural community or corner of a big city that isn’t getting covered, and tell that community’s stories. This was once something that a whole generation of journalists got to do to start their careers. Sadly, we’ve seen it disappear. We want to restore that tradition.

Sennott: Newspapers, public radio stations, digital news organizations, pretty much anyone that has a commitment to excellence, to being independent and fair, and that has a culture of mentorship — that’s an important piece of this, that we find mentors in the newsrooms who can do a good job helping these emerging journalists.

For our first year, we’re going to try to do 12 corp members and do it really well. We’ll be in approximately four regions to start. We’re starting off modestly and we hope to grow and build as we go on.

We hope, next week, to announce a call for applications for the first round of reporting fellows. Or, I mean, corps members. We called them “fellows” at first and we got rid of that term: It’s something we realized that communities and journalists really don’t relate to that much. So, it’s Report for America corps members. Or just — reporters! That’s a good word. I like that word.