WEST LEBANON — Working with the national service program Report for America, the Valley News has hired a staff reporter to cover climate change and the environment and a photographer to buttress its local news, sports and feature coverage in the Upper Valley.
Claire Potter, who will graduate in June from the University of Chicago, will report on environmental and climate change issues in the Twin States, a beat of keen interest to many of the paper’s readers.
Potter’s experience includes working as a reporting fellow for ABC covering the Iowa caucuses and as an intern for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
The Valley News has also hired Alex Driehaus, who has been working as a staff photographer for the Naples Daily News in Florida and graduated in 2017 from Ohio University, where she was photo editor and director of photography at The Post. She also has interned at The Virginian-Pilot and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Both Potter and Driehaus will start in June.
“I look forward to Claire and Alex joining our team. These new positions will strengthen our local news coverage,” Valley News Publisher Dan McClory said on Monday. “We will continue to seek donations for these critical Report for America positions. To date we have raised over 20% of our goal.”
Potter and Driehaus are among some 300 journalists whose placements are being announced by Report for America on Tuesday as part of its 2021 reporting corps.
The cohort, which includes a number of corps members returning for a second or third year, will join the staffs of more than 200 local news organizations across 49 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and Guam.
Report for America is a national service program that places journalists into newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities. It is an initiative of The GroundTruth Project, a nonprofit journalism organization.
“The crisis in our democracy, disinformation and polarization, is in many ways a result of the collapse of local news,” said Steven Waldman, co-founder and president of Report for America. “We have a unique opportunity to reverse this decline by filling newsrooms with talented journalists who not only view journalism as a public service, but who can make trusted connections with the communities they serve.”
Report for America pays half of a corps member’s salary while the newsrooms cover the balance, which can be offset by community fundraising.
McClory last month announced that the Valley News has set a $50,000 fundraising goal for the partnership with Report for America.
Information on how to support the initiative can be found at the top of the Valley News homepage at www.vnews.com.