Rural Reporting Project

Texas Observer
04/29/2020

After the 2016 election, outlets from across the United States (and beyond) began parachuting into rural spaces. They were hoping to find tidy answers to coastal questions, then fly home with an easily digestible story that might provide comfort about a widening divide in U.S. culture.

The Observer wanted instead to establish a beat-style focus on rural spaces, one that would offer regular on-the-ground reporting from someone who knows them. Fortunately, Chris Collins was game, and we were able to make reporting on rural Texas a priority with our Rural Reporting Project. Now, from rural hospitals in jeopardy to the half-million Texans living in communities with contaminated groundwater to “news deserts” across the state, the Texas Observer’s Rural Reporting Project offers award-winning, groundbreaking investigative journalism across a breadth of issues.

In 2019, this included a look at the alarming suicide rate in rural East Texas and how the safety net for people who need mental health help is stretched thin. The resulting piece, “Warning Signs,” took about a year to put together—and a hefty amount of source work to finalize. We believe that Chris’ familiarity with rural spaces is what allowed us to complete this tricky project.

After “Warning Signs,” Chris and his colleague Sophie Novack teamed up to tell the stories of rural Texans living in communities that are experiencing either a drought or sudden loss of access to health care. This three-part series surfaces the realities around an emptying rural health care landscape. What happens when the only hospital within reasonable emergency distance closes? In Ozona, Texas, for example, we found that women seeking any kind of reproductive health have an 80 minute drive ahead of them—at least.

After the publication of this series, we heard that one of the characters in it, Sabrina Salas, was able to get state assistance to put her baby in the local daycare, an effort that had been surprisingly difficult until the publication of our stories. We were also able to share the final piece of this series with the local paper in Ozona.

We capped our year of rural reporting by constructing a map of all of our rural coverage. The goal here is to allow folks in the rural parts of Texas to better interact with local stories at a time when true local coverage is disappearing from so many far-flung counties. Internally, it also shows us where we’ve been, and where we still have to go.

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Submitted by Michael Kanin.