American Deadline: Reporting from Four News-Starved Towns in the Trump Era

In this unique and often heart-wrenching collaboration, four journalists with ties to struggling or shuttered newspapers in different parts of the U.S. share their reporting from 2020. In McAllen, Tex., where the construction of Donald Trump’s border wall and Covid-19 were at the top of citizens’ concerns, Sandra Sanchez poignantly describes families on both sides of the border trying to negotiate a potentially separated future and the devastating onslaught of a disease that killed more than 1,400 people in Hidalgo County by September. Elsewhere, Jason Togyer documents how the closure of manufacturing plants in McKeesport, Pa., and other towns in the Pittsburgh area in the 1980s fueled nativist tendencies that drove away young people (“especially if they’re Black, creative, or liberal”), and Greg Glassner reports on the fight over a 114-year-old Confederate monument of the grounds of a courthouse in Bowling Green, Va. Though not every detour pans out, the reporting is consistently fine-grained, evocative, and insightful. It’s a fitting testament to the value of local journalism. (May)