As a teenager growing up in a rural Georgia town in the early 2000s, Alison Miller counted the days until she could move away for good. Bound for New York City after high school, she could think of nothing worse than “a continued existence in Hartwell, Georgia.”
“I could not wait to leave,” she said.
Miller studied journalism at New York University and dived into a career of magazine journalism. She secured internships at premier publications and landed a full-time gig at Travel and Leisure. New opportunities in the industry took her to other cities over the years, but eventually, Miller found herself going full circle. Today she’s back in Georgia, living near the place she once vowed never to settle down.
From her perch in Athens, where she has lived since 2019, Miller reports on the rapidly changing South for national publications, telling stories that those outlets might otherwise overlook: in-depth profiles of Black athletes competing across the South in a small-town wrestling circuit, a Baptist pastor who made waves when he delivered the opening prayer at a Pride festival, and a Georgia father who gifted his son a gun—for his third birthday.
“I began to see a lot of these happenings, places, communities, and people that I had just either ignored or took for granted while growing up,” she said. “I wanted to explore that.”
Miller is one of many reporters who started out in large, coastal cities who have more recently chosen to live in parts of the country not known as media power centers—a shift propelled by economic necessity and accelerated by the remote-work revolution and the pandemic. A few years on, these journalists say they’ve found themselves exposed to communities they never would have otherwise known, allowing them to better comprehend the diverse nation they cover. In doing so, they also built stronger bonds with their readers, helping to address the ever-declining level of trust in the news media.
“I think there’s real value in being in places that are not those cities,” Miller said. “I understand the nuance of the place maybe more than someone who is flying in for the weekend.”
Journalists weren’t always so consolidated. As late as 2002, the places where reporters lived “matched the distribution of the overall population fairly closely,” said David H. Weaver, a professor emeritus of journalism at Indiana University who has studied the demographics of American journalists through large-scale surveys since 1982.
By 2019, however, a Pew Research study found that more than 20 percent of newsroom employees were huddled in just three American cities: New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. Among digital news workers, 41 percent lived and worked in the Northeast. These digital reporters were least likely to call the Midwest or the South home.
Donald Trump’s “surprise” victory in 2016, as well as the nationwide racial reckoning following the police killing of George Floyd, has prompted some major national newsrooms to rethink their geographic isolation. For the past few years, NBC News has actively sought to recruit reporters from the country’s interior—and it wants them to stay there. “We are especially interested in hearing from candidates who are based outside of New York, Washington, or Los Angeles to add geographical diversity to our staff,” one recent job posting read. In June, the Associated Press launched a new initiative to fund and promote regional news, and ProPublica recently announced plans to expand its Local Reporting Network to all fifty states by 2029.
As a journalist who decamped from Manhattan to Chattanooga, Tennessee, during the pandemic and now lives in the rural mountains of North Carolina, I can attest to the benefits of living well beyond the tidy zip codes that a plurality of journalists call home. My new neighbors are far more diverse in terms of their ideological views and socioeconomic backgrounds than the circles I ran in while living in New York and, before that, Washington. I had lost touch, and I’ve spent the past several years taking stock of my blind spots. In 2021, when officials in Washington were busy denying that inflation was a real problem, I listened to my neighbors express shock and concern over the sudden increase in the cost of lumber, construction supplies, or groceries—changes I wouldn’t have picked up on so quickly while living in New York.
Expanding horizons by living away from the big cities “frees you up a bit from some of the groupthink,” said Jason Zengerle, who was an early adopter of the leave-the-coast movement—he’s covered political affairs from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, since 2000. “If all of your day-to-day interactions aren’t involved with politics, it frees you up to think in some different directions.”
Many reporters find moving out of major cities exposes them to a wider array of conservative perspectives; others find their views shifting in unexpected directions. C.J. Ciaramella, who covers criminal justice for the libertarian magazine Reason, became increasingly interested in environmental issues after relocating to Key Largo, Florida, in 2018. Kayaking through the Florida waterways, he took note of all the trash floating around, and watched with concern as the local coral reefs where he liked to scuba dive died off.
“When something is staring at you in the face, it gives you a different perspective than when you’re reading policy papers or talking to advocacy groups about it,” Ciaramella said. “It definitely changed my perspective on environmental stuff and led me to write about it more than I had been.”
Getting out of the coastal cities can also simply make for more perceptive journalism. When Ruth Graham was hired to cover religion for the New York Times in 2020, her editors agreed that the paper’s Manhattan headquarters wouldn’t be an ideal home for a reporter who needs access to large populations of conservative evangelical Christians. Instead, she settled on Dallas, a growing and diverse city in the middle of the country that also serves as a base of modern evangelicalism.
North Texas—where churches with several hundred members are considered “small”—provides Graham with unparallelled access to sources on her beat. Story ideas come from everyday life: conversations at the supermarket, billboards she passes on the highway, or the T-shirt brands the young evangelicals wear at the local coffee shop where Graham likes to write. Dallas is also a major thoroughfare for religious leaders, so Graham could ensure face time with the people she covers whenever they visited. “Everyone comes through Dallas,” she said.
A few years ago, a press agent asked Graham to have coffee with a potential source who said he was working on a Christian film project. She had never heard of him, but she took the meeting. While at the coffee shop, their conversation was interrupted by fans who asked the filmmaker for selfies. Whoever this person was, he was obviously already resonating. The man was Dallas Jenkins, director of The Chosen, now a massively popular series about the life of Jesus Christ.
“I would not have been able to pick Dallas Jenkins out of a lineup,” Graham said. “It’s that kind of encounter and moment that perks my ears up to know what people around me here are watching, thinking about, spending their time and money on.”
In 2015, Christopher Ingraham, then a data reporter for the Washington Post, wrote an article from his desk in DC that described Red Lake County, Minnesota—a place Ingraham had never visited—as “the absolute worst place to live in America.”
Red Lake residents, predictably, were outraged, but some of them reached out to Ingraham and invited him to see the place for himself. He ended up loving it so much that he uprooted his family and moved there.
“I think a big problem with a lot of coverage of rural and small-town places,” Ingraham told NPR in 2019, “is we often just send reporters in and they go on these kind of safari expeditions and they come back a day or a week later with this ‘secret knowledge’ of these long-lost rural tribes, and I think that kind of reporting and storytelling really enhances these supposed divisions between small-town America and everywhere else.”
Reporters who move out of coastal cities say they are connecting more directly with the people and communities they report on—and in the process, they may be helping journalism rebuild some of the trust it’s lost over the past several years.
Leigh Munsil gave up her editing gig at CNN’s Washington bureau in 2021 to become editor in chief of the San Antonio Report, a nonprofit community publication in southwest Texas.
The pandemic lockdowns had left Munsil working in isolation from her English-basement apartment on Capitol Hill, without the social part of the job—the happy hours, in-person events, the collegiality of a high-pressure newsroom—that made it all fun. She had been living in the capital for more than a decade by then and was starting to feel cynicism creep in.
“For me, the pandemic gave me a second to think about what I wanted to do with my career,” Munsil said. “All the things I loved about Washington journalism were taken away, and yet I had this busy stressful job that I was doing by myself in front of a laptop in my basement. I was just like, I don’t want to do this.”
In San Antonio, Munsil said, she has discovered vast differences in the way she viewed the consumers of the news she was producing in DC. It can be difficult to pin down your audience when working for a large, national media corporation; readers are often represented as little more than a faceless blip in online traffic on an analytics screen. But in San Antonio, Munsil said she knows exactly who her team is writing for. Living in the community forces her to be more responsive to those readers in a way that wasn’t necessary—or even possible—in national news.
“In Washington, there was this sentiment of don’t read the comments, don’t respond. But that’s not an option in a community-based role. You have to engage when people disagree with the work you’ve done,” Munsil said. “You are face to face with your community in a different way than when you are just pushing out stories to a faceless mass of digital readers.”
Chris Moody is a writer based in Boone, North Carolina, where he teaches journalism at Appalachian State University. He is a former senior correspondent for CNN Politics. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and more. The author moved from New York to Chattanooga during the pandemic.
