Reporter's Notebook

Here is the message that went out to a number of Atlantic readers this week.

Starting six years ago, in the summer of 2013, my wife—Deborah Fallows—and I began visiting smaller-town America, traveling in our single-engine four-seat propeller plane, for a series of web posts, videos, magazine articles, and radio reports in what was called the “American Futures” series. Last year we published a nationally best-selling book from the project, called Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America, and now we’re working with HBO on a documentary of the same name. It will appear about a year from now, around the time of the national political conventions, toward the goal of offering a different conception of America’s political possibilities than those likely to dominate cable news.

Now we are beginning a new round of extended on-scene reporting, following up on the successes and challenges of some of the places we’ve already visited, and expanding our coverage to new regions and towns. In an introductory post for this series, I set out some of the places we’ll be visiting and themes we will be exploring this year. These will range broadly, over: economics and business questions; urban architecture and the arts; the reinvention of schools and libraries; the expansion of broadband and technological opportunities to rural America; ways to help local journalism survive as a business, and to encourage national journalism to take small-town America more seriously; and whether solutions being devised at the local level could percolate up to improve national-level politics.

We have already done some initial reports. For instance: from Indiana, about a radical new approach to public school not previously mentioned in the national press; and also from Indiana, about the second (and third, and 10th) lives of factory buildings and shopping malls that outlive their original economic function; and from Mississippi, about a small-town daily that has retained its economic and civic role (and an even smaller daily that was crucially influential in the outlook of the famed journalist David Halberstam); and from all around the country, about the emerging role of public libraries as America’s “second responders,” filling social and economic gaps in a quietly heroic way.

Soon we will be traveling again, by small airplane, to Appalachian North Carolina and Kentucky; and to the Rio Grande Valley of Texas; and to industrial areas of Wisconsin, from Racine to Eau Claire; and to inland areas from Oklahoma to Nebraska to Nevada; and beyond.

Please follow along here! And please send ideas or suggestions to ourtowns@theatlantic.com.

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The story and the reports it refers to are all worth your attention. Another of the important implications: that most people who think they are living in small-town or rural settings are officially classified as being in “metro” regions. As Van Dam says:

About 6 in 10 U.S. adults who consider themselves “rural” live in an area classified as metropolitan by standards similar to those used above, according to a Washington Post–Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted in 2017. And 3 in 4 of the adults who say they live in a “small town”? They’re also in a metro area.

Very much worth reading. Congrats to Van Dam and the Post.

2) The second story is by Eduardo Porter and Guilbert Gates, from The New York Times, about a shift in migration patterns. In the same “show the evidence” spirit, here is the headline for their story (which was the same in print and online versions, as far as I can tell):

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The reinforcement is the idea that for certain very top-level, sought-after, professional-and-technical talents, the economic rewards in white-hot centers from New York to San Francisco exceed what they could find anyplace else.

The complication is that for most other people, the rewards across the country have evened out—so that the “Let’s move to the big city and get a new start” impulse is weaker than at many other times in U.S. history.

This is partly because automation has removed so many accountant-and-clerk-type jobs from the biggest cities. It is partly because real-estate prices have jacked up the price of simply existing in Seattle, New York, the SF Bay ArEA, etc. It’s partly because of a dispersal of activities elsewhere—which is one of the big themes that Deb and I have chronicled.

Whatever the balance of forces, the evidence Porter and Gates present is interesting, nuanced, and different from what you’ve heard in most political speeches and segments on the news.

3) The third is an American Enterprise Institute report, which finds that the “amenities” of local life—parks, restaurants, walkable shopping, libraries—make a major difference in how happy, trusting, and engaged people are. As the report, by Ryan Streeter and Daniel Cox, found (and as they elaborated in a post for The Atlantic last week), people who live near parks, libraries, etc.:

are more content with their neighborhood, more trusting of others, and less lonely regardless of whether they live in large cities, suburbs, or small cities or towns.

This may seem ordinary and obvious, but it caught my eye for several reasons:

• It’s an extension of the AEI survey work I wrote about earlier this year, showing that most Americans felt better about their local communities than they did about the trends in national life.
• It underscores the absolutely crucial point that civic character is not something that merely exists, like eye color or the day’s temperature, but instead is one of many traits that can be intentionally improved and cultivated.
• In that, it’s related to a wonderful new book by my friend Eric Liu, the head of Citizen University in Seattle. The book is called Become America, and it’s a collection of 19 short “civic sermons” about ways to foster a more rather than less engaged public life. More on this, and its relationship to the most important essay in America’s public life, later on.
  (What was that essay? Stay tuned. The hint is that it was published 109 years ago, and while its author was an Atlantic contributor, it did not first appear in these pages.)

Next up in this space: another report from Mississippi.

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If these are the libraries acting as second responders, there are also plenty of cases where they respond as providers of second chances.

The Los Angeles Public Library offers a chance to earn a high-school degree for those who missed out the first time around. Mayor Eric Garcetti and City Librarian John Szabo hand out diplomas. The most popular volunteer opportunity at the Smiley Library in Redlands, California, is for adults to teach other adults how to read and write. Public libraries across the country offer a variety of paths to help people find new economic opportunity, with job and interview support and digital skills training.

And listen for how often you hear adults credit the public library as the place that spirited them away in their youth from anger or sadness or boredom at home. Many libraries make themselves appealing to schoolchildren of any age as a safe, warm place to do homework or just hang out when they can’t or won’t go home. I have seen and heard variations on this theme that range from the library being the only place the kids could go, to the library being the cool place where teenagers would hang out. I heard these comments from the desert communities of Arizona to the small towns of California to the urban centers of the Midwest and East Coast.

There are libraries in prisons, for those who can’t go out, and books delivered to prisons when inmates request them. Library books are delivered to remote schools in Kanawha County, West Virginia, for teachers who don’t have access to materials. Extending that metaphor of the library coming to the people, I have seen pop-up libraries in parks in Wichita, Kansas. There is a summer program around Minneapolis lakes to lend books in watertight containers from a library raft to boaters. And there is a library in the big shopping mall in Ontario, California, opportunistically placed for presumably reluctant shoppers who accompany enthusiastic shoppers.

Welcome to the new realities of public libraries and librarians.

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The guiding principle of this reporting will be the one we developed—city by city, story by story, question by question, surprise by surprise—through our preceding years of travel. The central premise is that the most positive and practical developments in this stage of American life are happening at the local and regional level—but that most Americans have barely heard of those developments except in the communities where they themselves live.

This past February, an extensive nationwide survey from the American Enterprise Institute provided data that matched what we’d heard in interviews. By nearly a 2-to-1 ratio, the survey’s directors (Sam Abrams, Karlyn Bowman, and Ryan Streeter) found, Americans were very pessimistic when asked about the prospects for the country as a whole. But by nearly a 3-to-1 ratio, people in different parts of the country, and of different races and economic groups, said they felt that their own communities were moving in the right direction. It was like the radio host Garrison Keillor’s ancient joke about Lake Wobegon, where “the children were all above average,” but with a real-world edge. People recognized the possibility of progress, despite obstacles and injustices, in their own part of America, but assumed the rest of the country must be doing much worse.

Of course the paralysis and division of national politics matter. Of course every community has its entrenched problems, of which the opioid and addiction crisis is the most acute, economic dislocation is the most widespread, and racial injustice is the most intractable. My view of American history is: From the start, it’s been a struggle, between society’s worse impulses and the better ones. Any clear-eyed view of this nation, at any point, will include the tragic and the inspiring.

But the underappreciated and potentially inspiring news of this moment, as Deb and I have come to believe through travel in every corner of the country, is the extent of locally based renewal and experimentation, and the evolution of formal and informal networks connecting those far-flung efforts, all directed at many of the same challenges that seem hopeless from a national perspective.

Over the past year, we’ve been visiting communities that we’ll soon write about in this space—from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to Kenosha and Eau Claire, Wisconsin; from Bellingham, Washington, to Pensacola, Florida, and Danville, Virginia; and points in between and beyond.

Starting with the next few installments in this space, the focus will be on the state that has long had the most manufacturing-intensive economy in the entire country: Indiana. (At a public forum last month in Fort Wayne, we talked with the podcaster Ashley C. Ford, who is now based in Brooklyn but grew up in and considers herself a proud citizen-in-exile of Fort Wayne. “When people hear Indiana, they think it’s all a bunch of cornfields,” she said at that session. “They can hardly imagine how many factories we have.”)  

The nature of Indiana’s economy has long exposed its citizens and communities to both the good and the bad of rapid shifts in technology, business structure, and world trading trends. We’ll explain how this looks on the ground in places up and down the state. We’ll follow with reports from other parts of the Midwest, the South, and inland California. This summer we’ll begin a new round of travel, to additional cities, by small propeller plane.

Some of the themes we’ll explore in coming months will include:

• Economic dislocation and opportunity. The saga of this era is the disappearance of old lines of work, the appearance of new ones, and the unequal opportunities and rewards that may result. Some of the response we’ve seen involve innovative kinds of schooling, as we’ll describe from San Bernardino, California; different kinds of manufacturing and start-up cultures, which we’ve seen around the country; and different technical, civic, and social tools to match candidates with possibilities and make this era’s growth more inclusive and broadly shared than the past generation’s.
• The prospects of the rural and the regional. We are continuing to report on the smaller towns that are finding a future, on their own or in regional alliances, often through the arts or through technology-based programs—and how they differ from the others that are losing ground.
• The tensions between the local and the national, and what it means for America as a nation, in good ways and bad, if its center of initiative is again shifting (as it has several times in the past) away from the federal government and toward 50 states and hundreds of cities.
• The role of the arts. On this we have become believers. Which leads to …
• The modern civic role of faith, and the power of religious organizations, in building and sometimes straining civic fabric.
• The role of technology, from barriers to internet access in non-coastal America, to new tools that can help remote areas recover and thrive.
• The role of libraries, which are the new public square, and where people don’t just consume but also create knowledge.
• The role of local media—indispensable, imperiled, and the object of widespread experimentation to establish viable business models.
• The role of the local, from food to language to festivals to craft breweries.
• The prospects for sustainability, at a time when the main point of leverage may be local.
• The reconstruction of downtowns, and their fights against big-box stores and urban sprawl.
• The “reverse migration,” of people who are deciding that the best prospects for their families, careers, and souls lie not in New York or L.A. but in some other place they feel they are “from” or are “at home.”
• The lived reality of immigration at the local level, which is in such contrast to national-level rhetoric.
• The lived reality of inclusive growth and opportunity, where it happens and where it does not, including modern dynamics of racial barriers.
• The return of “civics,” and the willed reconstruction of the public sphere. This is something we’ve actually seen in a few places, and will be looking for in more.     
• The illuminating roles of music and literature. Are we living in a world that Theodore Dreiser and Willa Cather, plus Woody Guthrie and Billie Holiday and Loretta Lynn, have already mapped out?

And a list of others, which no doubt I’m forgetting now but we’ll get to in the months ahead.

Our plan is deliberately slow-building, incremental, learning as we go. I believe in “showing your homework” as a reporter: laying out what you’ve seen, what you might have missed, what you’ve changed your mind about, where you need to learn more.

Our approach is also deliberately inclusive and “big tent.” Part of our goal is to connect people in disparate groups around the country who are working toward similar ends, but may not be aware of one another’s efforts. Our allies include New America, where Deb is now based; HBO, with whom we are making a documentary for airing next year; and many other groups we’ll link to and publicize as the year goes on.

We’ll lead off this week with reports from our recent trip through Indiana, and then through the months ahead we’ll cover as much of the country as we possibly can.

We’re excited to begin this process, to share stories we’ve heard in recent months, and to learn in the months ahead. Deb and I look forward to hearing from you with tips, stories, and even dissents. Please join us here as the journey unfolds.