Palagummi Sainath is an Indian journalist. He calls himself a 'rural reporter', or simply a 'reporter' - and photojournalist focusing on social problems, rural affairs, poverty and the aftermaths of globalization in India. He spends between 270 and 300 days a year in the rural interior (in 2006, over 300 days) and has done so for the past 18 years.On the absence of reporting on the poor in India ...

Sainath ... toured ten drought-stricken states in India, about which he ruefully recalled later,

That's when I learned that conventional journalism was above all about the service of power. You always give the last word to authority. I got a couple of prizes which I didn't pick up because I was ashamed.^[3]

He has also said: "There are two kinds of journalists. One kind are journalists, the other are stenographers."

... At the interview he spoke of his plans to report from rural India. When an editor asked him, "Suppose I tell you my readers aren't interested in this stuff", Sainath riposted, "When did you last meet your readers to make any such claims on their behalf?"

He got the fellowship and took to the back roads in the ten poorest districts of five states. It meant covering close to 100,000 km across India using 16 forms of transportation, including walking 5,000 km on foot.^[5] The paper ran 84 reports by Sainath across 18 months, many of them subsequently reprinted in his book, Everybody Loves A Good Drought.The paper ran 84 reports by Sainath across 18 months, many of them subsequently reprinted in his book, Everybody Loves A Good Drought.

... The book is now in its thirty-first edition and is still in print. Typically Sainath, he gave all the royalties from this huge best-seller to *****fund prizes for young rural journalists.*****

[Sainath supported poor young people as journalists so they could report on what was happening to their area of India, one they would cared about.  Is there any reason that could not happen for rural "beats" here?  Fill them out with young people?  Young people, even mothers/fathers, grandmothers/grandmothers in Eastern Kentucky, in the Midwest, in the rural south, why not get people in rural areas to do their own reporting?  They won't be paid but if connected to journalists seeking their work, they'll gain experience and in time may form papers in their area themselves.  And when do we stop doing important things because there is no money?  This reporting must be done.]  

"You see it in the simplest and most direct way: the organisation of beats. Many beats have become extinct. Take the labour correspondent: when labour issues are covered at all, they come under the header of Industrial Relations, and they’re covered by business correspondents. That means they’re covered by the guy whose job is to walk in the tracks of corporate leaders, and who, when he deigns to look at labour, does it through the eyes of corporate leaders. Now find me the agriculture columnist — in most newspapers, the idea doesn’t exist any more. If you lack correspondents on those two beats, you’re saying 70 per cent of the people in this country don’t matter, I don’t want to talk to them." ^[17]