host: at the end of your book you say this, you acknowledge-- one to my three fathers, charles simmonsjack otter and al carr. explain. guest: i have my biological father, my mother and he separated early on and so i have like nicknames for each of dad. that is my bio dad and then i have my raising dad and that's jack otter. he was around as i was going through my most formative years, so i call him dad. came into my life when i was maybe six months or a year old, so he's also my dad and then my mom remarried i think when i was in middle school to our cotter, so he was sort of my stepdad during my high school years. had a lot of great father figures in my life. host: where did you grow up? guest: in a town called prescott host: arizona? guest: yes, north of phoenix. host: how long did you live there? guest: almost my entire adolescence. i left when i turned 18, so i was there my entire schooling from five years old until he graduated high school. host: where did you go to college? guest: near dc at american university. host: why did you pick american? guest: i wanted to study internatio

charles simmons and steve walden are the cofounders of report for america.g to scaleup to 60 and in a few years they want to get up to 1,000. >> we begin in aplatcha, in west virginia and eastern kentucky, so two news papers. and that's exactly what we want to do, be in these places where people haven't felt heard. and it's not just the elite media on the coast that hasn't heard them, in some cases it's the lexington herald. and we're seeing that, we're seeing even within states that are in the middle of the country are not part of those postal elites, those communities themselves are not listening to themselves either. and there's a need to sort of think about local journalism as a binding agent for our communities or as will wright has done excellent work on water. so the access to clean water is a huge issue in appalachia and kentucky. >> and a month later the person who's in charge of the water district gets forced out and a month after that the state legislator mysteriously finds $5 million to help fix the problem. what's constructive to us about that i