National Newspaper Association
Protecting, Promoting and Enhancing Community Newspapers Since 1885
Sustaining Rural Journalism by Al Cross
Al Cross edited and managed rural newspapers before covering politics for the Louisville Courier Journal and serving as president of the Society of Professional Journalists. He is director emeritus of the University of Kentucky’s Institute for Rural Journalism and can be reached at al.cross@uky.edu.
Residents still want local news, will pay for a good product
Legacy newspapers are slowly adapting to the digital era, but many have not fully faced up to their greatest-ever existential challenge.
Nonprofit news trust grows in urban and rural areas
Nonprofit newspaper journalism, until now largely a feature of urban areas, is going rural — especially if the National Trust for Local News keeps up what it’s doing and plans to do.
Kansas case is an inflection point for rural newspapers
Community journalism is more than a business; it is an essential public service, envisioned by our nation’s founders when they wrote the First Amendment. Many Americans still understand that, but ...
National Summit on Journalism in Rural America explores local news crisis in smaller markets
The standard metric for the crisis is the decreasing number of newspapers, but more than 90% of U.S. counties still have at least one paper. The forces that are causing closures or mergers are having a ...
Report for America is looking for rural newspapers
Rural newspapers are missing out on a great deal — subsidized, eager, young reporters who can boost coverage and build the paper’s brand as a public service.
States build support for newspapers; how to tell your story
When local newspapers write about their problems, it might seem self-serving. But what if legislators in a state could read a comprehensive report about the newspapers in that state, including information ...
Gish Award nominations due April 15; The Canadian Record provides a great example
The second winners were the Ezzell family of The Canadian Record in the Texas Panhandle, a storied rural weekly that suspended publication in March after a planned sale fell through.
To build trust and your audience, show how much you care, not just how much you know
"In one small consolation, Americans had more trust in local news.” ... It wasn’t a small consolation for people in local news, but it also had some warnings and offered the basis for ...
Editor ‘can handle mean,’ but can’t stand ‘baseless cynicism and unwillingness to think’
This month’s column is mainly from someone else because it illustrates a serious problem facing rural newspapers: How do they manage increasingly contentious public discourse and still maintain the ...
A new mission: answering how rural communities sustain journalism that serves local democracy
This column, which we started almost 12 years ago as a guide to covering rural issues, using examples from The Rural Blog, has a new name: Sustaining Rural Journalism.
Rural America is growing older faster than urban America; one in five rural Americans is older than 65, USDA says
"For the first time, more than one in five rural Americans is over the age of 65," reports Chuck Abbott of Successful Farming,citing a report from the Department of Agriculture report. “Rural America ...
Rural journalism is good journalism
We think it’s important to exalt examples of good work, and that’s why we present the Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism — and partner with ...
A newspaper editor cries for help, in a surprisingly frank way, and gets it; his embarrassed publisher is glad he did
Under a headline reading, "Will you cheer the death of an institution or come to its aid?" Editor Chad Hobbs told how the paper was suffering from social media, a boycott by some advertisers upset about ...
Forums can rekindle interest in local news, help community appreciate your work
If there is an issue in the community that needs sorting out, have a forum to discuss it.
National Summit on Journalism in Rural America shows good journalism is good business
“I leave hopeful for community newspapers,” one attendee said as she left the National Summit on Journalism in Rural America June 4. And there were reasons to have hope.
Join the National Summit on Journalism in Rural America on YouTube, June 3-4
All this raises a fundamental question, not just for rural newspapers, but for their communities: How do rural communities sustain local journalism that supports local democracy? That is the question we ...
One way to put philanthropy in your business model: a community news fund
For independent newspaper owners who can’t find the right buyer, the key move could be transferring the paper to a nonprofit corporation and living on salary rather than distributions of profits. ...
Where will non-metropolitan news outlets get the revenue they need to support good journalism? We need answers
He sees a future in which “for-profit general news organizations of less than enormous scale (and therefore almost all local digital outlets) will increasingly be dependent almost entirely on reader ...
‘60 Minutes’ report on crisis in local journalism gives local media opportunity to elaborate, reinforce message
Most of those stories, and the belief that “journalism is essential for the survival of American democracy,” as one former reporter put it, are familiar to readers of The Rural Blog. But they ...
Stand up for the truth in your community
‘I got tired of the paper being part of the problem with people treating each other with a lack of respect. I realized we weren’t going to change anyone’s mind, and it wasn’t worth ...
