Protecting, Promoting and Enhancing Community Newspapers Since 1885
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 directs the University of Kentucky’s Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, which is seeking a new director as he heads into retirement. For more information, contact him at al.cross@uky.edu.
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.
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 ...
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.
"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 ...
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 ...
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.
"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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
If there is an issue in the community that needs sorting out, have a forum to discuss it.
“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.
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 ...
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. ...
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 ...
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 ...
‘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 ...
The truth has prevailed among most Americans, but not among most Republicans, and that’s a real problem for democracy — and for journalism, which is supposed to serve it.
Millions of Americans believe the 2020 election was stolen. That's not true, The Associated Press concluded after exhaustive investigations in the six most closely decided states.
Two strategies that have been touted as ways to preserve community newspapers — the nonprofit model and university involvement – are combining to save a weekly newspaper in northeast Georgia. ...
Few vaccine-hesitant or -resistant people are likely to be persuaded by a news story or editorial urging vaccination, but it's important to keep delivering facts about the vaccines because social media ...