Arkansas and her weekly win Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism

An Arkansas publisher and her weekly newspaper, which revealed school officials’ cover-up of sexual-abuse allegations by students in the face of court challenges and harsh criticism by the officials, are the winners of the 2022 Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism from the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, publisher of The Rural Blog.

Publisher Ellen Kreth

Ellen Kreth and the Madison County Record have long been standouts in Arkansas journalism, and leaders in the battle for freedom of information in the state. Their FOI experiences served them well in their battle with the Huntsville School District, which tried to conceal sexual abuse by members of the Huntsville High School Junior High boys’ basketball team against some of their teammates over two basketball seasons.

The Record learned of the case from parents of the victims, who approached the newspaper to make sure the allegations weren’t swept under the rug and school officials were held accountable. The paper didn’t name any students involved, but did report that the school board reduced or rejected the recommended punishment for the violators. It focused on how officials handled the allegations. It reported the district’s failure to immediately report the allegations, as required by law, and multiple open-meetings violations of the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act.

The newspaper’s reporting prompted an investigation by the county sheriff; special open-meetings training for the school board, which didn’t do it in the time required; a lawsuit by a parent alleging violations of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which ban sex-based discrimination in any school that gets federal funding; the board’s admission of liability in that suit; and the electoral defeat in May of three of the four board members who sought re-election.

Madison County (Wikipedia map)

The Record also reported that on election night, five days after the board granted the school superintendent’s request to become director of compliance and personnel, the sheriff’s office found her hidden under a bridge with the unopposed board member in his truck, claiming to be “star-gazing” on the stormy night.

“The school district fought us each step, publicly criticizing our editorial decisions and the credibility of our reporting,” Kreth told the Institute for Rural Journalism. “The school board claimed ignorance for never having previously handled a Title IX investigation. It failed to provide notice of meetings, claiming a newspaper should not cover student discipline. Based upon our reporting, a parent sued the district for the open-meetings violations and won.” The district asked for a gag order, and the paper hired legal counsel to intervene in the case on that issue and won. That allowed parties to the case, “including victims, to continue to speak to us, helping ensure accuracy in every article,” Kreth wrote.

Gen. Mgr. Shannon Hahn

The newspaper's work, which is at https://www.mcrecordonline.com/Content/Default/Title-IX/-3/111, was done by Kreth, General Manager Shannon Hahn and Celia Kreth, the publisher’s younger daughter, now a senior at the University of Pennsylvania. Ellen Kreth said the 4,000-circulation paper with a staff of five turned down help from larger news organizations because they had promised anonymity to several victims and families and wanted to ensure the confidentiality was maintained.

Kreth started out as a journalist and became a lawyer, but got back into journalism in 2002 when she inherited the newspaper from her grandmother. She said that her knowledge of freedom-of-information law prevented officials and their lawyers from intimidating her, and that the paper’s use of the laws has made readers more aware of them, to the point that they come in asking how to file an open-records request.

Reporter Celia Kreth

“At a time when newspapers need to remind the public of their value to local democracy, as independent watchdogs of local officials, Ellen Kreth and the Madison County Record are an example to the nation,” said Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and extension professor of journalism at the University of Kentucky.

The Tom and Pat Gish Award is named for the couple who published The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Ky., weekly for more than 50 years and repeatedly demonstrated courage, tenacity and integrity through advertiser boycotts, business competition, declining population, personal attacks, and even the burning of their office by a local policeman who state police believe was paid by coal companies.

Author and journalist Bill Bishop of LaGrange, Texas, who worked for the Gishes and is a member of the award selection committee, said of the winners’ work, “I can't imagine a harder issue to pursue in a community. And the open-records fight is straight out of early Tom and Pat.”

The Gishes, who died in 2008 and 2014, respectively, were the first winners of the award, in 2005. The other winners, in chronological order, have been the Ezzell family of The Canadian (Texas) Record; Stanley Dearman (former publisher, now deceased) and Jim Prince (publisher), The Neshoba Democrat, Philadelphia, Miss.; Samantha Swindler of Portland, Oregon, for her work at the Jacksonville (Texas) Daily Progress and the daily Times-Tribune of Corbin, Ky.; Stanley Nelson and the Concordia Sentinel of Ferriday, La.; Jonathan and Susan Austin, publishers of the now-defunct Yancey County News in Burnsville, N.C.; the late Landon Wills of the McLean County News in Calhoun, Ky.; the Trapp family of the Rio Grande Sun in Española, N.M.; Ivan Foley of the Platte County Landmark in Platte City, Mo.; the Cullen family of the Storm Lake (Iowa) Times; Les Zaitz of the Malheur Enterprise in Vale, Oregon; Ken Ward Jr., then of the Charleston Gazette-Mail and now of Mountain State Spotlight, along with his mentor, the late Paul J. Nyden of the Charleston Gazette and Howard Berkes of NPR; the late Tim Crews, editor-publisher of the Sacramento Valley Mirror in Willows, Calif.; and the Thompson-High family of The News Reporter in Whiteville, N.C.

The Gish Award will be presented Nov. 3 at the annual Al Smith Awards Dinner at the Embassy Suites Lexington on Newtown Pike near Interstate 64/75. The keynote speaker will be Renee Shaw, public-affairs director for Kentucky Educational Television.

The annual dinner also honors recipients of the Al Smith Award for public service through community journalism by Kentuckians, which the institute presents with the Bluegrass Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. The 2022 winners of the Smith Award are Chris Evans and Allison Mick-Evans of The Crittenden Press, a small weekly in West Kentucky that has punched above its weight and persevered for almost 30 years in the face of increasing challenges, most recently a city water crisis in which it has been an information lifeline.

Dinner tickets for non-SPJ members are $125 each; table sponsorships are $1,250. For more information, contact Al Cross at al.cross@uky.edu.

Some university professors and journalism programs are helping rural newspapers; one says they are way overdue

One in a series of reports on the National Summit on Journalism in Rural America, held June 3-4 by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues and the College of Communication and Information at the University of Kentucky. Summit sessions can be viewed on YouTube.

As more higher-education journalism programs try to serve community journalism, one professor who started a newspaper with her students, is doing hands-on research and testing a new business model at two weekly papers says it's way overdue.

Teri Finneman

The state of journalism and the news business "is a colossal failure of higher education," Teri Finneman, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Kansas, said at the National Summit on Journalism in Rural America Saturday afternoon.

"Where the hell has the ivory tower been the last 20 years?" Finneman asked. "We are the ones who should have been leading the research, working with the industry, to avoid this mess that we are in right now. . . . It is time for the ivory tower to step up and support our counterparts in the industry."

Finneman is a researcher of journalism history, but she has launched into doing journalism with her students, as publisher of the Eudora Times in a small town nine miles from her journalism school, which will host "News Desert U." Oct 21-22 for journalism educators to address the crisis. "It is time for universities to step up, finally, and do something about this," she said.

This summer, Finneman is testing a new business model for community papers at Harvey County Now in Newton, Kan., and the Hillsboro Free Press, which will get $10,000 to participate. The model aims to get more revenue from the audience with e-newsletters, events and two tiers of memberships. Kansas Publishing Ventures, which owns the papers, is keeping detailed minutes of its weekly meetings on the project, to help develop an information packet for community papers across the nation, Finneman said.

The model is based on surveys that Finneman and other researches did in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas, which found that newspaper readers are much more willing to support their papers with money beyond subscriptions that newspaper publishers think they are. In North Dakota, the only state where she has released her results, 40 percent said they were likely or very likely to donate.

Finneman said she and her colleagues were "taken aback" at the attitude of publishers in focus groups who felt that asking for voluntary support would be admitting failure or showing personal weakness. "They very much saw themselves as a business, as opposed to an unreplaceable civic community organization that a newspaper is," while "leaving free money on the table."

She said publishers cited the lack of time and resources for business-model experimentation, but "Overall, there was very much this underlying fear, the fear of doing something different."

M. Clay Carey

In a session on what sort of research journalism schools could do to help rural news outlets, Clay Carey of Samford University in Alabama said research projects need to have social value, not just economic and journalistic value. "We all know the future of rural news outlets is tied to the future of rural places," he said, so "stories of places that are struggling" could he helpful.

The summit's "research question" was "How can rural communities sustain local journalism that supports local democracy?" Carey said we need research that is centered on the idea of democratic practice, and the essential role of agency: the ability to act on information. He said research has focused on information at the expense of focus on agency, which many people feel they don't have, and suggested more specific research questions" How can journalistic organizations equip people to be civically engaged? How can they encourage and empower them? Perhaps by "inviting people to participate in sharing their story," he said.

More broadly, he said universities should ask, "How can news organizations facilitate collaboration that creates a sense of community and creates positive change?" and think about facilitating collaboration among local newspapers, national and regional organizations, and local entities such as libraries. He said universities can help create frameworks, and reduce risk and risk aversion. And all the while, do research that is "accessible to people outside the academy. . . . It's easy for research to be an extractive industry, in the same way that journalism can be an extractive industry."

Bill Reader

Bill Reader of Ohio University, a longtime community journalism scholar, said "The academy has not been a friend of the cause, overall," but "Industry leaders have ignored the research of the past, and they are ignoring the research of the present." He said research needs to take on the knowledge gap between "haves and have-nots" in rural communities. "Helping people become full-fledged members of the community builds support for the newspaper, long-haul."

Beyond research, some university journalism programs are trying to help individual papers and the industry at large. University of Georgia students staff The Oglethorpe Echo, a nearby paper that was going to close until retired chain publisher Dink NeSmith created a nonprofit and got the university involved (he described the process in the first Saturday afternoon session); and West Virginia University has the NewStart program to train the next generation of community newspaper owners. Its director, Jim Iovino, reported that the University of Texas is sending someone to see how it can emulate the effort. In both states, newspaper associations asked universities for help because newspaper owners could not find acceptable buyers for their papers.

Further reports on the National Summit on Journalism in Rural America will appear later on The Rural Blog. Previous articles were on the state of rural journalism the Summit-driven effort for sustainability in rural journalism and nonprofit models.

National Summit on Journalism in Rural America This Week

The National Summit on Journalism in Rural America is this Friday and Saturday (June 3-4).

It will be livestreamed. Details at https://www.nna.org/join-the-national-summit-on-journalism-in-rural-america-on-youtube-june-3-4

Friday, June 3 | 1:15-5 p.m. 

• The state of America’s community newspapers and their journalism
• Reports from leaders of the community newspaper industry
• Putting local philanthropy in your business model
• Converting your newspaper(s) to nonprofit status

Saturday, June 4 | Starting at 9 a.m. 

• Good journalism is good business, but how do we make people want local news? 
• How two community newspapers are adapting to change
• Innovation at other community newspapers
• National funders and supporters on help for rural journalism
• A university-nonprofit team saves a weekly paper
• New business models for community newspapers, and a plan to test one
•  What other research is needed to help community journalism?