University help for community journalism among topics at weekly editors' conference in Kentucky June 20-23

By Al Cross
Director and professor, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, University of Kentucky

Editorial critique session at an ISWNE conference

The annual conference of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, July 20-23 at the University of Kentucky, will have programs on university help for community newspapers, national politics becoming local, dealing with the evils of social media, new business models for weeklies, governments’ role in the news business, a visit from a news-media leader from Mongolia, newspapers’ and libraries’ common interests, and the hallmark of the conference: editors' critiques of other members' editorials and editorial pages.

Those sessions are on the schedule for Friday and Saturday, July 22 and 23. As usual, the professional-development programming will be preceded by two days of tours in the area; the itinerary includes a historic newspaper, an iconic horse farm, a bourbon distillery, and a community that is headquarters to a big cannabis company and for 14 years was home to a newspaper created by UK students and their professor (this writer). For a detailed schedule, click here.

Attendees will stay in a university dormitory, and private rooms are available. The conference fee is $600 per person, and there's a three-day, $300 option. ISWNE membership is $50 a year. The registration form is here. The deadline is Wednesday, June 15. Questions? Email al.cross@uky.edu.

Friday’s opening session will examine the common interests of newspapers and public libraries. “Libraries and newspapers share the front lines in the battle for intellectual freedom,” says AnnaMarie Cornett, chief of staff at the Lexington Public Library, who will join with other leaders of the library to talk about their approaches to neutrality and challenged materials, and how libraries and newspapers can work together in the fight against censorship.

Next up will be a session on navigating the increasingly contentious political landscape. My informal survey of ISWNE members last year found that editors are becoming more cautious because the national divisiveness has made local public discourse more contentious, and I have heard likewise from other editors. I’ll present what I have heard, then lead a group discussion so we can learn more and help guide paths forward.

Allison Frisch of Ithaca College and Gina Gayle of Emerson College will discuss their research paper about the ways higher-education journalism programs can help community newspapers. They found that such partnerships can increase civic engagement, create new local media channels, and strengthen civic literacy, engagement, and democracy. They also can give students real-world experience covering a wide range of issues, and help newspapers in need of more resources.

After lunch and ISWNE's annual Associated Press Stylebook quiz, we will have a discussion with Bradley Martin, editor and publisher of the Hickman County Times in Centerville, Tenn., about dealing with the evils of social media, and when it’s necessary to dip into the cesspool. Brad has an object example of a social media mess that had a serious impact on a school, a student and his family. I’ll be you have some examples to discuss, too.

Should government help the news media, and if so, how? Canada has taken steps to help newspapers that would be off-limits in the U.S., where the newspaper industry is fighting battles in Congress and state legislatures. Gordon Cameron, group managing editor of Hamilton Community News in Ontario, will give a report from Canada, where government help hasn’t set well with some rural editors. I will discuss battles in the states over public-notice advertising, and efforts in Congress to help news media recover some of the revenue they have lost to digital platforms – efforts that are better suited to community papers than they were at the start, but U.S. editors and publishers are still debating what role government should play in sustaining local journalism. I’ll also discuss newspapers’ biggest victory in Congress lately, the great expansion of the ability to send sample copies to non-subscribers in their home counties.

What are the ethics of seeking public-notice ads and other support for local journalism from public officials whom you may have to cover and comment on? That will be the point of departure for a roundtable session about tough ethical calls, often a challenge in rural communities.

To wrap up Friday's discussions, we will have a session looking at new business models for community newspapers, drawing in part on our recent National Summit on Journalism in Rural America, where speakers talked about taking their newspapers into nonprofit status, working with a local community foundation to put philanthropy into their business model, and using e-newsletters and membership models to raise more revenue from readers. (For another Summit story, on the state of rural journalism, click here.)

On Saturday, after the editorial critiques, we plan to hear from a very special visitor: Enkhbat Tsend, chairman of the Press Institute of Mongolia and CEO of Control Media LLC. Mongolia ranks 90th on the World Press Freedom Index of Reporters Without Borders, but that is higher than most nations near it. The index says Mongolia “broadly respects the principles of freedom and media pluralism, though its regulation still lacks basic legal protection for the confidentiality of sources and imperfect defamation laws encourage abusive lawsuits against journalists, stirring self-censorship.”

So, the conference will reach from your campus to your county courthouse and city hall to state legislatures and Congress and to other nations, just as an ISWNE conference should do. Please join us.

Zaitz wins Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism

Les Zaitz

A longtime practitioner of accountability journalism, now making his weekly newspaper a model for investigative and enterprise reporting at the local level, is the winner of the 2017 Tom and Pat Gish Award from the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.

Leslie "Les" Zaitz is editor and publisher the Malheur Enterprise in Vale, Oregon. His family bought the paper, which has a circulation of less than 2,000, to keep it from closing in 2015. In 2016, he became publisher after retiring from The Oregonian, where he had been the senior investigative reporter and winner of many awards, including finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2014 for a 2013 series about Mexican drug cartels in the U.S.

In 2017, the Enterprise pursued the story of a former state hospital patient’s involvement in two murders and an assault in Malheur County shortly after his release. The newspaper discovered that the defendant had been released after convincing state officials he had faked mental illness for 20 years to avoid prison, and after mental-health experts warned he was a danger. The state Psychiatric Security Review Board sued Zaitz and the Enterprise to avoid complying with an order to turn over exhibits that the board had considered before authorizing the man’s release. Zaitz started a GoFundMe effort to pay legal fees, but then Gov. Kate Brown took the rare step of interceding in the case, ordering the lawsuit dropped and the records produced. Brown later named Zaitz one of three news-media representatives on the Oregon Public Records Advisory Council, which makes recommendations concerning the state public-records advocate.

The Enterprise’s efforts won Zaitz and his reporters, John Braese and Pat Caldwell, the 2018 Freedom of Information Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. They beat out entries from much larger news outlets, including The Oregonian. The judges wrote that the series was a "classic David-meets-Goliath triumph," and showed "You don’t need a large staff and deep resources to move the needle on open records."

"That’s one reason Les Zaitz and the Enterprise are such a good choice for the Gish Award," said Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, based at the University of Kentucky. "Doing good journalism in rural areas often requires more courage, tenacity and integrity than in cities, but the same state and federal laws apply, and Les knows how to use them for the public good." The Institute publishes The Rural Blog.

The Enterprise is not Zaitz’s first foray into rural journalism. From 1987 to 2000, he was owner and publisher of the weekly Keizertimes in Keizer, Oregon. His family still owns the paper, which consistently wins journalism awards, and much of his investigative reporting has been in rural Oregon. He is a five-time solo winner of the Bruce Baer Award, Oregon’s top award for investigative reporting. In 2016, the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association gave him its highest honor for career achievement, an award not given since 2010.

"Rural journalism is so critical to the American fiber, and even more so today when people are so hungry for a trusted news source," Zaitz said. "Small news outlets don't have to be bad news outlets, and I'm hoping our work in rural Oregon can in some modest way inspire others to redouble their efforts to provide quality journalism. That quality is not only a professional imperative, but a business one as well."

The Tom and Pat Gish Award is named for the late couple who published The Mountain Eagle at Whitesburg, Ky., for more than 50 years and became nationally known for their battles with coal operators and politicians, and the firebombing of their office by a Whitesburg policeman. Their son, Eagle Editor-Publisher Ben Gish, is on the award selection committee.

“Given the tenacity, courage and integrity Les Zaitz has shown during his career, it would be hard to find a more deserving winner of the award named in honor of my parents,” Gish said. “I find it more than just a little interesting that his father and my father ran statehouse bureaus for United Press [International].”

Past winners of the award have been the Gishes; the Ezzell family of The Canadian (Texas) Record; publisher Jim Prince and former publisher Stan Dearman of The Neshoba Democrat in Philadelphia, Miss.; Samantha Swindler, columnist for The Oregonian, for her work in rural Kentucky and Texas; Stanley Nelson and the Concordia Sentinel of Ferriday, La.; Jonathan and Susan Austin for their newspaper work in Yancey County, N.C.; the late Landon Wills of the McLean County News in western Kentucky; the Trapp family of the Rio Grande Sun in Española, N.M.; Ivan Foley of the Platte County Landmark in Platte City, Mo.; and the Cullen family of the Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa.

Cross will present the 2018 Gish Award to Zaitz at the annual conference of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors in Portland on July 11. Nominations for the 2019 Gish Award may be emailed at any time to al.cross@uky.edu.

As S.D. publisher gives up his title, he tells the story of his family and their weekly paper

Tim Waltner

An outstanding weekly newspaper publisher is giving up the title, but not his connection with the newspaper, which his son and daughter-in-law will take over. Tim Waltner's column about the changes at the Freeman, S.D., Courier is a biography of himself, his family and the newspaper, and an exemplary piece of rural journalism, to be expected from a leader and award winner in the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors.

After recounting the twists and turns that took him to Freeman, then away, then back again, Waltner writes, "I could not be happier — for myself, for Jeremy and Stacey, for the Courier and the Freeman community. And I’m pleased I’ll be able to be part of that in these transitional years.

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"I have no illusions about my time at the Courier; I know some people still bristle at my politics, reputation as a rebel and willingness to challenge authority. The role of a community journalist — if you’re doing your job — includes sometimes ruffling some feathers. I’m happy to play that role and am fully aware that some people, as there were 46 years ago, will be happy to see me start to step away.

"But I’ve been humbled and gratified by the support and respect shown me over my 40 years with the Freeman Courier. I’m thrilled to give Jeremy and Stacey the same opportunity Glenn Gering gave me four decades ago. My deepest hope is that community residents and leaders will give them — and the Courier — the support and respect they deserve." (Read more)

Trapp family of the Rio Grande Sun in Española, N.M. wins Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, tenacity and integrity in rural journalism

By Casey Parker-Bell

University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Telecommunications

Two community journalism giants received awards for their service Thursday night and showed their gratitude while focusing on how journalists can improve their craft.

Robert Trapp Jr., publisher of the Rio Grande Sun in Española, N.M., accepted the 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.

The award was given to the Trapp family, recognizing the work of his parents, Robert and Ruth Trapp, who started the Sun in 1956 with a partner they later bought out. The weekly paper and the elder Trapp have received many awards, and Institute Director Al Cross said the Gish Award for them was overdue.

The award is named for the couple who published The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Ky., for more than 50 years and won national recognition for their courage, integrity and tenacity as they practiced a straightforward style of journalism in the face of opposition from powerful interests.

The Eagle and the Sun have exchanged papers for many years, and members of the Gish family joined Trapp at his table at the Marriott Griffin Gate Resort in Lexington, Ky.

An emotional Trapp was clearly thankful for the award. He explained that his parents had put reporting the truth over advertising dollars, and he pointedly described what he believes will improve journalism at all levels: quality reporting on issues that are important to the community. “That’s what we should be doing,” he said. “Following the stories that affect our communities and trying to improve our communities by doing that.”

In his speech, Trapp called community newspapers “the last bastion of truth in reporting.” Here's a video of the award presentation and his acceptance speech:

Carl West accepts the Al Smith Award

Carl West, former editor of The State Journal in Frankfort, Ky., and founder of the Kentucky Book Fair Committee, accepted the Al Smith Award for public service through community journalism by a Kentuckian. The Institute and the Bluegrass Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists co-sponsor the award.

West also emphasized the importance of newspapers in his speech. “Newspapers, journalism, it’s a community trust. A public trust,” he said. He highlighted how important accuracy and fairness are to journalists, how downsizing is changing newsrooms (including the one where he remains editor emeritus) and how the people running newspapers should view their service to the public.

“Newspapers aren’t a bank. You have to make money to own one and run it. Sure, but you’re not going to get rich,” he said. “If you are going at it that way, you’re in the wrong business.”

West also spoke about the Kentucky Book Fair and how it has helped fund public libraries in small communities with limited financial resources and has touched thousands of book lovers.

The Al Smith Award is named for the co-founder of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, who owned weekly newspapers in Kentucky and Tennessee and was the founding host of KET’s “Comment on Kentucky.” He also spoke at the dinner.

Nominations for next year's awards will be accepted until April 1, 2016.

St. Louis American takes a strong stand on Ferguson

When The Washington Post wanted local perspective on the publication of leaked reports from the autopsy of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., they turned to community newspaper editor Chris King.

King is managing editor of The St. Louis American, the largest weekly newspaper in Missouri and one of the best African-American newspapers in the U.S. Over the last two weeks, he has been an outspoken critic of the Post and The New York Times, both of which published the autopsy leaks in late October. The leaks seem to suggest that Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed Brown in August, will not face criminal charges. The protests and riots touched off by Brown’s shooting have received international media attention.

King told the Los Angeles Times a law enforcement source had offered him the autopsy reports, but he decided not to run them. In the Post article, King was quoted as saying he suspected the publication of the leaks could touch off more violence on the streets of Ferguson, an idea that was echoed in an American editorial the same week. That editorial read, in part:

The Times and Post ran with this anonymous third-party hearsay regarding a high-stakes case that has our entire region on edge. Tensions are so high that preparations for riots, if Wilson walks free, are discussed in sober terms in local and national media and on street corners. The editors of these powerful publications have shown a lapse in judgment and ethics that is not only shameful, but actually dangerous.

This week the American covered  protesters upset with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s publication of the leaked autopsy details.

Aggressive reporting and public commentary on matters such as the leaked autopsy reports are nothing new for the American. The newspaper has provided pointed, comprehensive coverage of the social unrest in Ferguson, Mo., since Brown’s shooting.

Taking long way home from ISWNE conference

Note: Outgoing COMJIG head John Hatcher was given a scholarship to attend the ISWNE conference in Green Bay in July. Here are his reflections on that visit.

The GPS told me it was going to take 5 hours, 30 minutes to make it home to Duluth from the International Society of Weekly News Editors’ conference in Green Bay, Wisc.

But as I crawled out of town through the construction and congestion on the four-lane highway, the thought of following the computer’s recommended path held no appeal.

I glanced at an approaching exit sign and, on a whim, I got off. The GPS took evasive action.

“Recalculating! Recalculating!” it shouted.

I set the GPS to “mute” and drove farther away from the major artery.

What had beckoned me off the main road was a sign for the village of Pulaski, Wisc. Just the day before I had learned about the newspaper in this town, the Pulaski News, touted as the oldest community newspaper in the country produced by students at the high school. It claims as one of its alumnae the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jacqui Banaszynski.

I didn’t stay in Pulaski long. I drove down the main street, glanced at the town park with the sign reading “Home of Pulaski Polka Days” and headed out of town, content that I could now match the student journalists I had met with the community where they work.

The International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors began in 1955 when a group of “country journalists” and educators met at Southern Illinois University to discuss the power of the editorial voice of the weekly newspaper.

In the first issue of the organization’s journal, Grassroots Editor, published in 1960, the group defined its mission: “The object of this organization shall be to encourage and promote wise and independent editorial comment and leadership in weekly newspapers throughout the world; to facilitate the exchange of ideas and viewpoints of weekly newspaper editors in order that they and their readers may become better informed; to help in the development of the weekly newspaper press as an instrument of mutual understanding and world peace and to foster freedom of the press in all nations.”

Author Vickie Canfield Peters, who has chronicled the history of ISWNE in a newly released book, “Watchdogs, Town Criers, Historians: The People and Newspapers of ISWNE,” notes that the group’s summer conferences have been attended by some of the great community journalists in our nation’s history: Houston Waring, one of the group’s founders, from Littleton, Colo.; Henry Beetle Hough, editor of the famous Vineyard Gazette on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.; and Hazel Brannon Smith, winner of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing on issues of civil rights in her Mississippi newspaper, the Lexington Advertiser.

I had come away from the annual convention — my first one — struck by how this event felt more like a family reunion than a conference. Journalists returned even after they had sold their papers and retired. On the last day, a slideshow was accompanied by stories of the editors who had died in recent years. And a newcomer was made to feel welcome.

What this family of community journalists from the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia share is a desire to produce journalism that is important to their communities. They do this by balancing an intimate community connection with an obligation to be tough and courageous. They take editorial stands, knowing that they will be held personally accountable for what they write.

Just outside of Pulaski, I looked at my GPS. It was highlighting in purple a new route that would get me back on the main road and safely to Duluth. Instead, I entered in the name of another small Wisconsin community, Abbotsford, population 2,316, and home of The Tribune-Phonograph newspaper.

Billed as the oldest city in Wisconsin, Abbotsford is where, in 1971, J.A. O’Leary and his wife, Carol, purchased the community newspaper. Today, Carol, her daughter, Kris, and son-in-law Kevin Flink, run the newspapers in this and a few neighboring communities.

On the night of the ISWNE editorial awards, the editors at the family’s community papers stood several times to receive honors for their work.

The family’s newspaper group won, for the second time in three years, the top award, The Golden Quill. Peter Weinschenk’s editorial challenged county leaders in his community for their plans to lure young professionals to Marathon County, Wisc.: “The general idea is to turn Marathon County — land of paper mills, dairy farms and the Sunday polka jamboree — into a mecca of urban cool, a magnet for lifestyle-oriented, upwardly mobile, laptop-carrying Generation XYZers with college degrees by the dozen.”

I had ulterior motives in coming to Abbotsford; I had been told that I couldn’t pass through town without stopping by the Hawkeye Dairy Store for a scoop of Wisconsin-made ice cream.

With my heaping of strawberry ice cream dripping into my lap as I drove through the quiet, historic downtown, I headed north to the city of Medford, where another paper, The Star-News, is owned by O’Leary family.

Editor Brian Wilson, a graduate of Northwestern University and a New Jersey transplant, has won awards for his editorial writing in 2008, 2009 and again in 2013. This time, the award was for an editorial criticizing the city council for backing down on a community improvement project.

“The city council’s lukewarm reception to those who have worked hard to make this project a reality is disappointing,” Wilson wrote. “If the city treats those who would donate their time, energies and financial resources this way, it won’t be long before no one wants to work with the city in any capacity.”

The day was getting late and I finally gave in to the GPS and followed the purple line back home, more than five hours behind the computer’s initial ETA. I tried to think about what it was that made these communities special. At first glance, they were like any of the other small Wisconsin farming communities I passed through that day.

But each of them – perhaps without truly appreciating it – were home to independently owned newspapers produced by editors who had the courage to write strong editorials, taking a stand on the issues important to their community. I asked myself a question I’ve been asking ever since I began working as a community journalist myself 21 years ago: Is it the community or the journalist that makes these situations happen?

Could a journalist with the drive and the desire plop down in any small town in America and start producing strong, independent journalism? Or is there something about these communities and their residents that encourages or even requires this as one of the elements of that community’s character?

I’m not sure I’ll ever come close to an answer to the question, but I intend to keep asking it and to keep visiting small towns across the world and asking the same question.

Next year the, ISWNE conference is in Durango, Colo. I wonder how long it will take me to get there.

John Hatcher is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota Duluth.