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.

Cullen family of Iowa’s twice-weekly Storm Lake Times wins Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, tenacity and integrity in rural journalism

Times photo: John, Mary Tom, Dolores and Art Cullen.

A Northwest Iowa family that has demonstrated courage, tenacity and integrity in the face of competition and powerful, entrenched local interests is the winner of the 2017 Tom and Pat Gish Award from the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.

The Cullen family publishes the Storm Lake Times, a twice-weekly newspaper that has focused attention on water-pollution issues in Iowa, often to the dislike of agribusiness interests that are sources of much of the pollution.

“We’ve lost some friends, we’ve lost subscriptions; for a while, lost some ads,” said Art Cullen, editor and co-owner of the paper started by his brother John more than 27 years ago. This year Art Cullen won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, for a series of columns about pollution in the Raccoon River, which supplies water for Iowa’s capital and largest city, Des Moines. He and his son Tom also wrote many news stories about the issue.

Following their reporting, the Des Moines Water Works sued the drainage districts of Buena Vista, Calhoun and Sac counties for failing to stop the pollution. The Times forced the release of public records that showed major agribusiness interests were paying for the suit’s defense. Courts ruled the districts couldn’t be sued, but the suit and the Pulitzer Prize focused more attention on the issue. Art Cullen says “The terms of the debate are changing,” and the amount of farmland in cover crops that prevent pollution has doubled in the past year.

Cullen’s Pulitzer-winning columns had punch. He wrote in March 2016, "Anyone with eyes and a nose knows in his gut that Iowa has the dirtiest surface water in America. It is choking the waterworks and the Gulf of Mexico. It is causing oxygen deprivation in Northwest Iowa glacial lakes. It has caused us to spend millions upon millions trying to clean up Storm Lake, the victim of more than a century of explosive soil erosion."

The Pulitzer committee said the editorials were “fueled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests.” Much of that reporting was done by Tom Cullen. Art’s wife, Dolores, also reports and takes photographs for the paper, and John’s wife, Mary, writes a recipe column. The family dog, Mabel, is there, too.

The Times began reporting and editorializing about pollution from farms about a year after it was established in June 1990, first looking at concentrated hog-farming operations. It has brought to light other environmental concerns, such as the need to dredge Storm Lake, and issues surrounding the livestock-processing plants that have brought many immigrants to Buena Vista County, in the heart of socially and politically conservative northwest Iowa.

In one of his most recent Editorial Notebooks, Art Cullen wrote, “Many of my ignorant friends conflate people of color with their having lost control of their own destiny; they don’t realize they never had control of it. It’s harder to hate the Chicago Board of Trade than it is a Mexican who doesn’t like American football or can’t speak English. They voted for Barack Obama to take on the Board of Trade and Wall Street. He didn’t,” so they voted for Donald Trump.

“That column is a sterling example of a rural editor speaking hard truths to power and to the people he serves,” said Al Cross, director of the Institute, based at the University of Kentucky. “The Storm Lake Times has long been known to those of us who follow rural journalism as a great example to emulate, and Art Cullen’s Pulitzer Prize merely confirmed that. We hope this award to the Cullen family will show that they have had high ideals and standards for a very long time.”

Cross noted that the paper is a commercial success, with a circulation of 3,000, more than the 1,700 reported by the thrice-weekly Storm Lake Pilot-Tribune, owned by Rust Communications of Cape Girardeau, Mo. “Unlike most weeklies, the Times gets most of its revenue from circulation, with a relatively high $60 annual subscription price,” Cross said. “That is testimony of community support for quality journalism, providing another example to follow.”

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.

“It is encouraging to know that small, family-owned-and-operated community newspapers like the Storm Lake Times and Editor Art Cullen are still here and doing their jobs in very difficult circumstances with the same courage and tenacity exhibited by my parents,” Ben Gish said.

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.; and Ivan Foley of the Platte County Landmark in Platte City, Mo.

Cross will present the 2017 Gish Award to the Cullen family at the annual convention of the Iowa Newspaper Association in Des Moines on Feb. 2. Nominations for the 2018 Gish Award are being accepted at 122 Grehan Journalism Building, University of Kentucky, Lexington KY 40506-0042 or via email 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)

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.