When a newspaper chain lets a community's small daily newspaper deteriorate

From The Rural Blog

All across America, small newspapers are shriveling, mainly because digital media have taken much of their advertising base. Quantifying that on a national scale would be very difficult; the U.S. has more than 6,000 newspapers, most of them small. But a story about one, The Hawk Eye of Burlington, Iowa, is emblematic of the problem, which is worst for small daily papers bearing a burden of debt incurred by hedge-fund buyers like GateHouse Media, which took over Gannett Co. and its name.

Elaine Godfrey, who grew up near the Mississippi River town of 24,000, writes for The Atlantic about The Hawk Eye under the new Gannett: "Its staff, now down to three overstretched news reporters, still produces a print edition six days a week. But the paper is dying. Its pages are smaller than they used to be, and there are fewer of them. Even so, wide margins and large fonts are used to fill space. The paper is laid out by a remote design team and printed 100 miles away in Peoria, Illinois; if a reader doesn’t get her paper in the morning, she is instructed to dial a number that will connect her to a call center in the Philippines. Obituaries used to be free; now, when your uncle dies, you have to pay to publish a write-up. These days, most of The Hawk Eye’s articles are ripped from other Gannett-owned Iowa publications, such as The Des Moines Register and the Ames Tribune, written for a readership three hours away. The opinion section, once an arena for local columnists and letter writers to spar over the merits and morals of riverboat gambling and railroad jobs moving to Topeka, is dominated by syndicated national columnists."

Using the recently created Burlington Breaking News Facebook page to solicit comments, Godfrey got dozens: "Readers noticed the paper’s sloppiness first—how there seemed to be twice as many typos as before, and how sometimes the articles would end mid-sentence instead of continuing after the jump. The newspaper’s remaining reporters are overworked; there are local stories they’d like to tell but don’t have the bandwidth to cover. The Hawk Eye’s current staff is facing the impossible task of keeping a historic newspaper alive while its owner is attempting to squeeze it dry."

Social-media sites that pop up when a newspaper withers "can be a useful resource, and a good source of community jokes and gossip. But speculation and rumor run rampant" on the Facebook page, Godfrey writes. "When a member hears something that sounds like gunshots nearby, she’ll post about it, and others will offer theories about the source. Once, I read a thread about an elementary-school principal suddenly skipping town. Some thought he might have behaved inappropriately with a student; one person said he’d been involved with a student’s mother; another swore they’d seen security-camera footage of the principal slashing tires in a parking lot at night. I checked The Hawk Eye and other outlets, but I couldn’t find verification of any of those stories."

The guessing is hard for Dale Alison, former Hawk Eye editor, to watch. "He often interjects in the comments to correct false information. Sometimes he posts news himself. . . .  People want to know what’s going on, Alison told me; they just don’t know how to find the answer, whom to call, where to look. That’s what reporters are for."

Godfrey touches on another national trend seen all over the country: "In the absence of local coverage, all news becomes national news: Instead of reading about local policy decisions, people read about the blacklisting of Dr. Seuss books. Instead of learning about their own local candidates, they consume angry takes about Marjorie Taylor Greene," the radical Republican congresswoman from Georgia.

And she senses an even more disturbing trend, relayed by Mayor Jon Billups, who was fired as The Hawk Eye's circulation director in 2017: "Since the purchase of the paper, he’s noticed a growing negative self-image among residents, he told me. Fewer people see Burlington as a nice place to live; they seem to like their neighbors less. 'We’re struggling with not having [this] iconic thing.' As mayor, he helped start a newsletter to keep residents updated on city projects. 'It’s a matter of time before our local paper does not exist.'"

Like many towns with shriveled papers, Burlington has an online news site, the Burlington Beacon, founded by Jeff Abell, soon joined by William Smith, both former Hawk Eye reporters. "The Beacon is far from profitable. Until recently, Abell paid Smith from his own pocket. The two work out of Abell’s comic-book store in downtown Burlington," Godfrey reports. “Jeff and Will are doing their best,” Alison told her in an interview at the newspaper's building, now for sale. “But doggone it, it would take 150 years to build up what they had here.”

Godfrey reflects, "When people lament the decline of small newspapers, they tend to emphasize the most important stories that will go uncovered: political corruption, school-board scandals, zoning-board hearings, police misconduct. They are right to worry about that. But often overlooked are the more quotidian stories, the ones that disappear first when a paper loses resources: stories about the annual Teddy Bear Picnic at Crapo Park, the town-hall meeting about the new swimming-pool design, and the tractor games during the Denmark Heritage Days. These stories are the connective tissue of a community; they introduce people to their neighbors, and they encourage readers to listen to and empathize with one another. When that tissue disintegrates, something vital rots away. We don’t often stop to ponder the way that a newspaper’s collapse makes people feel: less connected, more alone. As local news crumbles, so does our tether to one another."

Community Newspaper Holdings closes weeklies in northeastern Kentucky; will send subscribers daily once a week; university town 55 miles away has no newspaper

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

One of the largest chains of community newspapers, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., has undertaken an unusual consolidation of its northeastern Kentucky weeklies into a daily.

"Welcome to a change," read the April 29 headline in The Morehead News, over a message from Group Publisher Patty Bennett, informing readers that the paper "will merge with our sister newspaper, The Daily Independent in Ashland," because of lack of advertising during the pandemic. "The Daily Independent will undertake coverage of Morehead." In other words, Morehead, a university town of 7,000 in a county of 25,000, no longer has a local newspaper.

A similar message appeared in the Grayson Journal-Enquirer and the Olive Hill Times, essentially the same paper with slightly different content, in Carter County, between Morehead and Ashland. CHNI also killed off the Greenup County News-Times, a weekly in another county adjoining Ashland and Boyd County; it's in the metropolitan area of Ashland and Huntington, W.Va.; Carter County is not, though it is oriented to Ashland. Rowan County is neither; Morehead is 55 miles from Ashland, and 65 miles from downtown Lexington.

Many dailies have swallowed up sister weeklies, but it's unusual if not unprecedented for such a consolidation over such a distance. It dismayed people in Morehead, home to Morehead State University and some recent economic developments, including a huge complex of greenhouses intended to provide vegetables to the Eastern U.S.

"This county has been booming," said Keith Kappes, a former MSU spokesman who was publisher of the News for six years. He said a local economic developer told him, "I can't say to a prospect, we've got everything you want in a small town, except a newspaper."

"There's kind of a shock effect," Kappes told The Rural Blog. "How are we gonna follow our schools, our athletics? How are we gonna be informed about what's going on in the community, how are we gonna know the good things and the needs?... If you don't have a newspaper in your community, how backward are you?"

Kappes said that when he became the paper's publisher in 2010, it was making nearly $500,000 a year, a figure that gradually declined to $180,000 by the time he left three years ago. "Even at this low ebb, The Morehead News was still profitable," he said. "I know that from the people who work there." He said the other papers were not. Bennett said she couldn't comment, but said she would pass along the request to company headquarters in Montgomery, Ala. CNHI is owned by the Retirement Systems of Alabama.

Bennett told subscribers that they would receive each Wednesday's Independent "and a special offer to subscribe. They will also be able to sample local, regional and state news about the covid-19 pandemic and other news and sports on The Daily Independent’s website, dailyindependent.com. We hope this experience will result in your subscribing to the merged newspaper and its robust website." She said subscribers who wanted refunds could ask for them by email, and invited readers to ask her questions "about our restructuring plan."

Kappes said he is talking to people in Morehead who want the town to have its own newspaper. "Its a source of pride," he said. "I think we're gonna end up with a 24/7 online newspaper that may publish once a week" in order to qualify for public-notice advertising, he said. Under Kentucky law, the newspaper with the largest bona fide circulation in a county gets the "legal ads," but if a county does not have a paper, only those in adjoining counties qualify, so the Daily Independent does not. The Kentucky Press Association explains the details and reports on newspaper frequency changes.

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.

Family-owned firm, started 3 years ago, is already 6th largest owner of U.S. papers

From The Rural Blog

Adams Publishing Group, a newspaper firm that is barely three years old, has bought more than 100 small dailies, weeklies and shoppers in at least 15 separate transactions," Poynter Institute media-business analyst Rick Edmonds writes for the Iowa Newspaper Association's INA Bulletin. That makes it the nation's sixth-largest owner of newspapers, according to a March 2017 report by Visiting Professor Carol Wolf for the University of North Carolina's Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media. About half its papers are in Minnesota, where it is based.

Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media map; click on it to enlarge

"In contrast to other big consolidators, they often leave existing management in place, do not impose cookie-cutter content templates, and do not start by stripping down newsrooms of editors and reporters," Edmonds reports.

One example is its purchase of Jones Media, a Greeneville, Tenn.-based chain that was in its fourth generation of family ownership until patriarch John Jones died in 2016 and his descendants forced a sale over the objection of CEO Gregg Jones. He "chose to stay and has nothing but good things to say about the company," Edmonds reports, quoting him: "I'm working harder and enjoying myself more than I ever have. . . . These are the kind of people we want buying newspapers."

CEO Mark Adams rarely speaks
publicly about the firm he runs.

Edmonds couldn't elicit comment from the company, and called it "secretive." The firm is part of a diversified portfolio owned by "billionaire investor Stephen Adams and his family," who "have flown largely under the radar, unknown to those outside the industry," the UNC report says. "The company looks to buy non-metro publications where the newspapers or groups have revenue of about $10 million, said Larry Grimes, of W.B. Grimes & Co., a Gaithersburg, Md.-based mergers-and-acquisitions advisory firm specializing in media properties. Adams Publishing looks for large niche markets and buys within a geographic region. So far, the company has focused primarily on purchasing papers in the Midwest, but it owns publications as far east as the Jersey shore."

Intern and weekly editor show how to deal with, and engage with, critics

Josh Qualls was having difficulty finding a source to help him explain how the House health-insurance bill might affect seniors on Medicaid in Lincoln County, Kentucky, where he just completed a summer internship with The Interior Journal in Stanford. So he went to the Boone Newspapers weekly's Facebook page.

"The very first response echoed some of the most disheartening, gut-wrenching rhetoric we’ve seen directed toward journalists in recent months. Its author offered a scathing indictment of the news media and accused us of being liberally biased," Qualls wrote in his intern report to the Kentucky Press Association, relying on memory because the poster had deleted the post. "She talked about how much 'Obamacare' didn’t help her health-hindered family, so I saw a way to connect with her."

Josh Qualls

Qualls wrote, “We appreciate your feedback … and we’re sorry to learn about your health problems and your family’s health-care situation. Our hearts go out to you.” He said no one at the newspaper "was happy with the Affordable Care Act allowing premiums to increase at an alarming rate," but said journalists must "seek the truth and report it," as the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics says.

“The truth, based on what we know about the American Health Care Act so far, is that these proposals may have long-term effects that are even more damaging than Obamacare,” Qualls posted. “The Congressional Budget Office reported last Wednesday that while premiums would likely decrease for younger Americans, older Americans would likely see a substantial increase and lose many of their benefits.”

Then he wrote this, which KPA highlighted in its report to members: “In this newsroom, we all have different political beliefs but respect each other. What we all have in common is that we’re biased against the things that harm the community we serve, and by community we mean people like you.” Those are lines to remember.

"The author quickly wrote back," Qualls reported to KPA. "She said that she never really thought about it that way and would consider what we wrote, that she appreciated our effort to connect with her and to explain what we were trying to accomplish." He and Editor Abigail Whitehouse, who had approved his message, "were ecstatic," yelling "We got through to someone!"

Though the reader soon deleted her post and the comments, Qualls said the episode showed the value of engaging with readers through social media: "People may think now that they have carte blanche to denigrate journalists, but Abigail taught me that we don’t have to cower in fear of what they might say or do — we must respectfully stand our ground. It simply comes down to this: People hate what they don’t understand, and some people unfortunately don’t understand journalists."

Qualls is a May graduate of the University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Media.

Al Jazeera America suspects it may have found America’s smallest two-paper town

Al Jazeera America paints an interesting picture this week of the media landscape in Crawfordsville, Ind., population 15,000.

Crawfordsville is home to two daily newspapers, the Journal Review and The Paper. Al Jazeera America writer Kevin Williams speculates in the article that Crawfordsville might be the smallest U.S. town with competing daily newspapers. Data on the number of two-paper towns is hard to come by, Williams writes. He interviewed media business analyst Rick Edmonds, who said Crawfordsville “sounds like a good bet” to be the smallest.

Journalists quoted in the story make great observations about the value of local ownership and editorial control. They also stress the importance of documenting daily life in their communities. Jack Lule, chair at Lehigh University’s Weinstock Center for Journalism, makes this point in the article:

Two-newspaper towns survive for a good reason: despite all the possibilities of digital media, local coverage still is handled best by local newspapers. People have all sorts of access to news on Washington politics, the latest airline disaster, Mideast tensions and other national and international stories. But local politics, obituaries, sports, concerts, street closings and news stories on that level still are reported only by the local newspaper. 

Is Crawfordsville really is the smallest town in the U.S. with two daily newspapers? I don’t know of any smaller towns with two dailies, although there are many rural communities with competing weekly publications. Oneida, Tenn., population 5,000, has two strong weekly newspapers.

I’d love to hear from you, blog readers. Do you know of any smaller towns with competing daily newspapers?

Vermont weekly celebrates 300th edition with stories about community journalism

The Brattleboro Commons, a weekly newspaper in Vermont, is celebrating its 300th issue by "shining the spotlight on community journalism — and especially its future. Our staff and a number of other media professionals with ties to the Windham County region reflect on these issues and help us celebrate a milestone." Here are some of the stories:
• When business principles are turned upside down: Jeff Potter writes, "The small newspapers I worked for were founded not to make money but to fill a need — and the bond they had with their readers was amazing."
• Randolph T. Holhut is a Refugee from a corporate news career: "We would have to do more and more with less and less, with no possibility of improvement," he writes. "No newspaper ever got better by giving its readers less. No newspaper ever cut its way to prosperity."
• Writing close to home:  Evan Johnson writes, "I’ve learned the craft of journalism while living in a place I know more intimately than anywhere else."

Rural editor reflects on changes, core values and a reader who came around

Rural editor John Nelson reflected on the changes in journalism and the unchanging mission of community newspapers as he was inducted into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame at the University of Kentucky this week.

"A community and its newspaper are each both plagued and blessed by the human condition, by the shortcomings and successes of their members. Only when those are revealed can they be overcome or celebrated. That's part of the newspaper's mission, and that may be the only way today's product resembles the one at which I began in the early '70s," Nelson said.

"For the most part, however, we still use the same words and write about the same topics. There is just more work and fewer people to do it. One day consumers of news will again accept that you get what you pay for, but that will first require those who hire journalists to accept the same thing. Good journalism is costly in a variety of ways. It often will offend friends, alienate acquaintances and anger customers. But when it works, you hope it makes a difference. Sometimes, you get a hint that it has, like I did in a letter I received many years ago after a particularly costly story."

Nelson then read from a letter from a reader who was horrified that his weekly newspaper would print a story with the awful details of the sex-abuse charges against a leading local citizen:

I am going to call them right now and cancel my subscription … tell them off and do everything I can to put them out of business. But, first I read it all. Oh, please Lord, I don't know about this. What do I feel? … Suddenly, it was like a great burden lifted, I was able to really face the truth for the first time. ... Nothing is ever exactly what it seems. Life is not black and white. It has many colors. I already had learned at great cost that having too much faith and trust in someone can be a great mistake… So, with all that said … I knew today would not be a good day at your newspaper … I appreciate your intentions … I feel so much better about myself and I can handle the answers that I must give to my family, my children and grandchildren, friends and political allies … Keep up the good work. You are what newspapers should be about. Facts, with a heart."

Nelson is executive editor of Advocate Communications, which owns dailies in Danville and Winchester and weeklies in Nicholasville and Stanford, and is a subsidiary of Schurz Communications. He was editor and co-owner of a weekly in Somerset after working at a weekly in Irvine, all in Kentucky. His induction citation called him "a leader for openness in government and quality in journalism" and noted his work as a leader of the Kentucky Press Association president on the state's first open-records audit and efforts to open juvenile courts.

Others joining the Hall of Fame were Akron Beacon Journal sportswriter Marla Ridenour, Bill Goodman of Kentucky Educational Television, retired news director Dan Modlin of Western Kentucky University's WKYU-FM, and the late Ralph W. Gabbard of Lexington's WKYT-TV and founder of Hazard's WYMT-TV, which might not be thought of as a community-journalism outlet, but in fact has created a greater sense of regional community among the topgraphically isolated and politically fractious communities of southeastern Kentucky.

Award winner says failing to do good rural journalism tells rural people they are 'not that important'

All that is, can or should be great about community journalism was on display July 20 as two rural newspaper journalists with very different but equally distinctive careers received the Al Smith Award for public service through community journalism.

Jennifer P. Brown, opinion editor and former editor of the Kentucky New Era in Hopkinsville, and Max Heath, retired vice president and executive editor of Landmark Community Newspapers Inc. received the award from the Bluegrass Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.

The award is named for the rural newspaper publisher who is a national SPJ Fellow and co-founder of the Institute, based in the School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky. Last year Smith was the first recipient of the award, which is presented for a career of public service through community journalism in Kentucky, or anywhere by a current or former Kentuckian, with preference given to those outside metropolitan areas.

In her remarks to the awards dinner crowd at Eastern Kentucky University's Center for the Arts, Brown, left, gave a clear picture of the fortitude and high goals often required be a good community journalist.

"You have to be careful with friendships, and you have to tell the truth. And then you see the subjects of your stories in the toilet paper aisle at Kroger," she said. "Often, I learn that we don’t expect enough from people. I mean we don’t expect enough from our own journalists and from the people we cover. Setting the bar high usually works. I hate to see people at smaller papers accepting crumbs. If you don’t do good journalism at small papers —and doing good journalism includes filing open records requests and complaining when the open meetings law is violated —then you are telling people who live in rural areas that their place in life, in the world, is not that important."

For more from Brown, and from Heath, and more about the award, click here.

Harrisburg paper broke Penn State story in March; reporter calls it 'huge testament to local news'

Uncovering the story of a former Penn State football coach's alleged rapes of boys "was all local journalism," Harrisburg Patriot-News reporter Sara Ganim told Howard Kurtz this morning on CNN's "Reliable Sources."

"Its a huge testament to local news," Ganim, a 24-year-old Penn State journalism graduate told Kurtz, who initially referred to the 71,000-circulation Advance Publications newspaper as "The News-Patriot." Ganim said, "It was all local journalism, going to my sources. ... I spent a lot of time knocking on doors and getting shooed off properties."

Ganim said the newspaper "did have some pushback" to her stories that first reported the investigation, starting March 31, but "I actually expected a lot more than we got. . . . For the most part people were happy that we were bringing this out." The stories didn't get much play beyond Pennsylvania until ex-coach Jerry Sandusky was indicted this month, perhaps because they were based on interviews with people who had testified before a grand jury, reporting that was difficult for non-local media to match, Ganim said.

The story of Sara Ganim "is also the story of a family-owned media company, Advance, of a second-generation newspaper editor, David Newhouse, of a publisher, John Kirkpatrick, who understands what a newspaper means to a community, and of a newsroom that has the deep local connections and also the courage to keep going no matter what the potential cost to its own reputation," Carl Lavin writes on his 07newsroom blog.

For Ganim's original story, click here. For her latest summary, focusing on authority figures and "What did they know and when did they know it?" go here. Her last-Sunday story about why the probe took so long is here.

All paid up?

As community papers struggle to stay afloat, one media organization has an idea for its holdings. Thoughts?

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-medianews-group-adds-paywalls-to-23-more-newspapers/

Paper reports a rumor, to protect the object; social media may cause more such cases

Report a rumor? Sometimes it's called for. The Times Tribune of Corbin, Ky., made that decision this week because a rumor made viral by social media was raising the possibility of retribution and discrimination against an innocent person and his business.

Michele Baker's story began tightly: "A Corbin business has suffered a downturn due to an apparently false rumor circulated on social media outlets that the owners refused to serve uniformed soldiers." It quoted the owner, an India native who said he is a U.S. citizen, as denying the rumor and noting that his daughter is in the local high school's Reserve Officer Training Corps; and it quoted the local police chief: “We have had a dozen calls this morning and we are trying to verify the allegations. We are trying to stop the rumors.” (Baker photo: The Pak-N-Sak store)

Having established the official concern, the newspaper weighed in on its own authority, reporting, "Attempts to contact the servicemen who were allegedly refused service have been unsuccessful. Allegations of business owners refusing to serve soldiers are rampant on the Internet." And it kept the story short: 325 words. There's just as long a story in how the 6,000-circulation daily decided to report a rumor that exploded on Facebook and Topix, the website with discussion threads for seemingly every community.

Managing Editor Becky Kilian said she first heard the rumor Saturday, and by the time the office opened Monday, "It was pickling up multiple threads on Topix and was spreading to Barbourville, in the next county." She said that the police chief mentioned it to her in a conversation about another matter and "We were both concerned that if the rumor continued unchecked that it might contirbute to an inappropriate action on someone's part," beyond the ethnic slurs and gullibility displayed online.

Baker went to work on the story, and "In every aspect in Michele's reporting, it looked like a myth," Kilian said. "It might as well have been a Bigfoot sighting." When a Google search found similar cases elsewhere, involving ethnic or racial discrimination, Kilian knew the paper needed to publish an unusual story. "With the discrimination against a minority and the inflammatory langauge that was being used," she said, "it needed to be addressed."

"This is the first time I think in my career as a journalist that I've ever been involved in a story that dealt with a rumor like that," said Kilian, a Corbin native who has been a journalist for 10 years and returned to her hometown as a reporter two years ago. She became managing editor of the Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. paper last year.

"I just wish there was some way to educate people" that just because they read something on the Internet that doesn't mean it's true," Kilian said. "I wish we could teach news discernment." Situations like this call for editorial discernment, too, and the prevalence of social media mean that journalists may have to make calls like this more frequently.

"So far today's story seems to have garnered a great deal of attention," Baker said in an email to The Rural Blog. "I received a call from a man who said he was among those who helped spread the rumor and the he now regrets it." To read Baker's story, click here. To read some of the discussion on Topix, click here.