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.

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.

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."

Check it Out...

COMJIG member Barbara Selvin's article has just been posted by Nieman Reports: Local Weeklies Are Covering the Communities Big Dailies Ignore
It's a great read. Thanks, Barbara!

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.

Weekly editors' lively, informative list-serve is open to COMJIGers

One of the finest organizations in community journalism is the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors. It's a relatively small group, but what it lacks in quantity, it more than makes up with quality. It was founded to improve editorial standards and performance, but members also share information and opinions on business-side issues, since many of the editors are also publishers or general managers. They do much of that through a lively and informative list-serve.

Membership in ISWNE (which can't agree how to pronounce the acronym) is open to academics, at the standard rate of $60 a year, and several COMJIG members belong to the group. Some of us would like to establish a working relationship between the groups, and discussed it at the annual COMJIG meeting and last summer's ISWNE board meeting.

At the latter meeting, the directors agreed to grant free access to ISWNE’s list-serve to all COMJIG members who want it. At the COMJIG meeting a few weeks later, all present did so, and they have been added to the list.

We have found the list to be a useful resource for teaching, research and service. If you want to join it, at no cost, send me an email by clicking here. I co-manage the list with Chad Stebbins, ISWNE executive director and COMJIG member (Missouri Southern), who is at stebbins-c@mssu.edu.

At its meeting next week, the ISWNE board may discuss other ideas for expanding and deepening the relationship, including our participation in ISWNE conferences. The next one will be held July 10-14 in and around Green Bay, Wis., with headquarters at St. Norbert College. The group bases its conferences at college campuses to hold down costs. For more information, go to www.iswne.org.

If you have suggestions for developing this relationship, you can e-mail me, Chad Stebbins or Dave Gordon of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, who has been the point man in this effort and is an ISWNE director.

Daily reads worth considering

From PBS's Media Shift, "At Rural Newspapers, Some Publishers Still Resist Moving Online."

Long shielded from the pressure of Internet news competition, as well as classified competitors like Craigslist, rural newspapers have reportedly fared far better than their metropolitan counterparts. While newspapers in population centers saw growing competition from online startups in the past decade, rural newspapers have faced relatively little competition. (So-called hyper-local sites like AOL's Patch are clustered in metropolitan areas and altogether absent from rural areas in the West.)

As broadband Internet spreads into rural communities -- spurred by a $7 billion federal investment -- rural newspapers are increasingly facing a question encountered by their metropolitan counterparts a decade ago: What information should be offered online?

The article quotes Al Cross, among others.

And from Earl Wilkinson at INMA: "Why is relevance to audience such a sin for journalism?"

It has this provocative line: "Start rewarding “relevance” over “quality” in the culture of your company, notably the newsroom."

International weekly editors' group offers COMJIG members access to its Hotline, hoping to start a working relationship

Beginning a cooperative relationship that could pay substantial dividends, the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors has agreed to give COMJIG members access to the ISWNE Hotline, where some of the more thoughtful and dedicated weekly editors in the English-speaking world discuss editorial policies, ethical issues, management questions and just about anything that means something to editors of weekly papers.

The ISWNE Board of Directors voted at the group’s annual conference last week to give Hotline access to COMJIG members who request it, on a trial basis, with a review in January. The idea was proposed by David Gordon of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, who is an ISWNE director and COMJIG member; and the undersigned, secretary of COMJIG and director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, based at the University of Kentucky. COMJIG members who want Hotline access should email me at Al.Cross@uky.edu. I manage the list-serve with COMJIG member Chad Stebbins of Missouri Southern State University, who is director of its Institute of International Studies and executive director of ISWNE.

We think the Hotline can be a good source of research ideas and class discussion topics, and give academics interested in community journalism regular glimpses into the life of weekly newspapers, most of which are independently owned. Examples of recent Hotline topics include coverage of elections, suicides and vandalism; political endorsements, use of accident photos, policies on letters and obituaries, valuations of weeklies, competing with other papers, starting a paper from scratch, relationships with broadcast and cable operations, staffing questions, employer-employee relationships, Postal Service problems and adapting to the digital age, which as you might guess covers a wide range of questions. The ethical questions have also included a discussion of the circumstances in which an editor or reporter should speak up at a public meeting. This is a rich trove of information and insights that COMJIG members should find useful in teaching, research and service.

We hope this will be the first step in a mutually beneficial relationship. COMJIG members could be invited presenters at ISWNE conferences, and ISWNE members could be panelists at COMJIG programs, possibly with travel support from AEJMC. Some or all COMJIG officers might receive ex-officio memberships in ISWNE. The ISWNE quarterly, Grassroots Editor, could become a refereed publication, or at least have one issue per year that is refereed mainly by COMJIG members. The weekly editors could get ahead of the curve through COMJIG research on digital media, and suggest topics for research. ISWNE members could review and contribute to syllabi of journalism classes, especially on weekly newspaper management, instruction in which may be spotty but could be more important at a time of creative destruction and a plethora of community journalism start-ups. We could have a continuing dialogue toward a theory of community journalism. These are just ideas right now, but illustrate the potential of the relationship. The ISWNE board agreed that representatives of the two groups should discuss these and other ideas.

A productive relationship should boost the membership of both groups, which are relatively small. ISWNE has about 250 members, COMJIG about 100. ISWNE doesn’t just want to increase its membership, but to increase awareness of the organization among journalism students (for whom a discounted membership fee might be arranged) and faculty. Likewise, COMJIG could be a source of useful research for weekly editors, who operate in a segment of the industry that is little researched. Those of us who are service-oriented would gain connections within the industry. ISWNE showed its interest and good faith by giving me travel support to attend its board meeting.

Journalism academics increasingly realize that community journalism is the most vibrant and diverse segment of journalism, and it deserves more attention. As Humphrey Bogart told Claude Rains, “This could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.”

What's the word?

Community journalists may be wondering what the Project for Excellence in Journalism will say when PEJ on Monday unveils what it terms "groundbreaking research that paints a new, more nuanced portrait than captured before of how people learn about their community." That quote comes from PEJ Director Tom Rosenstiel. He says the research is groundbreaking because of a paradigm shift in methodology of data collection. Instead of the traditional method of simply asking people where they got their news about their community, the researchers took a path less traveled. It wasn't exactly a "Eureka!" moment, but the new approach instead asked people to say where they got their info in 16 different areas, from the all-important weather report (according to Paul Simon, we get all the news we need on the weather report) to where is a good place to eat (that's right, restaurant reviews).

The research of the sublime to the mundane was done with help from Pew's Internet and American Life Project and the Knight Foundation.

"The results paint an entirely different picture of local news than we have seen before, one that pinpoints the role of the newspapers more completely versus television, the internet and even volunteer newsletters and word of mouth," Rosenstiel said. "We can see a whole ecosystem of local news and information. This should help different media understand and communicate their role."

The report can be found here on Monday.

A call for giving weekly papers their due

In the Summer 2010 issue of American Journalism, Beth H. Garfrerick issues a call for researchers to give weekly newspapers special separate recognition.

Unfortunately, full text is not available except through the expensive EBSCO database, and since it is in the Research Notes, it's not even in the limited PDF of abstracts available on the AJHA site. But a few excerpts:

The history of community weekly newspapers in the United States has been largely ignored in spite of the fact that for much of the twentieth century, weeklies far outnumbered dailies and served a larger population. I believe it is time that we give weeklies their due, appreciating and exploring the role that these strong local voices played in our country’s history and recognizing them as an important feature in the history of journalism.

She notes that journalism historians have traditionally applied a "developmental" context to weeklies, seeing them as inferior, "as nothing more than smaller, low-quality versions of their larger daily counterparts." But, she writes:

I would argue, however, that the professional, developmental perspective is not the proper one to apply in evaluating community weeklies. Because of the inherently “localized” nature of the community weekly, the accepted standards of “professional” practices in journalism do not apply in full to community weeklies. They differ in content, context, and purpose from daily newspapers, responding to the specific needs of residents in sparsely populated regions. Despite the fact that most journalism history works have considered weeklies and dailies together when referring to newspapers, weekly community newspapers deserve a category of their own and attention rather than avoidance when it comes to explaining the role of newspapers in everyday lives.

Journalism historians should consider community weeklies more seriously as an important part of journalism history because they reflect the cultural, political, and technological changes taking place in American life.

Garfrerick also discusses the differences between suburban and traditional community weeklies, and their different economic roles in their communities (traditional community weeklies sought to keep shoppers at home; suburbans benefited from ads from large retailers in shopping centers and downtowns) And she concludes:

Journalism historians should consider community weeklies more seriously because these small-town publications reflect in a more personal way the cultural, political, and technological changes experienced in American life. Thus, community weeklies are worthy of taking their respective places among the pages of journalism history. For without the story of America’s small-town newspapers,
that history remains incomplete.

It's a well-written explanation of why weeklies - and by extension community journalism - are important. If you can get your hands on it, I recommend reading it.

Leader in community journalism in New York dies

Below is the obituary of Vicki Simons, who was instrumental in the creation of the Center for Community Journalism at SUNY Oswego. I worked with her at the center for three years. An indicator of the kind of newswoman she was is that she wrote her own obituary.

Victoria A. Simons
Newspaper Editor/Owner


Victoria Alda Simons died of lung cancer on March 1 at her home in Ghent surrounded by family.

For 15 years she was editor of the twice-weekly Independent Newspaper, published out of Hillsdale and serving as official newspaper-of-record for virtually every government entity in Columbia and southern Rensselaer counties.

Following sale of the paper in 2001, she became a participating founder and first executive director of Columbia County Bounty, a non-profit that connects local farmers to local chefs and consumers to promote local agriculture. She played an integral role in expanding the Bounty model to other Hudson Valley counties, and last year coordinated Bounty’s signature “Taste of….” event.

In 1996 she was elected as the first woman to serve on the board of the Columbia County Agricultural Society, which puts on the annual Columbia County Fair. Among other responsibilities, she handled marketing, corporate sponsorships, and efforts to expand use of the fairgrounds for other events. She held the title of vice-president until she was named a board member emerita in 2009.

In 2005 she volunteered with Unite for Sight, providing simple eye care to Burmese refugees in Northern Thailand. Immediately following Hurricane Katrina, she spent a month as shelter director with the American Red Cross in Louisiana.

During her career as editor of The Independent, which she co-owned with her husband Tony Jones, the paper compiled an impressive record of growth, including acquiring an arts and entertainment publication, The Paper, and two antiquing guides. The newspaper was honored as the inaugural recipient of the Columbia County Chamber of Commerce’s Crystal Apple Award.

During her newspaper career, Vicki served as President of the New York Press Association during 1996-97, and also helped create the Center for Community Journalism at SUNY Oswego. In 1998 she received the National Newspaper Association’s Emma C. McKinney Award for outstanding leadership and service in the field of community journalism.

Outside her work, she was involved in a wide array of community service activities, including serving with Tony for 6 years as Columbia County Coordinators of the Fresh Air Fund. Lamark Murray spent seven summers with them and continues in touch 22 years later.

Additionally, she was a founder and first coordinator of Roe Jan Hospice. She served several years on the boards of United Way of Columbia & Greene Counties and Upper Hudson Planned Parenthood. She was a volunteer with International Friendship Exchange, a coach for the Ghent Junior Girls Softball League, and a long-time participant in the Leadership Columbia County media trainings.

A graduate of the Skip Barber Driving School, she was an avid golfer who served on the Board of the Columbia Golf & Country Club.

A journalist to the end, she catalogued her battle with lung cancer at http://vickicancer.blogspot.com

Born August 9, 1944 in St Louis, MO, she was the daughter of the late Henry N. and Harriette A. Simons, of Manhattan, who survives.

She graduated from Mary A. Burnham School before attending Cornell University and earning a B.A. in English Literature from Queens College.

She worked as a counselor in one of the country’s first licensed abortion clinics, Eastern Women’s Center in Manhattan, where she eventually became vice-president for operations, including affiliate clinics in Boston and Kansas City. She earned an M.P.A. in Health Care Administration from New York University, and was active in the founding of the National Abortion Federation.

She and her husband, who met in Marrakesh, Morocco in 1971, moved to Columbia County from Manhattan in 1977, settling first in Copake and moving to Ghent in 1992.

In Copake she worked as director of distribution for independent New York video producer Martha Stuart. She and her husband later founded MessageDesk in Hillsdale before purchasing the Roe Jan Independent newspaper in 1986.

In addition to her mother, Vicki is survived by her husband Tony Jones of Ghent; two daughters, Eleanor Jones Rossi (Robert) of Brooklyn, and Mara Simons-Jones of Austin, TX; sons Christopher K. Jones (Gwenda Marchione) of Ghent; Jayson H. Simons-Jones of Crested Butte, CO; D. Hamilton Simons-Jones (Annette) of New Orleans, LA; two grandsons, Casey and Christopher Jones of Ghent; two granddaughters, Charlotte and Arabelle Rossi of Brooklyn; brother F. Adam Simons of Los Angeles; and the family golden retriever Maxwell, a loyal companion during her illness.

A celebration of her life will be held at the Columbia County Fairhouse in Chatham at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, March 14. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Central Asia Institute, P.O. Box 7209, Bozeman, MT 59771 (www.ikat.org); or the Community Hospice of Columbia & Greene Counties, 47 Liberty Street, Catskill, NY 12414.

AP: Community papers doing pretty well

AP is the latest to weigh in on the meme that community papers, with less competition in their markets, are still doing pretty well.

"CNN is not coming to my town to cover the news and there aren't a whole lot of bloggers here either," said Robert M. Williams Jr., editor and publisher of The Blackshear Times in Georgia, about 75 miles from Jacksonville, Fla. "Community newspapers are still a great investment because we provide something you can't get anywhere else."

The AP also says that while larger newsrooms were cutting, an Inland Press study found smaller newsrooms spending more in 2008 than 2004.

But the recession has still hurt, with the small papers' revenue down 20%.

Jeff Ackerman, publisher of The Union in Grass Valley, Calif., says it well:

"Too many newspapers have been operating in an ivory tower for too long," said Ackerman, whose newspaper is based in a county with a population of about 100,000. "I answer my own phone. Some newspapers are just now trying to develop relationships with the local communities they cover. Ours has been going on for 144 years."

NRJ to feature special issue on "The Future of Community Journalism"

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: SPECIAL ISSUE OF NEWSPAPER RESEARCH JOURNAL FOCUSED ON "THE FUTURE OF COMMUNITY JOURNALISM"

The rapid changes in the newspaper industry have turned more focus in recent years to what appears to be one of the more stable branches of the newspaper business — small-circulation daily and weekly newspapers generally referred to as "community newspapers." In light of these developments, the Newspaper Research Journal is accepting research articles and conceptual/theoretical essays that will shed light on "The Future of Community Newspapers" for a special issue of NRJ (tentatively scheduled for the winter 2011 issue).

This call is for articles that provide insights into the modern role of community newspapers, as well as suggestions that would help community newspapers to adapt to the changing marketplace. Both social-scientific and cultural/critical approaches will be considered, as will mixed-methods approaches. Preference will be given to articles that draw upon and advance media theory, although insightful non-theoretical, descriptive studies will be considered.

Submissions will undergo NRJ's usual peer-review process, and must be original research that is not under review with any other publication (although modified conference papers will be considered). NRJ's published guidelines regarding length, citation style, and formatting of tabular material will apply. The deadline for submissions is Dec. 1, 2009.

Submissions should be sent as Microsoft Word files to guest editor Bill Reader of Ohio University. E-mail them to reader@ohio.edu.

No comfort in latest figures

Community newspapers like to point out that they are doing better than their big-city brethren. But there's only some comfort in the latest news out from the biennial news consumption survey by the Pew Center for the People & the Press.

From the Editor & Publisher story:

Weeklies, however, are doing a little better: "At a time when daily newspapers are losing readers, the audience for local weekly community newspapers has remained relatively stable. Currently, 33% say they read such newspapers regularly, about the same as in 2006 (35%) and 2004 (36%)....

"As is the case with daily newspapers, however, weekly community newspapers are much more popular with older people than young people. Four-in-ten of those 50 and older say they regularly a community newspaper, double the percentage of those 24 and younger (19%)."

Bottom line: Weeklies can't afford not to have online strategies, either, because that's where young readers are going. Yet some recent research from the University of South Carolina presented at a COMJIG session at the annual AEJMC conference showed that many still do not have a Web presence.

Case Studies of Courage in Community Journalism: A thoughtful editor inspires

Those who attended the panel discussion, "Case Studies of Courage in Community Journalism," at this month's AEJMC convention were treated to an inspiring commentary from Laurie Ezzell Brown, left, editor of The Canadian Record. After giving her thoughtful and practical tests for the journalism she practices in the Texas Panhandle weekly, she said, "The hardest part of community journalism is also the most rewarding part. We live within what we write about. Either we know what we report, or we are called on the carpet within hours, if not minutes, to account for our mistakes. We look our stories in the face every day. We meet them eye to eye. And if we deny their humanity, if we feel no compassion, then we have failed to grasp the story’s essence, and will fail the story’s telling."

Brown concluded, "At a time when we hunger for authenticity, for words which have meaning in our lives, for stories which are of us, about us — not thrust upon us — community journalists have both the privilege and the responsibility of beginning at the very root of the human experience, and of lifting it up, bringing it to light. Well done — and God knows, I’ve seen it done poorly — this is an honorable profession ... and a necessary one ... and that is what I would tell young students today." To read Brown's full remarks, click here.

Also on the panel were Bernard Stein, until recently the editor and co-publisher of The Riverdale Press in the Bronx, who talked about the editorial that prompted a firebombing of his weekly and his current project at Hunter College-CUNY, a student-produced newspaper for one of New York's poorest neighborhoods; and Homer Marcum, who edited and published The Martin Countian in Inez, Ky. He talked about his experiences in the Appalachian coalfield and two of his neighbors and mentors, Tom and Pat Gish of The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Ky., who were unable to attend the convention but were featured in video about their famed 50-year career. For a detailed report on the panel, click here.

Five more years!

Community Journalism Interest Group successfully "passed" its assessment by the AEJMC folks and you can now consider us part of the "permanent" landscape at AEJ. Here's what they said we should spend some time on:

• Define clearly what "community journalism" is. We may know it, but that doesn't mean everyone else in journalism and mass comm education does. We need a slogan, a label, so we can ....
• Get the word out about community journalism. In other words, market our IG. If community journalism is the hot trend, well, what are we doing to capitalize on that? And how are we letting the world know?
• Spend less time worrying about the number of research papers, and figure out what research we want to focus on. Perhaps it's in teaching, perhaps it's in public service (working with communities and news professionals). Focus our call for papers on a topic or 2.
• Make sure we document our activities beyond the convention .... national meetings we're part of, booklets we put together, etc.
• Understand that a lot of our diverse membership can come from our work with professionals (outside AEJ membership lists).
• Keep building the blog. Folks loved it.

Weekly editors' group charges batteries, gains perspective at conference

By Al Cross, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues

It’s a small group with an imposing name, an unpronounceable acronym and a nameless newsletter, but the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors showed at its annual conference last week that it’s a resilient and inspirational bunch of journalists who uphold the finest ideals of the craft.

A record 107 people attended the conference in the Black Hills, and as many as a third of them (including this writer) were at their first ISWNE meeting. And unlike most gatherings of editors and publishers, the conference included no sessions on how to sell more papers or more advertising, or even on how to deal with the Internet. The society is about journalism, and mainly about editorial leadership in community journalism.

It was founded in 1955 with the goal of improving editorial pages at weeklies, and the only awards it gives are for editorial writing, with one exception – an award for public service through aggressive reporting and interpretation of local government. But even that award requires reverence for language, for which its namesake, the late Eugene Cervi of the Rocky Mountain Journal, was known.

This year’s winner of the top editorial-writing award, Lori Evans of the Homer News in Alaska, echoed the comments of many other attendees when she said the conference recharged her batteries. “Our papers may be very small, but I believe our spirit may be larger than most of us imagine,” the editor of the Morris Communications paper told the awards-dinner crowd.

At the heart of each annual conference are editorial-critique sessions, originally intended to make up for weekly newspapers’ lack of editorial boards. They have expanded to critiques of the editorial and op-ed pages, and sometimes other parts of a paper.

The give and take is often among editors and publishers who know each other well, but they welcome new blood – essential in a group that has about 200 dues-paying members. “ISWNE is a small organization, more like a family than an organization,” said Dick Lee of South Dakota State University.

But even if that is still the case, it’s a far-flung family. Many of those at the conference were from Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland, and the group often meets outside the U.S. Years ago, a British editor endowed a bursary, or stipend, to bring an editor “across the pond” for the conference and give a speech. This year’s recipient was Moira Sleight, managing editor of the Methodist Recorder, an independent paper that is published for Methodists in the U.K. but has a global readership.

Sleight told the audience about her paper and the current state of independent community journalism in Great Britain, which she said may be threatened by “hyper-local” publications that major newspaper chains have started for “small rural areas and city neighborhoods,” typically with a free circulation of 6,000.

Even the British Broadcasting Corp. has gotten into the act, creating Web sites with similar agendas that threaten local papers’ sites, prompting strong lobbying by the newspaper industry against it. “No local paper has the resources to compete with an organization like the BBC,” Sleight said. “If it goes ahead, it will have a very negative effect on many community newspapers.” For Sleight's full prepared remarks, click here.

The learning experiences at ISWNE conferences are not limited to journalism. Tours and local presenters give attendees a taste of the locale, broadening editors’ perspective. The Black Hills gathering included an obligatory trip to Mount Rushmore, but an even more extensive visit to Crazy Horse, where a much larger memorial, this one to the legendary Native American leader, is slowly being blasted out of a mountain.

The group sat in on the most extensive interview ever granted by Ruth Ziolkowski, 81, widow of Korczak Ziolkowski, the sculptor who started the project in 1948 and died in 1982. The interview was conducted by Jack Marsh, diversity vice president of the Freedom Forum, who also moderated a panel discussion with Native American journalists.

In South Dakota, a state with a large Indian population, Marsh and Larry Atkinson of the Mobridge Tribune have created a journalism diversity program like none in any other state. Their annual conference at Crazy Horse attracts 150 or more Native American students and 35 to 40 mentors, and the American Indian Journalism Institute brings Native American students to University of South Dakota for one of four courses, then places them in internships.

“Native Americans are the most under-represented group in journalism,” Marsh said. Of the 58,000 journalists at U.S. daily newspapers, only 300 are identified as Native Americans, he said, and the number who are actually enrolled as tribe members – which requires at least 25 percent Indian blood in many tribes – is probably about 100.

Back at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, headquarters for the editors’ conference, one agenda item for the group’s business meeting was “Future of ISWNE.” The outgoing president, retired editor Harry Hix of Oklahoma State University, said the group is “making progress” after doubts about its survival a few years ago. Membership topped 200 this year, thanks in part to trial memberships and other recruitment efforts of Chad Stebbins, director of the Institute for International Studies at Missouri Southern State University, who is the group’s executive director.

Stebbins said the organization has improved its publications – a monthly newsletter and the quarterly Grassroots Editor magazine – and is providing more services, such as a hotline for members to ask each other questions about issues that arise at their newspapers, few of which are chain-owned. “The people who have sent in their questions have been amazed by the responses they’ve received,” often as many as 50 in a 24-hour period, Stebbins said.

The hotline also helps maintain a sense of community among the widely scattered membership. For rural journalists, often hampered by the isolation that defines rurality, ISWNE can provide valuable networking and inspiration. For more information, go to www.iswne.org.

(Originally posted to The Rural Blog July 2; for item on editorial awards, see July 1.)