INSTITUTE FOR RURAL JOURNALISM IN ACTION

Institute, IRE begin Rural Computer-Assisted Reporting workshops 
 
Twelve journalists from five Appalachian states learned computer-assisted reporting or honed their basic CAR skills Oct. 21-23 at a workshop sponsored by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues and Investigative Reporters and Editors. IRE provided the training at the workshop at East Tennessee State University, where journalism program director Andrew Dunn is the Institute's academic partner. It was the first of two Rural CAR workshops funded by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.

Daniel Gilbert, left, with Mike Owens at the workshop

 
The R-CAR program was started with a gift from Daniel Gilbert, a Wall Street Journal energy reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for the Bristol Herald Courier in 2010 with his reporting on state and energy-company mismanagement of pooled natural-gas royalties in Southwest Virginia. He donated his $10,000 prize from another contest, the Scripps Howard Awards, to the Institute's endowment to create a fund that sends journalists to IRE's six-day CAR boot camp, at which he learned the skills that enabled him to do the series. The Scripps Howard Foundation matched his gift, and the state of Kentucky matched both, creating a $40,000 fund that generates enough earnings to sponsor two journalists each year. 

The Institute asked the foundation to fund two "mini-boot camps" for reporters in rural areas, the first one in the same area where Gilbert did his prize-winning work. The money flows through IRE, but the Institute will host a second R-CAR Mini-Boot Camp at its University of Kentucky headquarters in May 2012. Details of that one will be announced soon. 

Gilbert spoke to the group at dinner about his project and how the R-CAR fellows could use their new skills. "It changed the way I think about journalism and opened up a whole new room in my mind," he recalled. "It's a critical tool, and one that I use daily . . . to add empirical vigor to my stories." After nearly a year of work, which included learning the skills and cleaning the data, "in a fraction of a second" he got the main result he had been seeking: accounts where gas was being produced but no royalties were being paid. 

Asked how they can get time to do such projects in the face of demands for daily stories, Gilbert advised them to "get buy-in as early as you can" from editors, their supervisors, other departments and even other media outlets in a chain. And he said projects can be produced episodically, not as a big package that requires forsaking daily duties.

Journalists attending the first workshop were Mary Alice Basconi of ETSU, Dave Boucher of the Kentucky New Era in Hopkinsville, Spencer Dennis of the Staunton News Leader in Virginia, Laura Graff of the Winston-Salem Journal, George Jackson and Nate Morabito of WJHL-TV in Johnson City, Sharon McBrayer of the Hickory Daily Record in North Carolina, Patrick McCreless of The Anniston Star in Alabama, Mike Owens of the Bristol paper, Kate Prahlad of the Johnson City Press, Edmund Shelby of the weekly Beattyville Enterprise in Kentucky and Jeff Sturgeon of The Roanoke Times.  

Institute's friends say it is making a difference   

When the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues was conceived in 2001, and was made a reality in 2004, the term “rural journalism” was rarely heard in the United States. Rural media were lumped in with all of community journalism. We have changed that. 

As the last decade began, rural people were increasingly shortchanged in national and state policy debates, as their share of population declined, and the locally oriented news media in rural areas did little to bring those issues to the attention of their readers, listeners and viewers. We have helped change that, too, as we hope this report will illustrate. But don’t just take our word for it.

 “Over these past two decades, few academically based individuals or institutions have made a truly lasting impact upon our nation’s rural policy framework. The Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues is in this very small cadre,” says Charles W. Fluharty, president and CEO of the Rural Policy Research Institute. Fluharty calls The Rural Blog, the Institute’s daily digest of events, trends, issues, ideas and journalism, “one of the most critical institutional developments in our field over the last decade,” because of its impact “on the national rural policy and journalism communities.”

The Institute has been able to conduct a wide range of activities and have a national and even international impact because of generous support from individuals, foundations and the University of Kentucky, which embraced the idea from the start. Now it has granted tenure and promotion to Institute Director Al Cross, who is an Extension Title professor, the first tenured extension faculty member outside UK's College of Agriculture.

Perhaps ironically, the financial squeeze on metropolitan newspapers and other changes in the news media have made all the more important the Institute’s vision of helping rural America through journalism, because most major papers and broadcast outlets have abandoned coverage of rural areas. That has left a vacuum that rural news media must fill, covering issues and setting the public agenda in their communities. That is what we help them do. Many have shown their appreciation, as demonstrated by the testimonials in our latest comprehensive report.  If you are interested in giving to our endowment, making the Institute a permanent part of the landscape of rural America and the nation’s journalism, and have questions, please don’t hesitate to write Al.Cross@uky.edu or call 859-257-3744. 
     
Institute expands its work to help rural media adapt to change, help rural communities deal with issues  
 
The mission of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues is to help rural journalists set the public agenda in their communities, through strong reporting and commentary, especially on broader issues that have a local impact – education, the environment, economic development and health care – but are driven by events, institutions and individuals outside the local community. It was created primarily to be a public-policy center for rural journalists, rather than a program to teach the craft of journalism, but changes in society and the news media are threatening the ability of news outlets to cover the issues and do the accountability journalism that readers, viewers and listeners deserve.

So, the Institute has become a bit more craft- and business-oriented, to help rural news outlets embrace new technology and the new approaches that go with it.  In October 2009 the Institute presented “Storytelling: Narratives in Print and Pictures,” a workshop with three kinds of storytellers: Stephen G. Bloom, author and journalism professor at the University of Iowa and writer for The Oxford Project, a 2008 book of photographs and narratives of the people of a small town in Iowa, 25 years apart; photographer David Stephenson, who helped the Lexington Herald-Leader break new ground in storytelling with audio, video and still photography; and Amy Wilson, feature writer and roving rural reporter for the Herald-Leader and former prize-winning reporter for the Orange County Register in California. Stephenson then assisted Institute Director Al Cross with “Foothills in Focus,” part of a McCormick Foundation-funded program to help Appalachian newspapers embrace the Internet and multimedia. Four weekly newspapers in Kentucky’s Appalachian foothills participated, as did Cross’s students, who did stories for the newspapers.

 Many rural newspapers worry that the U.S. Postal Service will end Saturday mail delivery, which would not only hurt papers that publish on Friday or Saturday, but inconvenience their readers. On behalf of the National Newspaper Association, which opposes the move, Cross testified before the Postal Regulatory Commission, saying, “The mail is simply a more important part of the public and civic infrastructure in rural America, where those infrastructures are thinner and shakier, than in the rest of the nation.”

The Institute has continued to expand its geographic reach. It now has academic partners at 28 universities in 18 states, and Cross has made two trips to Alaska to speak to the annual meeting of the Alaska Press Club. In 2010 he also spoke to the 100th anniversary convention of the Panhandle Press Association in Texas. He also traveled to Africa and India; for more on those trips, see below.  The Institute remains actively engaged in issues in its home state. In October 2010 it co-hosted a seminar for Kentucky journalists on crime, sentencing and corrections, held as part of a national series by the Center on Media, Crime and Justice in the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.

Earlier in the year, the Institute became involved in an effort to encourage more philanthropy in Kentucky, mainly at the local level, through the creation of community foundations. Cross testified before a legislative committee in favor of a tax credit for donations to such foundations, which became law, and wrote a story for Kentucky newspapers about a study showing the great potential for such foundations in the next few decades, when billions in wealth will change hands. “Our policy is not to advocate for anything except news coverage and commentary, and the things that make it possible, but I thought this was a worthy exception to make because no one lobbied against the tax credit and community foundations have such tremendous potential to help the many poor, rural areas of our state,” Cross said.

 The Institute often provides advice and comment for metropolitan journalists reporting rural stories. Cross was among the University of Kentucky faculty members that ABC News consulted for its 20/20 documentary, “A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains,” and appeared on the program in a follow-up segment. The show provoked much criticism in Appalachia. In a column published by several newspapers, Cross found fault with certain elements of the program that appealed to viewers’ emotions, but rejected the most common complaint: that it to failed to show recent progress in the region. The producers made clear from the start that the show was not designed to be a comprehensive report. Cross said the report should encourage Appalachian journalists to take their own looks at such problems in their local communities, and some of them publicly agreed. The East Kentucky Leadership Foundation gave Cross and the Institute its annual Media Award. 
 
Institute stands for open government to support accountability journalism, and not only in the U.S.  

Sometimes the biggest issue in a community, a state or even a nation is the efficiency and integrity of its government, so the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues is a strong supporter of open government and freedom-of-information laws that help journalists hold officials, governments and institutions accountable. The cause has gone international. In May 2010, Cross answered a call to help journalists in the southern African nations of Botswana and Zambia, where press freedoms have come under threat recently. In Zambia, cadres of the ruling party have physically attacked journalists. In both nations journalists are calling for a Freedom of Information Act like the one in the U.S.

 Cross spoke out strongly for freedom of the press and open government, and in Botswana addressed and moderated a meeting that included journalists, academics and leaders of the ruling party and prompted what one observer said was a rare, “truly open exchange of ideas and opinions.” In Zambia, his speech won front-page coverage in the nation’s only privately owned daily newspaper. In Botswana, Cross visited most of the privately owned newspapers, discussed how they practice journalism, offered some points about American practice, and endorsed self-regulation of the news media as long as the only punishment is embarrassment. 

Cross brought to bear his many years of covering politics, legislation and government for The Courier-Journal of Louisville and smaller newspapers, and his 2001-02 presidency of the Society of Professional Journalists, a group focused on journalism ethics and freedom of information. “In both countries I told journalists in various venues that they needed to emphasize facts over opinion, to argue that a Freedom of Information Act would help them do that, and to make their arguments to the public at large,” Cross reported.

 A volunteer in the Botswana office of the Media Institute of Southern Africa, which sponsored Cross’s visit, wrote in an open letter, “I have had the opportunity to sit in on a number of events, conferences and presentations. This, however, was the most compelling and dynamic of events I’ve attended in the three years I’ve lived in Botswana. . . . It was decided that events similar to this should continue, and be held on a regular basis in order to improve the understanding of media freedom, freedom of information, and freedom of expression.”  

The Zambia visit was sponsored by the Zambian Institute of Mass Communications, two staff members of which attended the 2010 conference of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, which the Institute hosted with Eastern Kentucky University.  

The Institute’s other international foray has been to India and its very rural state of Orissa, which Cross and Anderson visited in January 2010 at the invitation of the Orissa State Volunteers and Social Workers Association. The group, the Institute and Berhampur University are developing a proposal for a project to train rural Indians in the basics of journalism so they can report on local issues and get them on public agenda beyond the village and district level.