








A digest of events, trends, issues, ideas and journalism from and about rural America, by the Institute for Rural Journalism, based at the University of Kentucky. Links may expire, require subscription or go behind pay walls. Please send news and knowledge you think would be useful to benjy.hamm@uky.edu.
Our search of the newspaper's Web site found no stories with the word "Obama." Another paper in Kaufman County, the 4,200-circulation Kaufman Herald, a weekly in the smaller, county-seat town of Kaufman, ran an 85-word, unbylined story on Obama's election, which noted that McCain got 67 percent of the vote in the county just east-southeast of Dallas.
UPDATE, Nov. 9: The Daily Herald of Sapulpa, Okla., didn't report Obama's victory though "One paragraph on the front page did report the majority of Creek County voted for McCain," reports Krista Flasch of KJRH-TV. "More than a dozen protesters stood in front of the Herald's downtown office Friday morning to get answers from publisher Darren Sumner."
Sumner agreed that the election was a big event, but said the 5,000-circulation, afternoon paper focuses on local news, and that's what readers expect. "I'm sure they read about it (the election) and watched it on TV, or got on the Internet and followed it, as many people did, and knew complete coverage before we were gonna go to press." (Read more) In 2000, Sapulpa was 3.8 percent black, 8,7 percent American Indian and 5.2 percent two or more races. Creek County's census had similar figures.
The state exit poll by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International showed the initiative passed because of support from evangelical or born-again Christians. Among those who so identified themselves, 65 percent voted for the ban. Among those who didn't, 48 percent voted for it. The ban got 61 percent of the rural vote, which accounted for 44 percent of the exit-poll respondents. It got 57 percent in suburbs and 51 percent in urban areas.
"Arkansas joins Utah, home to a large, conservative Mormon population, as the only two states with bans on unmarried straight or gay couples fostering or adopting children," AP reports. "Mississippi bans gay couples, but not single gays, from adopting children. Florida is the only state in the nation to ban gay adoption outright." (Read more)
White spaces will not solve all of the problems of rural acces. Benjamin Lennett noted in a June 2008 article for The Center for Rural Strategies that while "some of these wireless signals can travel up to 60 miles with point-to-point directional antennas, they generally work well only over very short distances or with a line of sight connection, making them vulnerable to physical obstructions such as dense foliage and hilly terrain." As a result, they may not be beneficial to areas like Appalachia. (Read more)