Newspaper in Appalachian coalfield gave big play to Huffington Post story about coal miner's struggle

It's not uncommon for news outlets to share stories. What is uncommon about the story that ran on the front page of the Harlan Daily Enterprise was the byline of a Huffington Post writer on a story from remote southeastern Kentucky.

Stories from various media outlets can be viewed on HuffPost, but this time, the news flow from small outlets to a big one was reversed. "Also, any of the reluctance to take on the most powerful local industry, a reluctance that has often been seen in the region's newspapers, was absent," said Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, publisher of The Rural Blog.

The story, about coal miner Charles Scott Howard's fight against illegal underground-mine practices, ran on HuffPost Sept. 14 and was mentioned on The Rural Blog. Enterprise Editor Debbie Caldwell said when she saw the story, she asked its author, Dave Jamieson, for permission to run it with the understanding he and HuffPost would be credited. "I wanted to run the article because it involved a person from Harlan County and coal," Caldwell said. "The people of Harlan County enjoy reading about coal. Coal is our heritage."

The story ran over a two-day period in the Enterprise, in what Nieman Journalism Lab's Justin Ellis terms "a gesture of journalistic goodwill." Jamieson told Ellis no one at HuffPost "would have much hesitation about a print newspaper wanting to use a story like that." Ellis writes that HuffPost is often seen by some journalists as "the web's bad guy, a nemesis that subverts the norms of legacy media, soaking up other people’s work in the pursuit of money and the all-powerful pageview," but terms this example of one journalist helping another as "a neighbor borrowing a cup of sugar." Caldwell said sharing stories is simply standard operating procedure at the Enterprise: "I have always shared our stories with news outlets and I have never been denied when I've asked that in return. It has been the common practice and understanding to give a person credit for their work."