Book about community journalism and poverty in Appalachia wins award from Appalachian Studies Association

Clay Carey and his book (Berea College photo collage)

The News Untold: Community Journalism and the Failure to Confront Poverty in Appalachia, is the winner of this year's non-fiction Weatherford Award, given by Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association. It sounds like must reading for journalists in Appalachia and rural America.

Author Michael Clay Carey "shows how the local media within Appalachia tends to favor stories boosting community business interests and tends to ignore poorer residents, seemingly seen as part of a natural process," the award announcement says. "This local media thereby reinforces the idea of an overarching 'culture of poverty' and displays a lack of awareness of inequality within Appalachia and between Appalachia and the rest of the country. By looking at these stories, or lack of stories, and by putting them in a larger theoretical frame, Carey suggests how the factors behind poverty, as well as possible solutions, might be described."

Carey is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Samford University in Birmingham. He was a reporter and editor at several newspapers in Tennessee for 10 years, and covered the state as a correspondent for USA Today.

Runners-up in the nonfiction category were John M. Coggeshall’s Liberia, South Carolina: An African American Appalachian Community, Karida L. Brown’s Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia, Tom Hansell’s After Coal: Stories of Survival in Appalachia and Wales.

The fiction award goes to Silas House of Berea for his newest novel, Southernmost. This novel takes on the story of a disastrous flood, which many Appalachian communities have dealt with over the years, and weaves in a treatment of religious faith and gay rights in rural America.

The Weatherford Awards honor books that “best illuminate the challenges, personalities, and unique qualities of the Appalachian South.” They commemorate W.D. Weatherford Sr., a pioneer and leading figure in Appalachian development, youth work, and race relations, and of his son, Willis D. Weatherford Jr., who was president of Berea.