Gazette-Mail's owner is in gas industry but praises reporter's work on it; says he seeks balance of readers' wants, needs

Reporter Ken Ward Jr.

When reporter Ken Ward Jr. drove five hours from Charleston, W.Va., to Richmond, Va., to hear oral arguments in former coal operator Don Blankenship's appeal of his conviction for violating health and safety standards at a coal mine that blew up, he met relatives of some of the 29 dead miners. He recalls, "One of them saw me and said, 'We knew the Gazette would be here.'"

Ward's voice cracked as he told that story to Brent Cunningham, executive editor of the Food & Environment Reporting Network, for a long story in Pacific Standard about the Charleston Gazette-Mail, the merger of the business-friendly Charleston Daily Mail, for which Cunningham reported, and the Charleston Gazette, whose unofficial motto was "sustained outrage," as defined by late publisher Ned Chilton. The story's protagonists are Ward, and Doug Reynolds, the Huntington lawyer who bought the paper in bankruptcy last year. Asked to describe his journalism philosophy, Reynolds said, "You've got to kind of balance what people want to hear with what they need to hear."

Paper owner Doug Reynolds
(Beckley Register-Herald photo)

"It wasn't 'sustained outrage,' but it wasn't the rapacious indifference of the vulture capitalists either," Cunningham writes. "Finding that balance, never easy, will be even harder in a newspaper business that continues to struggle. It will be harder still given that Reynolds is entangled in what could be the biggest economic shift in the state since industrialization: the pursuit of shale gas. . . . He is president and chief executive officer of Energy Services of America, which makes natural-gas pipelines. Brian Jarvis, another principal in the group that bought the Gazette-Mail, also is a two-way player. He is president of NCWV Media, which owns newspapers in the north-central part of the state, and also of Hydrocarbon Well Services, an oil and gas service operation."

Recently, Reynolds started Daily Mail WV, "which offers a mix of business-focused opinion pieces and features that is singularly bullish on the future of West Virginia," one of the nation's most rural states. He says he's doing it for revenue to support the newspaper. He also owns the Herald-Dispatch in Huntington and some smaller papers. A Democrat, served in the state legislature until making an unsuccessful race for attorney general in 2016.

As for Reynolds' best-known reporter, Cunningham writes: "If there is one person who embodies the complexity Reynolds faces in trying to strike the balance he seeks in the Gazette-Mail's coverage, it is Ken Ward Jr., the paper's 51-year-old environmental reporter. . . . Ward, as much as anyone, helped ensure that 'sustained outrage' continued to define Gazette journalism. He embraced Paul Nyden's belief that journalism's highest calling was not some feckless notion of 'objectivity,' but rather to follow the paper trail and expose the many ways the powerful exploit the powerless." (Ward and Nyden are recipients of this year, along with NPR retiree Howard Berkes, of the Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, tenacity and integrity in rural journalism, given by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, which publishes The Rural Blog.)

"In 2018, Ward was selected for the inaugural class of ProPublica's Local Reporting Network, an effort to support investigative journalism at smaller papers around the country by paying reporters' salaries for a year, helping them develop stories around a theme, and then co-publishing those stories," Cunningham writes. "Ward's project was to scrutinize the state's natural-gas boom from a provocative standpoint: Is West Virginia making the same regulatory mistakes with gas that it made more than a century ago with coal?" Reynolds called Ward's series "The most important thing we've done in my short time here. There's a huge change happening, and an incredible amount of wealth is being created. So the logical question is, where are we going to be at the end of all this?"

Asked about Ward's contention that the state could lose out on its fair share of that "incredible wealth" the gas boom is generating, as it did with coal, Reynolds said, "There is not a doubt in my mind that the state, in this current environment, will take less than other states are going to take." Why? "Because the people who run the gas industry have more influence here. The public decides the kind of people they want running the state. They want less regulation, less environmental regulation . . . No one has won elections in West Virginia lately saying they're going to make sure these mining permits are held to the highest standard."

Cunningham concludes, "Doug Reynolds is not Ned Chilton. But maybe Ned Chilton wouldn't be the same newsman today as the one we celebrate. After all, Chilton's conviction that a newspaper's pursuit of profit could and must coexist with its commitment to public service is a far more difficult proposition now. Reynolds is clear that he intends to profit from journalism. And he seems fine with the public-service end of that equation, as long as it can be monetized. 'The bottom line," he told me, "is I don't care if people are happy or sad about our coverage, as long as they aren't ambivalent.' Maybe that's the best we can hope for these days. I worry, though, that it won't be enough. West Virginia is at a crossroads. With coal in decline, the state has a chance to diversify its economy, to build a future that is environmentally sustainable, one in which opportunity and prosperity are more broadly shared. But for that to happen, it needs leaders who actually put the public interest first—and a vigorous watchdog to make sure they do."