Citation of community-journalism book in N.Y. Review of Books leads to a dire observation from Rural Blog editor

By Al Cross
Director, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, University of Kentucky

The Feb. 27 issue of the New York Review of Books has a feature article, "Can Journalism Be Saved?" by Nicholas Lemann that cites 14 books, including The News Untold: Community Journalism and the Failure to Confront Poverty in Appalachia, by my esteemed colleague, Michael Clay Carey of Samford University. Here's what the dean emeritus of the journalism faculty at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism had to say about Clay's work:

Michael Clay Carey’s The News Untold, an ethnographic study of journalism in three small rural Appalachian communities, offers the hope that such papers could draw badly needed attention to poverty. His own careful research demonstrates how pathetically under-resourced these papers are. Carey interviews the owner of one of his small-town papers in the barbershop where he cuts hair three days a week, because the paper can’t support him full time; the paper’s editorial staff, consisting of one person who was hired through a temporary employment agency, is also part-time. Carey’s call for the papers to become less boosterish and more “inclusive” in their coverage is affecting, but with what resources would they undertake this? It would be possible to ask poor people to tell their own stories in such papers, but that wouldn’t be much different from starting a group conversation online. As [Michael] Schudson asks [in Why Journalism Still Matters], “What news items have the president or the Congress, governors or mayors, or corporate executives been forced by law or public opinion to respond to?” Outside of work produced by news organizations, “Little or none, I suspect.” In poor small towns, far more than in Washington, such reporting requires subsidy.

But there's no one to subsidize it. Not the audience, which is penurious, aging and migrating out. Not the advertisers, who have been savaged by big-box stores and the internet, and are disappearing. Not the philanthropies, who have never really understood rural America and sure as heck don't understand rural journalism. If that sounds like a gripe from someone who has failed to raise much money from them, it is, but it's also an admission of failure to educate them. Now they and rural America will learn the hard way; in the last three years, I have seen the finances of rural weeklies begin to take the same sort of hits from ad losses that their metro cousins took a decade ago. More than ever, they must make themselves essential servants to their communities, and make sure those communities understand their value.