Weekly editor retires after 47 years; she never worked anywhere else, but set national examples in rural journalism

Becky Barnes talked with John Nelson, retired executive editor
of Landmark Community Newspapers, at her retirment reception.

Today is Becky Barnes Day in Cynthiana, Kentucky, by mayoral proclamation. She surely deserves a day; she has given the town and Harrison County, population 19,000, most of her life.

Barnes has worked at The Cynthiana Democrat for 47 years, most of them as editor. It's the only place she's ever worked. Today she retires. Yesterday about 50 friends gathered at the Cynthiana Christian Church with her, to salute the service she has given. "I've loved every minute of it," she told the crowd, adding later, "It's been an amazing ride."

That it has. George Jacobs, the weekly's former publisher, recalled a Saturday in 1997 when the South Fork of the Licking River flooded, and how Barnes and the staff started working Sunday to publish a extra on Tuesday and the regular weekly edition that Thursday, then two weeks later another special section about the flood and yet another one about the local high school winning the regional basketball championship.

That special-section expertise came in handy in 2020, when Harrison County had Kentucky's first case of Covid-19 and local governments financed an extra about the still-strange disease that was mailed to every postal patron in the county, and wrote a column endorsing the use of masks. That nationally notable work helped Barnes win what Jacobs called "the Pulitzer Prize of Kentucky journalism," the Al Smith Award for public service through community journalism.

Barnes recalled crying as she took pictures of two elderly sisters being rescued from the flood after standing neck-deep in water all night. And everyone in the room laughed when she recalled getting a call on deadline from a woman who said, "My husband's on his way up there with his girlfriend" after being struck by lightning. Barnes recalled, "I went with him to his house, to see where the lightning came out ... through his foot and burned a hole into the linoleum in their trailer. 'He was sittin' on the terlet,' she said. So he had forever the nickname in our office as the Crispy Crapper."

Barnes said that when Jacobs and then-Editor Frank Warnock asked her to move uo from the mail room and composing room and be a reporter, she told them, "I don't know if I can go up to a complete stranger and ask them questions." She figured out how to do that, and "The questions sometimes got harder, but they had to be asked." In her final column, she thanked Jacobs, Warnock and many others, and said, "I have loved being the go-to person for all the town’s news."