In N.C., the $50 billion federal Rural Health Transformation Program won't eliminate health care deserts

North Carolina plans to use its RHTP money on hospitals
and clinics that are open. (KFF photo)

The $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program Congress created in 2025 to ensure the passage of President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act may sound like it's made to help closed rural hospitals or hospitals on the brink of shuttering, but in reality, the act strictly limits the amount of RHTP grant money struggling hospitals can use to stay afloat.

The RHTP funding restrictions haven't stopped midterm-stumping politicians in North Carolina from touting the program as a salve for rural hospitals in financial straits, report Sarah Jane Tribble and Amanda Seitz of KFF Health News. "Republican candidates in competitive midterm elections are casting the fund as a lifeline that will shore up critical rural health services across America."

In Martin County, N.C., where lawmakers face competitive midterm elections, some residents believe RHTP funds will help reopen their shuttered hospital, Tribble and Seitz report. "Martin County won’t get direct relief from Trump’s rural health fund — because its hospital isn’t open." The state plans to use its $213 million in RHTP funds on "existing health and social service organizations."

Without rural hospitals, residents in states like North Carolina, where most citizens live in rural counties, are especially vulnerable. During a medical emergency, when every second counts, rural residents must survive the travel distance to get medical care. Some don't make it. Tribble and Seitz explain, "Martin County does not have paramedics on its ambulances, and it can be 20 miles or more to the closest — and often overcrowded — emergency rooms."

Brian Floyd, the chief operating officer for ECU Health, which operates out of Greenville, N.C., told KFF, "It’s a real healthcare crisis that has already proven itself to have lost lives that perhaps didn’t have to be lost. They just want to not die because there’s nowhere to go when you have an emergency."

Helene flooded an Appalachian town’s Post Office; residents are fighting to get it reopened.

Swannanoa residents started a mail campaign to reopen
their P.O. (Photo by Anne Vilen, The Daily Yonder)

Residents from flood-torn Swannanoa, N.C., might be down, but they're not out. When Hurricane Helene pummeled western Appalachia in the fall of September 2024, it flooded the town's Post Office, grocery store and hardware shop, reports Anne Vilen for The Daily Yonder. 

More than six months later, all three businesses remain closed, leaving residents driving longer distances for pretty much everything. For many Swannanoans, living without a Post Office is unacceptable, so they're fighting to get it reopened.

In May, the town's brewery, Terra Nova, doubled as an activist meeting room where long-time Swannanoa resident Cynthia Hollar and "more than 50 of her neighbors gathered," Vilen writes. "To write hundreds of postcards to postal officials as well as state, local, and federal representatives who might sway postal service decision makers to bring the Swannanoa Post Office back home."

Dan Slagle, a former post office employee, explained the impact of not having a post office can have on rural residents. He told Vilen, "People have to drive 26 miles round trip to get their mail, their prescriptions, their social security checks, or packages.”

Vilen adds, "The Swannanoa Post Office and its PO boxes served hundreds of folks who live miles up steep mountain roads or on properties where mailboxes, bridges, and access roads went down the river the night of the hurricane."

Swannnanoa residents fear their Post Office won't reopen because the federal government doesn't have to reopen it. Vilen explains, "Under normal circumstances when the U.S. Postal Service decides to close a post office, it must allow for a public comment period and a possible appeal to the Postal Regulatory Commission. However, after a natural disaster, the emergency suspension of service can be extended to a permanent closure."

In Swannanoa, the Post Office was "the starting point for directions to houses without numbers and the water cooler for neighbors eager to swap news," Vilen writes."Town residents claim bureaucracy and red tape are the worst part of disaster recovery."

Slagle told Vilen, "You’re really not a town without a post office. It’s kind of a community hub."

Six months after Hurricane Helene, North Carolina is still trying to measure the loss while pushing recovery efforts

Flooding from Hurricane Helene wiped out homes and roads.
 (Adobe Stock photo)

North Carolina lawmakers are pushing Hurricane Helene recovery efforts forward despite not knowing the extent of Helene's damage or how much and when federal aid will be available. Brady Dennis of The Washington Post reports, "Officials seem determined to move quicker after Helene and avoid the mistakes of the past, even as North Carolina faces the most massive disaster recovery in its history."

Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina six months ago, leaving a swath of decimation caused by extreme rain, flooding and mudslides. More than 100 people died and thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed. Flooding "wiped out bridges, roads, businesses and farms," Dennis reports. The storm left "an estimated $60 billion of economic ruin in its wake."

State officials still don't know how much federal aid will "ultimately arrive and in what quantity, even amid President Trump’s promises to speed help to the region," Dennis adds. "FEMA has helped more than 157,000 families and distributed $402.5 million to storm victims in North Carolina. . . . But the larger sums of funding meant to fuel long-term rebuilding that often follow large-scale disasters, historically takes months, if not years, to be fully implemented." 

The storm's scope of catastrophic damage explains why recovery has been slow. "Disaster recovery is almost always frustrating, tedious and too costly for most states and localities to bear without a significant assist from the federal government," Dennis explains. "Lawmakers continue to hash out the final details of the state’s most recent — though almost certainly not its last — Helene aid package. If passed, it will include more than $500 million to help struggling farmers, jump-start a home building program and repair private roads and bridges."

Even with that progress, the state will need billions to get back on its feet. Gov. Josh Stein’s deputies admit "that serious hurdles remain," Dennis reports. "Among them: the staggering damage Helene inflicted, the lack of data in some counties about the actual number of damaged and destroyed homes and the difficulties posed by rebuilding amid mountainous terrain."

Cadaver dogs and their handlers comb through piles of debris to find people lost during Hurricane Helene

Cadaver dog handlers are always looking for ways to keep their dogs
interested during a long search. (FEMA photo via NC Health News)

Hurricane Helene's torrential rains and flooding across western North Carolina didn't just decimate homes and businesses, it swept people away, leaving many communities still searching through rubble for lost loved ones. To help find the missing, cadaver dogs and their handlers are painstakingly working through debris and high waters.

"Highly trained dogs have played a crucial role in finding victims’ remains; one canine-assisted search team from Guilford County recovered 20 bodies in the immediate aftermath of the storm," reports Jaymie Baxley of NC Health News. "These specialist canines and their handlers are likely to find more casualties in the weeks to come, according to cadaver dog expert Cat Warren." Baxley spoke with Warren about the added challenges cadaver dogs and handlers face after natural disasters. Their edited Q&A is below.

Baxley: What are some of the unique challenges involved in training a dog to detect human remains — especially in disaster scenarios like hurricanes?
Cat Warren: Disaster work adds bunches of challenges on top of just finding the scent of human remains. It takes absolute experience for the dogs and handlers to work in these situations.. . . In a tragedy like this, you also have so much competing odor. . . . Many times, the dogs will work for hours and hours without finding anything.

Baxley: How do factors like flooding, mudslides or dense forests affect the ability of dogs to detect remains after events like hurricanes?
Cat Warren: But in these cases, the dog may not be able to get close enough or the scent is so fractured that the dog is somewhat uncertain. That’s when the handler is going to tell people who are flanking them, 'Look, the dog showed real interest here.' The dog may not give his final indication because that body or that scent is underneath a pile of debris, so it’s then up to the searchers to go in and search that pile of debris.

Baxley: How would you describe a typical search operation involving cadaver dogs in disaster-hit areas? Is there a timeline for the work?
Cat Warren: It’s grim, but the timeline for this is going to be months because there’s such a huge area to search.. . . Officials are still gathering accounts of where people went missing, and we have a homeless population in Asheville that is probably very much still unaccounted for. 

Baxley: What improvements or advancements have you seen in cadaver dog training that could enhance future search and recovery efforts?
Cat Warren: Generally, training over the past 20 years or so has improved at the highest levels because people have a greater understanding of how positive reinforcement and motivation can be used to train dogs in a really disciplined way. . . . One of the things that handlers are doing all the time is figuring out how to keep these dogs motivated over long search periods.

For handlers, some of the feelings may come afterward. These guys are doing really, really hard work. It is exhausting, and it takes a real physical and emotional toll. . . .

Editor in North Carolina had to balance his storm-reporting duties with his other roles as a firefighter and EMT

Moss Brennan

Moss Brennan is editor of the Watauga Democrat newspaper in western North Carolina, and he also is a volunteer firefighter and an emergency medical technician. As Lauren Watson reports for Columbia Journalism Review, Brennan had to balance those roles as the flooding and winds from Helene led to extensive damage and hundreds of emergency rescues where he lives and works. 

In addition to his job at the Watauga newspaper, Brennan also is executive editor of Mountain Times Publications, which serves three rural counties in the region. 

As Watson reported, "In the days leading up to the arrival of Hurricane Helene last week, he was preparing for what he imagined would be some flooding and structural damage — possibly a handful of dramatic rescue missions — to report on. But he never anticipated the breadth of devastation and destruction that Helene would ultimately bring."

When the storm hit, Brennan first focused on his emergency services duties. “'If there is somebody that is hurt or their life is on the line, that comes first, before the story,'' he told Watson. "Balancing the two roles can be tricky ('I’m human, so it’s not perfect'), but Brennan also recognizes the responsibility that comes with his newspaper job."

Brennan told Watson: "I oversee the papers in Ashe, Watauga, and Avery counties, and during the week, we were the only outlet able to offer regular updates and reports to those communities."

As he delivered papers to people throughout the devastated communities, he found them welcoming of trustworthy information the newspapers provided. "I met people who told me that this was the first news they had gotten since last week.

"The Watauga County emergency services also asked for a bunch of papers so that their own damage assessment teams could give them out to people who lost everything and had no information about what was going on."

Newspapers, radio stations serve as a ‘lifeline’ for residents after major storm damage from Helene

The Henderson Lightning was chock-full of storm
information and free. (Henderson Lightning photo)

In the aftermath of terrible storm damage in the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida, many residents found themselves in dire need of reliable information about the damage and recovery efforts.

Local media organizations stepped up with round-the-clock radio broadcasts, updated information online and even free newspapers.

The Hendersonville Lightning, based about 25 miles south of Asheville, N.C., offered its newspaper for free to readers and packed its paper and website with storm-related coverage. As the community began its recovery efforts, The Lightning’s coverage included updates on power restoration, information about how to get rid of debris and details on which health centers were open and which ones were still closed.

In a thoughtful note to readers on Oct. 2, Editor Bill Moss explained why they were giving readers access to the newspaper for free and how else they were trying to navigate in the aftermath of the storm.

"Amid all the hardship and challenges in the post-Helene world, the last thing we want to ask people to do is dig for four quarters to get news of this historic disaster," Moss said. "We've unlocked racks at six locations in and around the city. These are the only racks that will be filled this week. For the sake of our distribution team, first responders and utility crews, we want to avoid adding traffic on hazardous roads."

After letting readers know details about where to find the free newspapers, Moss also wrote: “Subscribers are welcome to grab one, too, as we don't know when they'll get home delivery via U.S. mail of this week's issue” . . . . “Bear in mind, too, of course, that we're continuously posting updates on the website on the disaster, recovery, how to get help and more.”

Brian Stelter of CNN wrote about how the marathon broadcasts at radio stations in and around Asheville served residents with vital information and comforting reassurance.

“As communications across the region remained severed for many, the voices on the radio became a lifeline for locals in dire need of reliable information; sharing updates on road closures; opening the phone lines to anyone with working wireless or landline phones; and reassuring listeners that help is on the way from government organizations and volunteer groups,” Brian Stelter of CNN reported.

“WWNC, the oldest station broadcasting in western North Carolina, and six other stations owned by iHeart came together to simulcast their coverage of the weather emergency, host Mark Starling told CNN."

And “Blue Ridge Public Radio provided live coverage on the radio and online, including lists of 'who to contact' for help with missing persons and power outages.”

In new 'Southern Storytellers' series, N.C. author David Joy bemoans changes in his rural county; locals can't afford it

Author David Joy shares thoughts about his changing home. (PBS image)

Tracing a Southern county's history and landscape is one thing, "but drawing a singular image of our people, that's when things get difficult, or rather impossible," reflects David Joy in PBS's new "Southern Storytellers"series, which celebrates Southern identity with contemporary creators of literature, music, film, and TV.

In Western North Carolina, Joy takes viewers into backwoods hemmed with raspberry bushes laden with fruit and a cool spring for trout fishing. He holds up a small trout and says it's genetically different than all other brook trout. An Appalachian native, you might say.

But to Joy, the area's way of life is threatened. "Jackson County, North Carolina, is not the coalfields of Kentucky or West Virginia; coal isn't destroying our mountain tops; ours are threatened by unrestricted land development," he says. "There are millionaires hitting golf balls on Tom Fazio-designed golf courses just over the ridgeline from people surviving on mayonnaise sandwiches."

Against a backdrop of cedared woods, Joy and best friend Raymond head out to hunt deer and mull the the price of change. Raymond tells Joy he is not sure the area can reach beyond its current culture and get back to where it was. Raymond tells Joy, "I don't know if there's gonna be enough young people left to continue on. . . . Young people leave here to have a better lifestyle or to be able to afford a house. . . . All the local people will be displaced by going to fill a job, or get priced out because they can't afford to be able to stay here, and I think it's an inevitability. This culture, this place, will be gone." Joy nods, saying, "It's hard for other people to understand . . . the finality of that, that displacement." 

Sitting on his back steps surrounded by spring blooms, Joy reads a piece from his novel When These Mountains Burn: "When the paper mill shut down and when the old plastic plant at the south end of the county left, the very fabric that once defined the mountains fragmented and was replaced with outsiders who built second and third homes on the ridgeline and drove the property values up so high that what few locals were left couldn't afford to pay the taxes on their land."

Joy credits his Southern upbringing with giving him a place to hang every story. Asked to describe the South, he says, "I think what I want people to recognize about the South is that it's a very, very complex place. . . full of a whole lotta beauty and a whole lot of bad things as well. And I don't want to lose a bit of it."

'I don't know if the virus will kill me or it's going to be my rage" at anti-maskers, asthmatic clerk in rural store says

Lori Wagoner at her workstation (Photo by Eamon Queeney, The Washington Post)

Lori Wagoner, 63, never expected that her job as a retail clerk in a small North Carolina town would become so dangerous. But as she told The Washington Post for a July 18 package of 12 oral histories from the pandemic, covid-19 has drastically changed her job responsibilities.

Wagoner told reporter Eli Saslow that she has asthma, and if she got the novel coronavirus, she’d have an increased chance of developing a severe version of its disease. Thus, North Carolina’s mask mandate is crucial to her health, and she says about 95 percent of her customers have followed signs outside the store and worn a mask, but many of those who don’t have not been kind to her. Many are coastal visitors from cities: "They come here to have a good time and maybe they’re drinking. Some of them would see our signs, open the front door, and just yell: “F--- masks. F--- you.” Or they would walk in, refuse to wear a mask and then dump their merchandise all over the counter."

She relayed one encounter that spiraled downhill: “He rolled his eyes and ignored me, so I knew where it was going. . . . He said he just wanted to buy a drink. I said, ‘Okay, that means I will get your drink while you wait outside and I will bring it to the door.’ But he’s still moving into the store, and I’m trying to stay in front of his path and keep him from going down the aisle. He said, “Come on, lady. I just want water. I said: I’m tired of this. Just leave the store now.’ He kept moving toward me, yelling, ‘ADA exemption, ADA exemption’,” referring to the Americans with Disabilities Act that protects people with disabilities -- but not mask mandates.

“And now my body was starting to shake. It was fear and so much anger. My co-worker was yelling for him to get out, and another customer started yelling, and finally he stomped around for a while and then turned back outside. We locked the front door and my co-worker and I went back into the storage room. We sat there and sobbed.”

Now, at this small store on the coast of North Carolina, in a town Wagoner apparently didn't want to name, a customer has to ring a doorbell to enter. And next to her, behind her register, is pepper spray. With the local sheriff’s office refusing to help enforce the mandate, she said, she is now acting as enforcer of the mask mandate and ultimate defender of her own life; a retail clerk intimately trained in an array of behaviors from the public in response to a scientific and public-health effort.

“I don’t know if the virus will kill me or if it’s going to be my rage,” she said. “Sometimes I want to cut America into different pieces, and all these anti-maskers can live together, and we’ll see how it works.”

Some in South wary of plans to trim voting precincts

When a Republican member of the elections board in Cleveland County, North Carolina, explained the plan to consolidate five voting precincts into two, it sounded logical and helpful. He spoke of wheelchair access and $10,000 in savings every election. However, some African Americans are skeptical about the true reasons behind the change, Richard Fausset writes for The New York Times. (NYT graphic)

Those precincts have a lot of black voters who often vote Democratic. "We know that this is part of a bigger trend—a movement to suppress people's right to vote," said Rev. Dante Murphy, president of the Cleveland County branch of the NAACP.

The same issue has arisen in a number of communities, especially those in the South, "where changes to election laws no longer require advance approval from the federal government after a year-old Supreme Court ruling voided a key section of the Voting Rights Act," Fausset reports.

Voting-rights advocates say such changes and some new state laws that limit ballot access and require voters to show picture IDs add up to a deliberate effort to reduce voting by minorities, Fausset reports, while supporters of the changes say the new laws protect against voter fraud and can even be more cost-effective. Though in many places the obvious racism of the 1960s is mostly a thing of the past, "what often lingers is a racial mistrust that can make the moving of a polling place from a fellowship hall to a public park seem innocent to some, sinister to others," Fausset notes.

Francis X. De Luca, president of the Civitas Institute, a conservative North Carolina think tank, said, "This is something that local people can work out." However, voting-rights advocates and usually Democrats—whose success in states such as North Carolina depend on good black voter turnout—are less trusting. Others say local election changes are difficult to follow because they no longer need to get approval from the U.S. Justice Department.

The NAACP's Murphy said the reduction in polling places would cause longer lines, which might discourage some voters, and people might show up at the wrong location. Election-board member Alan Langley voiced surprise that anyone would think the proposal "was based on racial, or even partisan, motives," Fausset reports.

100+ arrests made in Appalachian poaching sting

http://www.eenews.net/Greenwire/2013/02/25/11

N.C. couple who started a paper 2 years ago and immediately went after corruption win Gish Award

Jonathan and Susan Austin of the Yancey County News in Burnsville, N.C., are the winners of the 2012 Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism, awarded by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, which publishes The Rural Blog. (Photo by Bill Sanders, Asheville Citizen-Times)

The award is named for the couple who published The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Ky., for more than 50 years. Tom Gish, who died in 2008, and his wife Pat were the first recipients of the award. “The Austins showed courage in starting a second newspaper in a one-newspaper town, in January 2011, then demonstrated courage, tenacity and integrity by reporting on local corruption,” Institute Director Al Cross said.

The weekly paper reported in its first edition about a state investigation of vote-fraud allegations, then analyzed records obtained from investigators to report that the county had an unusually high number of absentee ballots, many of which were witnessed by employees of the county sheriff’s department and cast by criminal defendants, some of whose charges were soon dropped.

The paper also revealed that the county's chief deputy, the arresting officer in several cases in which the suspects immediately voted and were given leniency, was also pawning county-owned guns for personal gain. He has resigned and pleaded guilty to failing to discharge his duties. The vote-fraud investigation continues. For a story about the Austins from the Asheville Citizen-Times, click here.

Ben Gish, son of Tom and Pat Gish and editor of The Mountain Eagle, serves on the award committee. He said, “Even though it occurred a few decades apart, I get the same feeling from looking at the examples of their work as I do when I look at copies of the Eagle when my parents were just getting started in the late 1950s.”

Upon getting the news, Jonathan Austin said, “We are humbled and honored to receive the Gish Award. Good journalists can spend their careers doing important work, yet they may never receive recognition other than an occasional tip of the hat from their neighbors. To be recognized by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues for our work reporting on the events in Yancey County is especially nice because the institute strives to strengthen the small, rural media in Appalachia." (Read more)

Editor of 1½-year-old, prize-winning weekly tells how and why

The Yancey County News, a weekly founded just last year, recently won two major journalism awards  -- the E.W. Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and the Ancil Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism.  On the Burnsville, N.C., newspaper's masthead are only two people, Jonathan and Susan Austin. In a Q&A with The Awl, an online journal, reporter Dan Cooper asked Jonathan Austin, right, about the prestigious prizes, both awarded for stories reporting on corruption in the county’s official channels. In one series, the paper revealed that the county’s deputy-sheriff had pawned county-owned firearms for personal gain; another series uncovered absentee ballot fraud, voter coercion, and voter anonymity rights violations in the county.

Austin told Cooper that he came to Yancey County after working for 30 years for various media companies and after a family decision was made that he should come and live with his aging father and stepmother. He said he also had read the competition and knew there was a lot of room for some better news coverage in the county. As for the awards, he said he was just trying to write "about what was going on. In many ways, it's just what you learn in Journalism 101. It's not investigative aggressive; it's showing-up aggressive. It’s covering as many of the items of what goes on in a community in any given week. We're storytellers so when I’m talking to journalists, I try and remind them that we come up with scripts for the things we don’t necessarily want to tell our grandma and I remind them — who, what, when, where and why. That community I felt didn’t have anything aggressive enough.”

His guiding principles of community journalism: He relies on "almost 30 years of experience; that’s where the editorial process gets going, where the rubber hits the road. As Garrison Keillor would say, "that’s righteous time." I try and subscribe to the theory that everything is important to someone. I doubt that anyone not in school bothers to read the lunch page but I bet they understand the purpose for it being there."

USDA closes 125 of 131 Farm Service Agency offices as planned

The United States Department of Agriculture announced its decision on consolidation of its Farm Service Agency county offices, moving to combine 125 of the 131 offices with other USDA service centers, as required by the 2008 Farm Bill. Public meetings were held within 30 days of the original announcement in every county affected by the proposal. In the USDA announcement, the department states that FSA will provide farmers and ranchers affected by consolidations an opportunity to choose the most convenient neighboring county office to conduct their future business. In addition, all employees in a closing office will be provided an opportunity to continue their work with FSA. Under the USDA's Blueprint for Stronger Service, the agency will also close or consolidate 259 other domestic and seven foreign offices.

The six proposed county offices that will continue operating are: Lafayette County, Ark.; Boulder County, Colo.; St. Mary Parish, La.; Pamlico County, N.C.; Mayes County, Okla.; and York County, S.C. A complete list of FSA county offices affected by this decision can be obtained by clicking here.

N.C. community colleges may bar admission to students who seem threatening

North Carolina's community college board is considering whether to allow schools to bar admission to students who appear to pose a threat, reports Emery P. Dalesio for The Associated Press. The new admission policy has been in the works since August and was a result of the shootings by a student at Virginia Tech in 2007. It has taken on new urgency since the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords by suspect Jared Loughner, a former Arizona community college student. North Carolina's community college system is one of the largest in the U.S. The state has a community college in most of its counties.

The current policy for the 17-campus University of North Carolina system does not bar people who present possible health or safety threats, writes Dalesio. How admissions officers could screen potential applicants among the more than 800,000 students statewide isn't clear. "There may be the tell-tale sign that an admissions person might recognize that this person might be a threat to that campus," said Stephen Scott, president of Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh. Community colleges are a major factor in rural areas.

Disabilities advocates and the American Civil Liberties Union are concerned the lack of clarity in the policy could open the door to discrimination against "people who are not a danger because they make people or they make administrators uncomfortable," said Sarah Preston of the ACLU. Preston cites those who suffer from HIV/AIDS as a potential example. (Read more)

Rural Southern writer Reynolds Price dies

Reynolds Price, a writer known for his "vivid evocation of rural Southern life," died Thursday, in Durham, N.C.  William Grimes reports for the New York Times that Price's "novels and stories about ordinary people in rural North Carolina struggling to find their place in the world established him as one of the most important voices in modern Southern fiction." Price died of complications from a heart attack.

His first novel, published in 1962,  was "A Long and Happy Life," the tale of Rosacoke Mustian, a young woman desperate to clarify her relationship with an untamable boyfriend, Wesley Beavers, writes Grimes. The opening sentence of the novel: "Just with his body and from inside like a snake, leaning that black motorcycle side to side, cutting in and out of the slow line of cars to get there first, staring due-north through goggles towards Mount Moriah and switching coon tails in everybody’s face was Wesley Beavers." Harper's Magazine published the entire novel as a supplement.

For more than 50 years, he taught writing and poetry at Duke University where he had studied with Eudora Welty. His first class at Duke included a promising 16-year-old named Anne Tyler, whom he encouraged to write. "He seemed genuinely joyous when we did the slightest thing right," said Tyler.  (Read more)

New Yorker writer Ian Crouch posts a remembrance of Price, who had been his professor at Duke: "He was a proud member of the university family ... he lamented the occasionally limited emotional and intellectual range of the young people among whom he lived and worked, bridling at their predilection for drunken parties, and taking a special pride, it seemed, in horrifying his students by sharing his distaste for Duke’s men’s basketball. ... He was a commanding presence in an era when fewer and fewer professors are able or willing to strike fear in the hearts of their students. He required attendance, participation, and most of all, preparation." (Read more)

Cookes expand newspaper holdings from Fla. Keys by buying 13 Cox papers in North Carolina

In a testament to the relative health of the community newspaper business, Cox Enterprises Inc. will sell three daily and 10 weekly newspapers in North Carolina to Cooke Communications LLC, a privately held firm headed by John Kent Cooke, son of the late billionaire Jack Kent Cooke, for an undisclosed price. (UPDATE, July 27: Tom Heath of The Washington Post estimates a sum of $30 million to $35 million.)

The dailies are The Daily Reflector of Greenville, circulation 21,000; the Rocky Mount Telegram, 14,000; and The Daily Advance of Elizabeth City, 10,000. The weeklies are the Beaufort-Hyde News of Bellhaven, the Bertie-Ledger Advance of Windsor, The Chowan Herald of Edenton, the Duplin Times of Kenansville, The Enterprise of Williamston, the Farmville Enterprise, Perquimans Weekly of Elizabeth City, the Standard Laconic of Snow Hill, the Times-Leader of Ayden-Grifton and the Weekly Herald of Robersonville.

Cooke's eldest son, John Kent Cooke Jr., "will move to the Greenville area to become president of Cooke Communications North Carolina and publisher of The Daily Reflector," the Telegram reports. His company "owns The Key West Citizen – 8,900 circulation daily, 9,749 Sunday – a number of weekly newspapers stringing the Florida Keys and Internet publishing business floridakeys.com." The elder Cooke was "part owner of the Los Angeles Daily News, the Washington Redskins and The Chrysler Building in New York City, among other businesses."

(Neil Johnston of Cox, John Kent Cooke and John Kent Cooke Jr. in the Reflector newsroom. Reflector photo by Greg Eans) The elder Cooke told Reflector employees, "Newspapers are not dead. They’re not even ill. ... I’m not worried in the least about the future of this business, particularly here in North Carolina. It’s going to be difficult at times, but we will be successful because we have the same attitude that the Cox people have and that is we’re going to concentrate on our local news,” the Reflector reports. Meanwhile, "Paul A. Clarin, who has served as Cooke Communications corporate chief financial officer since 2001, has been named publisher of The Key West Citizen and accompanying weekly community newspapers in the Florida Keys." Heath writes, "Because there are no local TV stations, Cooke has the turf to himself. He said his 425 employees, including reporters and editors, can outhustle the radio stations and anyone else trying to muscle in." And he quotes leading industry analyst John Morton: "Going forward, it's going to be the smaller papers that do reasonably well."

Atlanta-based Cox said last year that it would sell most of its newspapers in Colorado, North Carolina and Texas, The Associated Press notes. The company announced last week that it would sell the Grand Junction Sentinel and the Waco Tribune-Herald, and is still trying to sell others in Texas. It previously sold the Lufkin Daily News and The Daily Sentinel of Nacogdoches. UPDATE, Aug. 5: Cox takes its Austin paper off the market.

Southern Rural Development Initative is closing next week, after 16 years of rural advocacy

The Southern Rural Development Initiative, a non-profit organization aimed at combating poverty and racism in the South and creating economic opportunities in rural communities, will be closing next Friday after 16 years. The organization not only helped communities find areas where economic development were possible , but built "connections among them and to federal and national resources, both public and private," writes Todd Cohen for Philanthropy Journal.

The problem "wasn't as much driven by the economy as by the priorities in philanthropy at this point," says Alan McGregor, the executive director of the Raleigh-based organization. "As we got more focused on a strategy and more focused on community-based organizations, we seemed to have fewer places to go for money," he says. "There are fewer funders who have that specific focus, working on grassroots community-based change in poor rural places." (Read more)

Recession raises use of local libraries, but also costs them state funding

"An economic crunch has caused many people nationwide to entrust in an old standby for entertainment and information: libraries," reports David Allen of The Shelby Star in North Carolina. When people can no longer afford to pay for Internet access or buy new books, they turn to their local library.

"When times are tough, that's when library usage is the busiest," Cleveland County Memorial Library Director Carol Wilson told the Star. At her library the number daily visitors is up by 200 hundred people from 500 to 700. "Public computer usage is up 25 percent, despite people being guaranteed they can utilize the computers longer," Allen writes. People are using their computer time to search for jobs and fill out applications online.

However, the recession also means that funding for libraries may be cut. North Carolina has cut the Cleveland County library by $161,000 and more cuts could be coming. When use is up and money is down, libraries depend heavily on donations and fewer purchases of new materials. (Read more; hat tip to Al Tompkins of The Poynter Institute.)

73 arrested in cockfighting ring in North Carolina

Officials in a rural community in central North Carolina cracked down on a large cockfighting operation last weekend. The Randolph County Sheriff's Office arrested 73 people at a tournament Saturday near Coleridge, a raid so big that The Associated Press wrote about it.

Kathi Keys of The Courier-Tribune in Asheboro writes that officials are hoping the arrest will send a message to others who think that small towns will let such activities slide. “When they picked rural Randolph County to conduct this criminal activity, they thought it wouldn’t matter in a rural area,” said Sheriff Maynard Reid. “They can’t do that in Randolph County.” (Read more)

Rural N.C. school district recruits teachers locally

One rural North Carolina community has started a "teacher cadet" program to recruit local students to return to their hometown to teach. Bertie County, in the northeastern corner of the state, is also the state's poorest school district, and has struggled to retain qualified teachers.

The program selects promising high school seniors who "have a strong academic record, demonstrate a desire to remain in Bertie County, and commit to becoming a teacher in math, science, or English," says The Rural School and Community Trust. In exchange for five years of service after graduation, the community, in partnership with Shaw University in Raleigh, pays for tuition and books for four years, then receive a salary of $25,000 with full benefits.

The program aims to recruit 20 students per year, which would cost the community $670,000 annually. “We pitched this in economic development terms,” says Superintendent Chip Zullinger. “We’re keeping county money in the county and investing in our own young people.” (Read more)