U.S. trade policies are giving China a 'rare and unprecedented strategic opportunity'

Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump 
(Photo by T. Peter-Pool, Getty Images via The Conversation)

In the trade war between the U.S. and China, China may have some key advantages to stymie U.S. businesses -- including farmers -- while developing new trading partners. "The two economies are now locked in an all-out, high-intensity trade standoff," writes Linggong Kong for The Conversation. "As an expert on U.S.-China relations, I wouldn’t expect China to [back down]. Unlike the first U.S.-China trade war, when Beijing eagerly sought to negotiate with the U.S., China now holds far more leverage."

Dynamic shifts in China since 2018 make this round of tariffs different. "The importance of the U.S. market to China’s export-driven economy has declined significantly," Kong explains. "At the start of the first trade war, U.S.-bound exports accounted for 19.8% of China’s total exports. In 2023, that figure had fallen to 12.8%."

Overall, the U.S. is more dependent on Chinese goods. "By 2022, the U.S. relied on China for 532 key product categories – nearly four times the level in 2000 – while China’s reliance on U.S. products was cut by half in the same period," Kong writes. "Beijing believes Trump’s tariffs risk pushing the previously strong U.S. economy toward a recession."

China has a set of retaliation tools to use against the U.S. that the U.S. does not hold over China. Kong adds, "It dominates the global rare earth supply chain – critical to military and high-tech industries – supplying roughly 72% of U.S. rare earth imports."

U.S. farmers are also a target for China. Kong writes, "China accounts for about half of U.S. soybean exports and nearly 10% of American poultry exports. On March 4, Beijing revoked import approvals for three major U.S. soybean exporters."

Beyond financial targets, China is using the U.S. trade policies as an opportunity to rebuild its stressed trade relations in Asia and Europe. "After Trump had first raised tariffs on Beijing – China, Japan and South Korea hosted their first economic dialogue in five years and pledged to advance a trilateral free trade agreement," Kong writes. "On April 8, the president of the European Commission held a call with China’s premier, during which both sides jointly condemned U.S. trade protectionism and advocated for free and open trade."

Despite the harm Trump’s tariffs will "inevitably do to parts of the Chinese economy, Beijing appears to have far more cards to play this time around," Kong explains. "It has the tools to inflict meaningful damage on U.S. interests – and perhaps more importantly, Trump’s all-out tariff war is providing China with a rare and unprecedented strategic opportunity."

October is National Cooperative Month. It's a good time to myth-bust on what a co-op is and is not.

Cooperatives have a rich history rooted in democracy.
(University of Wisconsin photo via USDA)

Cooperatives are corporations; however, they are different than investor-owned firms in that the members that use the cooperative are the owners and benefit from their operations. Cooperatives allow individuals to operate together as a business and tackle economic issues they cannot solve individually. Here are some common myths about cooperatives from the Department of Agriculture.

Myth: Cooperatives are only in agriculture. False. Cooperatives exist in many industries. For example, home health, housing, grocery, rural electric distribution, finance, restaurant supply, outdoor gear, floral delivery, and news reporting.

Myth: Cooperative groceries are hippy throwbacks, only members can shop there. While many may have started in the '60s and '70s with a focus on organic and natural foods, today, cooperative groceries look much like any other grocery. The main difference is they operate for the benefit of the member-owners instead of outside investors. Thus keeping investment in the community and developing local wealth. . . . Many cooperatives are open to non-member business. Non-members can use the services however will not share in the surplus at the end of the year.

Myth: Co-ops are charities. False. Cooperatives, like any business, can choose a variety of legal structures depending on where the members choose to incorporate. The difference between non-profit (charitable) and the co-op is how revenue is generated and what is done with the surplus (profit).

The Ocean Spray co-op includes over 700 grower families
across North and South America. (Ocean Spray photo)

Myth: It's impossible for a co-op to be innovative. Cooperatives have been formed specifically to develop an innovative approach to market failures. One such example would be Ocean Spray. Read their history here.

Myth: Co-ops can't scale. There is a wide range of sizes for cooperatives. While many start out small, if the need is being met and the business is managed well the co-op will grow. Successful cooperatives are active members of their communities throughout the U.S. and the world. Some recognizable names are: Ace Hardware Corp., Blue Diamond Growers, Sunkist Growers, Independent Pharmacy Coop., and HealthPartners Inc.

For additional information on cooperatives visit:
CIR 7 How to Start a Cooperative; CIR 7 Cómo Empezar Una Cooperativa
SR 58 Feasibility Study Guide

To save their wilderness, people in this politically divided rural area in New York decided to start talking

Adirondack Park boasts 6 million wild acres.
(VisitAdirondacks.com photo)

In an era where public discourse can dissolve into shouting matches and expletives, politically divided residents in rural New York have found a way to listen and discuss heated topics civilly, reports Brian Mann of NPR.

To understand how this fragile peace took shape, a visit back to the 1990s in New York's Adirondack Park where a "CBS cameraman captured a violent confrontation. An environmental activist was attacked by a local government leader named Maynard Baker." According to Mann, Baker went on to yell, "'Go back wherever you come from, but get out of here, out of our lives and out of our business.'"

The history of tensions turned violent more than once. Mann explains, "The Adirondack Park is 6 million acres. Small towns here are surrounded by big chunks of heavily regulated land. Historian Phil Terry says the fight over environmental rules turned dangerous." Terry told him, "There was an attempt to set the Park Agency headquarters on fire. One of the Park Agency staff members had bullets flying around his car one day."

Green highlight encircles the massive
New York park. (Wikipedia map)

"In a lot of ways, the Adirondacks then resembled America today. Conspiracy theories and threats of violence were commonplace, " Mann reports, "Former New York Gov. George Pataki, a Republican, lives now in the park. He says the stakes were high. When he took office, huge tracts of privately owned land in the park were being eyed by developers. . . . Pataki unveiled an ambitious environmental plan to keep that from happening. . . . Pataki says the battle lines then were pretty much like what we see now across the U.S.--pro-business vs. pro-environment, urban vs. rural, people looking for agreement versus those who wanted to fight. He says his message to furious locals was simple. Let's start talking."

Zoe Smith, an environmental activist on the Adirondack Park Agency board, told Mann, "Our agenda is simply to have civil discourse. There are a lot of long conversations that happen, phone calls after hours."

"Everyone interviewed for this story said the Adirondack experiment has been successful so far but also messy," Mann adds. "They say the peace here often feels fragile, shaken by occasional lawsuits and by angry flare-ups on social media. But Zoe Smith with the Common Ground Alliance says people here keep talking, in part because they know how bad things can be when neighbors turn against neighbors."

The peace is an ongoing community effort to build bridges instead of burn them down. Mann reports, "So far, nearly a million acres of wild forest and lakes have been protected here with local buy-in and local input -- makes you wonder what could be done in other parts of the U.S. if people started talking again rather than making threats and shouting each other down."

More from National Summit on Journalism in Rural America: News startups, for-profit and not-for-profit, tell how they do it

By Al Cross

Professor and director, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, University of Kentucky

"People want local news." That's what I said after moderating one of the most interesting sessions at the National Summit on Journalism in Rural America, a panel of four women who started newsrooms and are finding success in markets no longer well served by chain-owned daily newspapers.

Two have for-profit papers: Lynne Campbell of The Community News in Macomb, Ill., and Debra Tobin of the Logan-Hocking Times in Logan, Ohio. Two have non-profit, digital-only news outlets: Jennifer P. Brown of the Hoptown Chronicle in Hopkinsville, Ky., and Nicole DeCriscio Bowe of The Owen News in Spencer, Ind., which is just getting started but has key community support.

The for-profits are in purely rural areas, and the nonprofits are in counties that lie within metropolitan areas (Bloomington, Ind., and Clarksville, Tenn.) but are still rural in character; Hopkinsville has 31,000 people and Spencer has 2,200 in a county of 21,000.

Nicole DeCriscio Bowe

DeCriscio Bowe started working at the Spencer Evening World soon before its employee owners sold it to Schurz Communications, which sold it to GateHouse Media in 2019. She was laid off but continued as a freelancer for what was “becoming a ghost newspaper,” which went from three full-time reporters and an editor to no local office and “no unique staff covering local events. It is at this point simply a reprint, almost, of the Bloomington newspaper,” the Herald-Times.

The main local information source became Facebook pages that stole or plagiarized content, and the local Chamber of Commerce reached out to DeCriscio Bowe to see what it would cost to start an online newspaper. She had already been talking with some other locals about a nonprofit publication, and the local community foundation committed $10,000 to the project “before we were even a nonprofit entity.” The foundation then secured a $10,000 matching grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

So far, The Owen News is posting news only on Facebook, but its website has a survey to test readers' willingness to support it. “My board has been very specific, that they don't want to charge our subscribers. We want to have it strictly donation-based, and based in advertising,” DeCriscio Bowe said. “We have a separate journalism Advisory Board, consisting of journalists across the nation, to help guide us in editorial policy and style guides and all of the nitty, gritty journalism tasks. . . . We want mandatory training for our correspondents, so that we never fall into a position where our content can't be trusted.”

Jennifer P. Brown

Brown, next to speak, said “I really respect Nicole, and what she's doing, because it's pretty much the exact opposite of how I started out.” She left the daily Kentucky New Era, weher she had been editor, in 2016 without a plan. Two years later, she attended an auction of some downtown buildings, which she found very intriguing, especially because “there were only two people in the room that I didn't know.” She took notes, wrote a story, posted it on Facebook, started a group and asked, “Would you all be interested in more stories like this?”

“Immediately the response was very positive,” she said. “People wanted more local stories, and . . . within six months. We had our 501(c)(3) approved, we had a website, had a launch party at the brewery in downtown Hopkinsville. and we got going. Our vision was to advance the public good, promote a respectful dialogue among citizens, and raise awareness of business, arts, culture, and history that is unique to Hopkinsville. What I really wanted to do was give people stories where I could sort of flex my institutional knowledge of the community and provide context and background that maybe they felt like they weren't getting in other places.”

Brown said she worked for two years without a salary “while we focused on the journalism, improving what we could do before we got really serious about raising money. We were raising money, but not enough to pay anyone a salary.” Now she does pay herself, and a part-time helper. She participates in the NewsMatch program of the Institute for Nonprofit News, and says “being a member of INN is crucial for us. We wouldn't have much financing without INN.”

Brown said she has 25,000 average monthly unique visitors, up 40 percent from last year; 1,550 daily newsletter subscribers, up 47% from last year, with an open rate of 55% to 60%; and about 4,700 Facebook followers, up 41%; and we 256 donors, up 24%. “Our daily newsletters are really important,” she said. “A newsletter comes out late, I usually hear from people. They want to know what happened. Where is it? And I take that as a good sign.”

The New Era, bought a few years ago by Paxton Media Group, has no office open to the public but still has local coverage. Brown said, “I think it's important to know that I've learned that it really doesn't work for me to try to compete against the other local media. It's a lot of wasted energy. We do have the local newspaper still. unfortunately, they have reduced their publication days, and the newsroom is very small. It doesn't look anything like the newspaper that I worked in. We also, though, have two commercial radio stations that have news operations,” and the Chronicle partners with WKMS at Murray State University, which “got most of the other public radio stations in Kentucky to sign on to that agreement. It gave us an immediate sort of wire service, so that we could help Hopkinsville readers know more about what was going on with the state government. . . . People in Hopkinsville quite often know more about what's going on with Tennessee state government than they do Kentucky state government because we're in their media market.”

Lynne Campbell

The for-profit startups are owned by women who spent most of their careers working for chains. Campbell said she last worked for GateHouse as regional publisher in Southern Illinois: “I took the opportunity because I thought I was going to save the 26 small community papers. Or that is what Gatehouse sold me; and in six months later they started to lay off people and asked me to close or merge, and what was 26 papers in a year's time was less than 12. . . . So I made it my mission in life to save community newspapers.”

After buying and improving a paper in a bedroom community of Peoria, then starting one for a town just outside Galesburg, home of another GateHouse paper that was no longer covering it, people in Macomb kept asking when she was going to start a paper there against another Gatehouse (now Gannett) ghost. She sold her interests in her other papers to her partner, and “went all in on the Community News,” she said.

It started on a copy machine, distributed free three times a week at 40 locations, and “was full of brief bits of local news,” such as events, police logs and death notices, but not full obituaries. “It was a quick read, and we had it out before lunch hour, so people would grab them at the restaurants and read them while they're waiting on their food.”

When the pandemic hit, Campbell said, “We didn't have events to write about. So we turned to partnering with the health department, the hospital, all of the government agencies, the mayors in all the cities, and we formed a great relationship between everybody, and we became the source for information during the shutdown . . . and our advertisers stayed with us, except for the ones that were shut down. All the advertisers stayed with us because they knew people were going there to read everything, and they won. And so we didn't lose that much revenue.”

The paper kept growing, and Campbell turned the Friday edition into subscription-only in May 2022. By that fall, she had almost 1,000 subscribers, and this year she made the Monday edition part of the subscription paper, shifted it to Tuesdays, and kept one free edition, called the Midweek, “so that everybody could get a little bit of the local news.”

Campbell said the Community News is billing $40,000 a month, much of it in legal advertising, since the Gannett paper, now called the McDonald County Voice, “is down to less than a hundred subscribers” and no longer has a storefront. The county has 27,000 residents, most in Macomb.

Debra Tobin

Logan, Ohio, is a town of 7,200 in a county of 46,000. Tobin worked for Adams Publishing Group for many years, last at the Logan Daily News: “About 20 of us that walked out one by one over the course of three months,” and eventually she and six of them “got together and started the Logan-Hocking Times,” charging $7.99 a month for digital subscriptions. “Within six months we had 700. We're over a thousand. That wasn't good enough for me, though, because I wanted to do something else, because a lot of people don't have computers in my hometown. It's a very small, not good access to broadband or anything. So I decided to do a print newspaper,” distributed free on Fridays, the day after the digital edition, and is funded by advertisers who sponsor pages.

Tobin has a part-time reporter, a part-time sports reporter, a full-time paginator and full-time graphics person, and two advertising staffers who work on commission. She’s on Social Security and takes no salary. “We were told that we were nothing but a pipe dream. And here we are almost three years later . . .and we're growing so.” Earlier, she said, We all decided to do this because the company that we worked for did not care about the community. . . . We all grew up in Logan. We all went to school in Logan. We love that we're vested in that county.”

Tobin said her experience can be replicated: “I encourage people to try it . . . if you have a background in journalism, and you are thinking about starting a paper. It may seem scary at first, but if I can do it, I know anybody can do it.”

For video of the session (it's the last one on this video), click here; for audio, here.

AppHarvest, startup with huge greenhouses for fruits and vegetables in Appalachian foothills, files for bankruptcy

An AppHarvest greenhouse amid Kentucky's knobs (CBS News image)

AppHarvest, a nationally hailed startup that has acres-sized greenhouses to grow fruits and vegetables in Kentucky's Appalachian foothills, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. 

"The indoor produce grower made a dozen different filings in the federal bankruptcy court for the Southern District of Texas on Sunday," reports Rick Childress of the Lexington Herald-Leader. "The filings come after an eventful few months for the cash-strapped company. Last month, a creditor demanding payment opened a foreclosure lawsuit against the company’s Richmond facility. Nearly two weeks ago, the owner of AppHarvest’s Berea farm announced that it wanted to terminate the company’s lease there."

AppHarvest said Monday that it wants to restructure itself while and resolve those issues. Equilibrium, the company that foreclosed and "demanded the immediate repayment of over $60 million in debt, will provide the cash necessary to help AppHarvest continue operations at its farms in Richmond, Somerset and Morehead," Childress reports. That extra money, nearly $30 million, is subject to court approval. So is a proposed deal with its distribution partner, Mastronardi Produce, which holds title to the Berea farm and served notice weeks ago that it intended to terminate AppHarvest’s lease. Now, "AppHarvest will turn the farm over to Mastronardi in exchange for about $3.75 million and additional funding and support for its restructuring plan," Childress reports.

AppHarvest CEO Tony Martin, who recently replaced founder Jonathan Webb, said the bankruptcy route will protect the company from creditors while it implements a new strategic plan, "which has shown strong progress toward operational efficiencies resulting in higher sales, cost savings and product quality." Childress notes, "AppHarvest’s stock price fell to $0.12 following the announcement of the bankruptcy filing Monday morning, falling from the $0.34 the company closed at Friday. The price has sat below $1 since February. In April, the company received noticed from Nasdaq that it would be delisted from the stock exchange if the stock price’s did not close above $1 for 10 consecutive days before October 16, public filings show."

Pick-your-own produce model offers farmers benefits and risks; it's part of agri-tourism, which has tripled since 2002

Tanner's Orchard near Speer, Ill., has offered U-pick since 1947.
The orchard has 11,000 apple trees. (Photo from Tanner's website)

Strawberries, peaches, berries, apples, pumpkins and a delightful December pine: The list of pick-your-own wonderfulness can start in May and go through year's end. But U-pick origins were born out of desperation, and in a culture of "instant-everything," its success is a curiosity.

"The concept first emerged during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when prices for fruit and vegetable crops reached historically low levels as war-torn countries began to recover and no longer relied on U.S. exports," reports Shelby Vittek of Ambrook Research. "For many growers, it was cheaper to leave their crops in the field to rot than to harvest and sell them for a pittance. That's when a ragtag bunch of cherry growers in Wisconsin decided to offer their fruit directly to the public for pennies a pound. The only catch was they'd have to come out to the farm to pick the cherries themselves. And so the bustling pick-your-own industry was born."

The model offers benefits, "reduces a farm's reliance on labor for harvesting, and eliminates the need for working with distributors, giving farms immediate access to the profits," Vittek writes. "Agritourism has boomed over the last two decades, with revenue more than tripling from 2002 to 2017. According to the USDA, agritourism revenue grew from $704 million in 2012 to $950 million in 2017. Pick-your-own farms have played a key role in that growth."

Pick-your-own operations also have unique costs and risks. Megan Bruch Leffew, a value-added agriculture marketing specialist at the University of Tennessee, told Vittek, "Consumers don't often know how to appropriately pick and can damage plants, so there's a loss aspect that needs to be built in when folks are pricing product." Also, "You need some added risk management and insurance," and "People are going to need access to a restroom, handwashing, and other things."

Poor weather "has the potential to wipe out an entire crop for a U-pick farm," Vittek notes. "This year, fruit growers across the country have experienced significant crop loss after erratic weather. Georgia lost more than 90% of its peach crop this year due to an abnormally warm winter."

But pick-your-own seems to have crowd appeal, even when a crop is scarce. "Our culture is starving for connections to nature. It's one more way that people can feel connected — connected to their food, connected to where they live," Anu Rangarajan, director of the Cornell University Small Farm Program, told Vittek. "U-picks do a huge service for connecting people to our food system, and especially the seasonality of food … and [gives farmers] the opportunity to have important conversations with people who can support agriculture more actively."

Founder of huge indoor-agriculture startup replaced as CEO

Jonathan Webb, then CEO of AppHarvest, at its Morehead facility in 2022 (Photo: Silas Walker, Lexington Herald-Leader)

The indoor-agriculture startup AppHarvest, with four farms along the edge of the Appalachian Plateau in Kentucky, will no longer be run by the Kentucky native who foudned it in 2018. Jonathan Webb will become chief strategy officer and remain a company director.

"Tony Martin, a veteran of the controlled-environment agriculture industry, will be the new CEO. Martin first joined the company’s board in October and has been the chief operating officer since January," reports Rick Childress of the Lexington Herald-Leader.

"The CEO change comes as the company faces a foreclosure complaint on its farm in Richmond and a dispute over the lease of its Berea farm. Last fall, AppHarvest — which grows large quantities of fruits and vegetables in massive, climate-controlled greenhouses and employs hundreds of people — said in public filings that it was running low on cash and disclosed “substantial doubt” about its future. The company also has farms in Morehead and Somerset."

Weekly editors, publishers feel a need to look after their and counterparts' mental health in the isolation that defines 'rural'

By Al Cross

Director and Professor, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, University of Kentucky

Has there been a more stressful time for community journalists, especially those in rural areas, where the isolation that defines rurality limits access to mental-health care and gives them few trusted peers to rely on for help and support? Rural editors, publishers and reporters have suffered the double whammy of the pandemic amid the impact of the great digital shift, which has robbed them of audience, revenue and colleagues.

Several editors and publishers talked about these existential issues with rural-journalism researchers June 21 at the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors' annual conference in Reno. After Christina Smith of Georgia College and State University and Kyle Miller of the University of South Dakota presented their research on rural journalists' mental health, Smith asked them if they have "confidants" with whom they can discuss the stresses of the job and the problems those stresses can cause. That sparked an interesting conversation.

ISWNE President Gordon Cameron of Hamilton, Ontario, said that after every annual conference, "We leave energized and that’s because, the people in this room, you all get it," through common experiences, some of which can be stressful. He said that has helped him get through "difficult times." Ken Garner of the Maryville Forum in Missouri said “I’ve found my tribe” in ISWNE. He said retired publishers Gary and Helen Sosniecki, longtime ISWNE stalwarts, had helped him, and he would have “no issue” calling anyone in the room at the University of Nevada-Reno for help. He said that is a key to his mental health.

Reed Anfinson

Reed Anfinson, publisher of the Swift County Monitor-News and two other weeklies in rural Minnesota, said he agreed with all that, but “I also feel like we’re glossing over the real impact that a lot of isolated newspaper publishers face in America. We sit there in our offices, for many, many weeks, without hardly interacting with other publishers, and there's too many publishers that don't belong to organizations. So there is a real problem out there with isolation.”

Especially when the concerns are existential. Anfinson said community publishers ask themselves, “Can I sell my newspapers? Will somebody want them? . . . Those things all eat at us, all the time.” He said ISWNE members can talk about it in "a therapy session" but “There are a lot of problems out there in our industry that have to be addressed and we have to get more of our publishers involved.”

Tim Waltner, retired publisher of the Freeman Courier in South Dakota, noted that state and provincial press associations have legal hotlines, and suggsted they should should have mental-health hotlines too. Anfinson called that "a great idea," noting that both major farm groups in Minnesota have mental-health hotlines for their members.

Smith said the research paper she and Miller are publishing soon in Newspaper Research Journal calls on press assocations and other organizations "to step up" and offer mental-health help, and encourages publishers to raise the issue with their readers “and say, this job is hard, but we love every minute of it because it’s our calling.”

Smith and Miller surveyed 31 Georgia and South Dakota publishers with weeklies of less than 3,000 circulation as part of a broader study about newspapers and the pandemic. Some said it affected their mental health, mainly due to financial concerns that were not entirely related to the pandemic. She said the title of their paper, based on a quote from one interviewee, is “The end of the golden era of weekly newspapering.”

Perhaps, but that's painting with a broad brush. The U.S. still has about 6,000 weekly newspapers in almost 3,000 counties, most of them rural, but with differing levels of rurality and prosperity, and many different challenges. Their success in meeting those challenges could depend partly on how much they could help each other, from one-on-one relationships to international organizations like ISWNE.

 

The isolation that defines rurality means that while there are thousands of good rural journalists, all too often they are the only person in their newsroom who fits that description. They need friends, allies and advisers, both inside and outside the industry. Let's all try to help each other.

UPDATE: Most local journalists "are burned out," Elizabeth Djinis writes for Poynter, citing a survey by the journalism school at the University of North Carolina. It's become "an institutional issue," says Scott Reinardy of the University of Kansas’s j-school.

Why are grocery prices remaining so high? Time to dust off an old law and support fair competition, writer argues

Image by Zek Tebbal, The New York Times

It's about impossible for smaller grocery stores to compete with galactic buyers like Walmart and Kroger, but without competition, food prices have gotten higher and will remain that way, writes Stacy Mitchell in her opinion for The New York Times. "To understand why grocery prices are way up, we need to look past the headlines about inflation and reconsider long-held ideas about the benefits of corporate bigness."

First off, there's no way for small stores or chains to "MacGyver" their purchasing power and cut prices that match big retailers. '"Food Fresh is the only grocery store in a rural stretch of southeastern Georgia. It has many five-star Google reviews praising its freshly butchered meats, tomato bar and friendly service. Yet it faces a threat to its survival that no amount of management skill can overcome. Big retailers like Walmart and Kroger can wrest deep discounts from suppliers, making it impossible for the store to come close to matching the chains' prices. Food Fresh's owner, Michael Gay, told Mitchell that big chains "have a handle on suppliers that I can't touch."

Is this competition at work? "Major grocery suppliers, including Kraft Heinz, General Mills and Clorox, rely on Walmart for more than 20 percent of their sales. So when Walmart demands special deals, suppliers can't say no. And as suppliers cut special deals for Walmart and other large chains, they make up for the lost revenue by charging smaller retailers even more. . . . This isn't competition. It's big retailers exploiting their financial control over suppliers to hobble smaller competitors. Our failure to put a stop to it has warped our entire food system. It has driven independent grocers out of business and created food deserts. It has spurred consolidation among food processors, which has slashed the share of food dollars going to farmers and created dangerous bottlenecks in the production of meat and other essentials. And in a perverse twist, it has raised food prices for everyone, no matter where you shop."

What's the history? "A level playing field was long a tenet of U.S. antitrust policy. In the 19th century, Congress barred railroads from favoring some shippers over others. It applied this principle to retailing in 1936 with the Robinson-Patman Act, which mandates that suppliers offer the same terms to all retailers. . . . For roughly four decades, the Federal Trade Commission vigorously enforced the act. . . . . Independent grocery stores flourished, accounting for more than half of food sales in 1958. Supermarket chains like Safeway and Kroger also thrived. This dynamism fed broad prosperity. Even the smallest towns and poorest neighborhoods could generally count on having a grocery store. And the industry's diffuse structure ensured that its fruits were widely distributed. Of the nearly nine million people working in retailing overall in the mid-1950s, nearly two million owned or co-owned the store where they worked. There were more Black-owned grocery stores in 1969 than there are today."

That's painful to hear. "Then, amid the economic chaos and inflation of the late 1970s, the law fell into disfavor with regulators, who had come to believe that allowing large retailers to flex more muscle over suppliers would lower consumer prices. For the most part, the law hasn't been enforced since. As a top Reagan administration official explained in 1981, antitrust was no longer 'concerned with fairness to smaller competitors.' This was a serious miscalculation. Walmart, which seized the opening and soon became notorious for strong-arming suppliers and undercutting local businesses, now captures one in four dollars Americans spend on groceries."

Is there an end in sight? "This has resulted in an ever-worsening cycle: As a system dominated by a few retailers lifts prices across the board — even at Walmart — consumers head to those retailers because of their ability to wrest relatively lower prices or simply because they're the only options left. . . . Meanwhile, the decline of independent grocers, which disproportionately serve rural small towns and Black and Latino neighborhoods, has left debilitating gaps in our food system. . . . Losing small retailers also stifles innovation. . . . This results in diminished selection for shoppers, who find store shelves stocked with only what the big food conglomerates choose to produce."

What can individuals do? "Stop big retailers from using their enormous financial leverage over suppliers to tilt the playing field. By resurrecting the Robinson-Patman Act, we could begin to put an end to decades of misguided antitrust policy in which regulators abandoned fair competition in favor of ever-greater corporate scale. . . . There is promising momentum. Last year an unusual coalition of Democratic and Republican lawmakers sent a letter to the FTC urging it to dust off Robinson-Patman. . . .These moves are already drawing fire from an old guard locked in bigger-is-always-better thinking. . . . In the early days of the pandemic, as Walmart and Amazon compelled manufacturers to steer scarce supplies their way and worsened shortages at local grocers,Gay [at Food Fresh] worked long days hustling to find alternate sources." Gay told Mitchell: "My meat is fresher. My produce is fresher. My customer service is better. Imagine if you made the playing field level. Imagine what I could do."

A tale of two towns and dollar stores: One blocked Dollar General, one allowed it on 3-2 vote; local merchants worry

Leelanau County is the pinkie finger
of Michigan's mitt. (Wikipedia map)

What does a dollar store add to a small community, or perhaps take from it? That can be a loaded question.

In Leelanau County, Michigan, in 2019, residents got the zoning board to shut out Dollar General Corp.'s plans to build in the county seat of Empire  because the chain's reputation and look did not "fit" with their quaint, small-town vibe, and it's now the only Michigan county without a dollar store, reports Rose White of MLive, a Michigan newspaper chain. “Chain dollar stores tend to target food deserts like Empire . . . providing a limited selection of food to city neighborhoods or rural areas,” White writes, citing a report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

Sperling's Best Places map

The dollar-store drama is playing out differently in Ebony, Virginia,  where some residents did not welcome Dollar General because they worried the store would "open the door to additional development that will spoil the character of their tiny, rural community of about 230 people," reports Michael Corkery of The New York Times. But not all the residents thought the chain would harm their town. "Jerry Jones grew up in Ebony. . . . He went on to manage grocery stores and later owned a gas station in Ebon. . . . Jones owns the land where the Dollar General would be built. He said the store would provide the county’s residents a convenient and affordable place to shop while also generating sorely needed tax revenue." Jones told Corkery: “You still need to have that balance between the people with nicer things and the people who live paycheck to paycheck. To me, Dollar General fits right in with that.”

The two places have some similarities; one big difference is that Empire is a summer tourist town where "quaint feel" has a financial impact. "Ebony sits on the edge of Lake Gaston and is a haven for second homes that serve as an important tax base" in Brunswick County, which has a median household income of $49,600, about the same as Leelanau's, but well under Virginia's statewide figure of $80,600, Cockery reports. "More than half the county’s population is Black." Only one-fourth of 1 percent of Leelanau County's is.

Brunswick County supervisors, by a 3-2 vote, "approved a zoning change that would allow the store to be built," Cockery reports. "The dispute in Ebony, which has been going on for more than three years, is about planning and zoning, but it also touches on a deeper issue simmering in many parts of rural America, whether the disputes are about cellphone towers or snowmobile trails. What does 'country' mean to different people in a small community?" Cockery asks.

But Dollar General is not winning everywhere. "The number of communities that are defeating specific dollar-store proposals or are enacting ordinances that control dollar store development is shooting up rapidly,” Kennedy Smith, a senior researcher at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, told White. Much of the opposition comes from local business owners like Mohamed Abouemara, who "moved to southern Virginia from New York to operate convenience stores and has run the Ebony General Store for nine years," Corkery reports. "He said his store, where locals can socialize and buy hot food, played an important role in a rural community. A dollar store, he said, would significantly hurt his business."

News-media roundup: Unionized Gannett staffers walk out to protest CEO; company gets competition in New Mexico

Employes at 24 of the 50 unionized newsrooms of Gannett Co. will walk out Monday (and maybe also Tuesday in some cases) to protest how the company is handling its business, The Washington Post reports.

In a northwest New Mexico market where Gannett has cut back its Farmington Daily Times, the owners of the Durango Herald in southwest Colorado have started the Tri-City Record, a five-day-a-week free publication, Editor & Publisher reports. 

Writing for E&P, veteran marketer Bob Sillick lays out "membership models that create value for readers" of newspapers.

Sarabeth Berman, CEO of the American Journalism Project, discussses with the Observer how to generate philanthropic support for local journalism. John Palfrey, presiddnet of the MacArthur Foundation, says "there are hundreds of promising new and re-energized philanthropic investment opportunities in the field of journalism."

The school committee in Amherst, Mass., is looking for a new superintendent after the student newspaper at Amherst Regional High School, The Graphic, reported accusations that counselors at the school had mistreated LGBTQ+ students, WBUR reports.

Gordon Wolf, longtime editor of the Denison Bulletin-Review in western Iowa, lost his job in a Lee Enterprises cutback. Now he's with the recioal Hispanic paper, the Carroll Times Herald reports. 

"Strengthening rural journalism will save small towns, and our democracy," writes Willliam McKenzie, senior editorial adviser at the George W. Bush Institute, and contributing columnist and former staffer at the Dallas Morning News. He says "These public and private sector efforts would help:

• Congress should consider tax laws that make it easier for struggling newspapers to become nonprofit publications.
• Lawmakers could allow subscribers to deduct their subscriptions from their taxes, just as taxpayers can do for contributions to public broadcasting operations.
• Rural papers could share back-office operations, perhaps with a larger news outlet, thereby allowing the smaller community papers to focus more of their resources on reporting.
• Nonprofit funders could help create more collaboratives like the Nebraska Journalism Trust that allow news to be shared across local communities."

Lee to make most papers weeklies, under a definition that's getting archaic; be frank with readers in making the move

One of the newspaper industry's oldest conventions, that a paper is considered a weekly if it's published three or fewer times a week and a daily if it's published four or more times a week, is gradually vanishing in the age of 24/7 digital publishing.

That was driven home by the plan of Lee Enterprises, a major national chain, "to reduce the number of days it prints in most of its newspapers to three days per week," as reported by Darrell Ehrlick of the Daily Montanan, a digital-only States Newsroom nonprofit that serves the state where Lee owns five dialy papers. It broke the news, based on multiple sources; Ehrlick is a former Lee employee.

"Four people who spoke to the Daily Montanan on condition of anonymity confirmed the company is planning to reduce its printing schedule in all publications, except for 20 of its largest titles," Ehrlick reports. "It’s unclear how that will affect the five newspapers in Montana." Those are the Billings Gazette, the Missoulian, the Ravalli Republic, the Montana Standard in Butte and the Helena Independent Record in the state capital. "Some sources were told the change would take place this summer," Ehrlick writes. "Repeated inquiries to Lee officials at both the corporate and state levels were not returned."

Papers have been reducing print frequency for years, but the trend is accelerating, and a historic tipping point seems at hand. "Print frequency has long been a term used to understand the audience and purpose of publications," Kirsten Staples writes for Editor & Publisher, in a story with advice about how to make and manage such a change. 

John Newby (Photo via E&P)

John Newby, who operates the consultancies 360 Media Alliance and Truly-Local, told Staples, “Reducing frequency is a local decision based on local parameters. What is right for one community or market may not be the correct path in another. . . . Reducing several days can add up to quite a few dollars. But buyer beware, not all this newfound revenue will be realized if you haven't factored in the loss of subscribers. Depending on the market, this hit ranges from 2-3% to greater than 15%. Many will come back in the future, but there will be some short-term subscriber erosion.”

The top concern should be the readers, and newspapers must understand them and their needs, Newby said. "Newby recalled a time when he worked with a newspaper considering reducing its print frequency, increasing its rates and moving the publication to mail. They eventually decided it would be best to make all changes at once to avoid disrupting their readership multiple times that year."

Newby recalled, “The publisher and editor did a great job telling the public what was happening. They discussed financials, [difficulty] finding carriers, newsprint costs, market trends and much more. They treated their readers as family and conveyed the reason for the changes honestly. At the end of the day, they lost very few readers and gained a ton of respect simply by being honest with their readers upfront about the reasons for the changes. That is what actually builds your brand — honesty and transparency.”

Likewise, Newby said, savings should be used for improvements, not just used to stabilize the bottom line. “If the newly found revenue is not invested back into the product, all you have done is extract from your product, providing the reader with a less delightful reading experience," Newby said. "To survive, our industry still needs to find new revenue verticals that help sustain the news product. I don't have all the answers on that front, but I know we continue to ignore many verticals as the digital world passes us by. E-commerce, Ai, creative and revenue-producing loyalty programs ... and the list goes on.”

George Coleman, general manager of the Victoria Advocate in Texas, told Staples that when he cut print days from five to three at Tennessee's Lebanon Democrat about five years ago, “We doubled up on comics, puzzles, Dear Abby and other features we knew they would miss. As a result, the papers were larger in page count than the previous Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday papers. We still produced content every day of the week, so our subscribers had access to the most current information on our website. From an expense standpoint, the biggest loser of this move was the post office. By making this move, we did not impact our employees in any way. Furthermore, the readers received all the content they were used to receiving. Also, by printing every other day, we kept our print-only readers informed of the local obituaries, which are very important to older readers.”

In the coal industry's bankruptcy game of musical mines, preventing environmental damage takes a back seat

Unreclaimed strip mine on the Kentucky-Virginia border, 2014 (Associated Press photo by David Goldman via ProPublica)

If your industry is declining, bankruptcy can be a business strategy. And if you're in the business of strip-mining coal, bankruptcy can relieve you of many of your environmental obligations. That's the upshot of a deep dive into the surface coal mining industry by Ken Ward Jr. of Mountain State Spotlight and Scott Pham and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica.

Their object example is Blackjewel Mining, which became the nation's sixth-largest coal producer "partly by accumulating mines ... that had gone bankrupt," they report. "By 2018, it boasted more than 500 mining permits in Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming. Then, in July 2019, Blackjewel stunned the industry by declaring bankruptcy, with claims against it later estimated at $7.5 billion." Other companies have followed a similar strategy, they report.

Environmental groups and state regulators "warned the bankruptcy judge that, while he was focusing on what they called the company’s 'significant financial mismanagement,' he should also be aware of 'severe environmental mismanagement problems'," including reclamation of mines that were causing damage downstream, the story says. "But, citing longstanding case law, the judge rejected their request. Instead, bankruptcy trustees began divvying up the company’s assets among preferred creditors such as banks and hedge funds. . . . By mid-2020, there were more than 600 outstanding violations of state mining and reclamation standards at the company’s mines in Kentucky, including 450 since the bankruptcy filing."

Bankrupt coal companies have long been bad environmental actors, but ProPublica and Mountain State Spotlight say they have documented for the first time "that mines that have gone through multiple bankruptcies also tend to create more environmental damage," based on bankruptcy court filings and state regulatory records. "We found that the median number of environmental violations for surface and underground mines that had been through multiple bankruptcies between 2012 and 2022 in Kentucky was almost twice the median number for mines that had not, and almost 40% higher in West Virginia."

Federal and state laws require coal companies to buy reclamation bonds, insurance that will cover the cost if the government has to clean them up. "But the required bond amounts often aren’t enough to cover all potential costs," Ward, Pham and Mierjeski note. "Cleanup costs have soared, partly due to larger surface mines that blew up or chopped off entire mountaintops, and partly because modern studies have increasingly identified water pollutants requiring lengthy and expensive treatment. According to a 2021 legislative audit, West Virginia’s reclamation bonds have covered only one-tenth of cleanup costs. . . . State officials are reluctant to revoke permits and take on the financial responsibility for cleanup. What often ensues instead is a game of musical mines. Knowing that they won’t end up on the hook for reclamation, other coal companies buy mines out of bankruptcy — and then often go bankrupt themselves."

After regional daily closed 2 satellite papers in N.Y. county, locals pledged to support them, and they have come back

How can rural communities sustain local journalism that supports local democracy? That was the question posed by last year's second National Summit on Journalism in Rural America. The simplest answer, which is often the best answer, seems to be: with their money, spurred by leadership.

Adapted Google map highlights towns involved. Click to enlarge.

In 2019, the Johnson family of Jefferson County, New York, publishers of the Watertown Daily Times, stopped publishing the daily Ogdensburg Journal and one of its two weeklies in adjoining St. Lawrence County, citing economic difficulties. and saying "Readers in those communities had already chosen the Watertown Daily Times as their source for news and information."

But two years later, as the pandemic began to lift, the Journal was revived as a weekly after local businesses in the city of 10,436 pledged their support for it, and the next year the weekly St. Lawrence Plaindealer in the county seat of Canton (town pop. 11,638) was reborn in the same way. The leader of the effort was James D. Reagen, a county legislator and former Journal editor, who “cobbled together a group of civic and business leaders” who pledged to support the paper, Editor & Publisher owner Mike Blinder says in the latest edition of his “E & P Reports.”

Without the Journal, elected officials felt no one was watching them, and “A lot of poor decision-making occurred because there was nobody to help sort through” anonymous allegations on social media and blogs, Reagen told Blinder. “There was no one to sort out the truth from the fiction, there was no one to hold people accountable for what they were saying. . . . That is one of the important roles of a newspaper at any level . . . to be sort of the arbiter of fact, the voice of reason, the community rallying point.”

Reagen rounded up businesses who pledged to advertise in the Journal, said Tom Grazer, Johnson Newspapers’ managing editor for St. Lawrence County. “That was a key component,” he said. People in Canton “saw what was going on in Ogdensburg” and did likewise. “Both newspapers have done well.” The company also piublishes the twice-weekly Courier Observer, which serves the towns of Massena (pop. 12,883) and Potsdam (14,901), more distant from Watertown. St. Lawrence County has 32 towns (in New York almost all places are in a town or a city) and about 110,000 people, and is the state's largest county geographically, at 2,821 square miles.

Laura Pearson, executive director of the Greater Ogdensburg Chamber of Commerce, told Blinder that businesses were willing to support the paper because “They understand the value of promoting locally” and “the Journal takes care of everybody. . . . To lose the Journal really hurt the city a lot.” Now, she said, “Our community understands how important the Ogdensburg Journal is to us.”

Dollar store mania: Six in and near a town of 1,400

Daily Mail map

A Dollar General store opened in Olive Hill, Kentucky, pop. 1,400, 50 years ago. Since then five more dollar stores have opened, all but one on the same road, U.S. 60, reports Keith Griffith for the Daily Mail. "In the Appalachian foothills, the town has two Family Dollar locations and four Dollar General stores. . . . leaving some residents wondering: Why so many dollar stores? Dollar General, like other major retailers, uses an algorithm to suggest new store locations. . . . Still, residents greet the recent explosion of dollar stores with a mixture of amusement and bewilderment."

"Just over the past couple years they’ve really started popping up," Jeremy Wells, editor of the Carter County Times, the local weekly, told Griffith. "People aren’t really upset by them, but they are a little puzzled." Griffith writes, "Over the past decade, dollar stores have been the fastest-growing food retailers by share of household expenditure, with growth in rural areas more than doubling, according to a recent study. . . . But critics noted health concerns about their food offerings, which skew toward high-calorie, ultra-processed packaged foods. . . . Dollar General has responded to this criticism by launching fresh produce sections in thousands of its stores, including several in Olive Hill." 

This Dollar General is also known as the ‘Olive Hill
Walmart.' (Photo by Keith Griffith, Daily Mail.com)

Christopher D. Merrett, director of the Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs at Western Illinois University, told Griffith that in some cases, a new dollar store can be a boon to rural areas where local businesses have shuttered; however, "If you are a small town that does have an existing grocery store, it's more complicated. It's not unilaterally positive. . . . We don’t want it to be a zero sum game, where a new store takes business from a longstanding locally owned business. It could force that existing grocery store to close."

Griffith notes, "Dollar General has expanded aggressively in rural areas and small towns, typically seeking out areas that are at least 20 miles from the nearest Walmart or major grocery chain. . . . its biggest footprint is in Southern states, and roughly 75% of Dollar General stores are in towns with populations under 20,000. . . . ‘We serve millions of Americans who may not have affordable food options nearby,’ Dollar General said in a statement."

The first Dollar General in the county was a "totally different experience," Wells said, with "a limited selection of mostly low-end dry goods," Griffith writes. "Olive Hill residents jokingly refer to the Dollar General closest to downtown as the ‘Olive Hill Walmart’ due to its wide variety of goods, including a small produce section stocked with fruits and vegetables." The town also has a Sav-A-Lot discount grocery. It is the birthplace of the late Tom T. Hall, country songwriter.

Former CEO of one of largest employee-owned corporations in U.S. dies at 81; business started with one rural grocery

Jimmie Gipson

Jimmie Gipson, who helped transform Kentucky's Houchens Industries from a rural grocery chain into a $3-billion-dollar conglomerate that is one of the largest employee-owned companies in the nation, died Saturday in Bowling Green. He was 81.

Gipson "spent 55 years with Houchens, the last 27 as the chief executive officer. He retired in March 2020, the Bowling Green Daily News reports. He was only the third CEO, following the nephew of the founder: "Ervin Houchens started the company in 1917 with a single grocery store."

Houchens offered stock to its employees long ago, when it was just a grocery chain, and since 1988 they have fully owned it. The company "owns over 25 operating companies in various industries including retail, manufacturing, construction, and insurance," its website says. Its most unusual purchase may have been in 2008, when it acquired the Louisville-based Hilliard Lyons brokerage firm and shared ownership with its employees until 2019.

“We never bought a company just to get bigger, and we never intended to buy a company that wasn’t run by good people,” Gipson told the Daily News in 2020. “If you do that, you’ll generally do well.” He called employee ownership “very gratifying. Years ago, we had a lady who worked in a Houchens store for 40 years. She had more than $480,000 in her retirement account. That’s life-changing for common people.”

Visitation for Gipson will be from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday at J.C. Kirby & Sons Lovers Lane Chapel, and from 10 a.m. to noon Thursday at Hillvue Heights Church, where the funeral will begin at noon. Entombment will follow at Bowling Green Gardens.

Walmart raising minimum hourly wage to $14 from $12; its pay scale influences those of many other rural employers

A Walmart checkout line (Photo from Walmart)

Walmart, which is the nation's largest employer and has a huge rural footprint, is raising wages for hourly workers in stores and warehouses. Starting pay next month will be at least $14 an hour, up from $12, the company said in a memo to staff Tuesday. 

"The company’s move could lead to wage pressure in lower-income areas where it is one of the main employers," Sarah Nassauer and Gabriel T. Rubin write for The Wall Street Journal. "Some economists have found that Walmart’s market power is a primary determinant of wage levels in local economies where they have a large presence, especially at other retailers and grocery stores."

Noting the company's more rural and Southeastern base, the Journal says "That means more of its 4,600 stores and warehouses are in states such as Texas, Mississippi and Georgia that haven’t adopted higher minimum wages in recent years. Twenty states don’t have a minimum wage higher than the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour, "which was last raised in 2009," the Journal notes. "More than half the states in the U.S. are set to lift their minimum wages in the coming year, although due to the tight labor market, employers have in many cases needed to offer pay significantly higher than the legal minimum in order to attract and retain employees."

Walmart's starting-pay hike is "the latest in a series of increases by the company to close the gap with rivals," the Journal reports. It "will push the company’s average hourly wages to over $17.50. Currently hourly workers at Walmart earn an average of around $17, a spokeswoman said." But its minimum will still be below the $15 minimum at its major rivals, Target and Amazon, which have a $15-an-hour minimum wage, and Costco's minimum is even higher, the Journal reports.

Dollar stores are fastest-growing food retailers, doubling their rural share; N.C. fines biggest chain for overcharging

UPDATE, Jan. 31: North Carolina has fined more Dollar General stores, along with Family Dollar, Circle K, Target, Walmart and 7-Eleven, The Charlotte Observer reports.

Dollar stores are a help for rural families, but consumers need
to be watchful at checkout. (Photo by Bob Bawdy, Tri-City Herald)

Rural town, two-lane road, open swaths of land on either side, some homes, a small post office and . . . a dollar store. Of course, there's a dollar store! Researchers have "found that dollar stores are now the fastest-growing food retailers in the contiguous United States—and have doubled their share in rural areas," reports Tufts University in Boston, where the researchers work. "Households with more purchases at dollar stores also tend to be lower-income and headed by people of color." The study was published Jan. 19 in the American Journal of Public Health.

The study, "which the researchers believe is the first to look at this trend over the past 10 years, could have meaningful implications for nutrition policy. Food and beverages stocked by dollar stores are typically lower in nutrients and higher in calories, while only a small percentage of such shops carry fresh produce and meats," Tufts says. "Their growing footprint, especially in the remote South, is also important: These regions already have higher baseline levels of obesity and food insecurity."

Wenhui Feng, the study's first author, said “Dollar stores play an increasingly important role in household food purchases, yet research on them is lacking. Many localities have established policies such as zoning laws aiming to slow dollar store expansion even though we don’t fully understand the role that they play. Our study is one of the first to use nationally representative data to see the role of dollar stores at the household level.”

The study confirms that rural towns and dollar stores go hand in glove. Researchers Wenhui Feng and Elina T. Page "analyzed how Americans use dollar stores to access food by analyzing food-purchase data from the IRI Consumer Network. The data captured purchases from 2008 until 2020. . . . In general, as people’s income goes up, they spend less of their budget at dollar stores. . . . In rural and low-income areas, people spend on average more than five percent of their food budget at dollar stores.  . . . rural non-Hispanic Black households spend 11.6 percent of their food budgets in dollar stores. Households in the rural South also spend in large numbers."

“The South is a hot spot,” said Sean Cash, food economist and senior author of the study. “The dollar-store business model originated in the South. They have more distribution centers there, and there’s also more consumer demand.”

The chain is not without its problems. North Carolina fined Dollar General Corp. for over-charging customers at the register. In Ohio, Attorney General Dave Yost is seeking a temporary restraining order against the company, reports Kevin P. Curran of Seeking Alpha: "Yost said that the discount retailer has habitually charged higher prices at registers than advertised on shelves. This trend has continued despite his filing of a suit against the chain in November."