Flora & Fauna: Muppets ponder the Electoral College; a new wildlife corridor; fall in love with moths; banana battle

Most muppets didn't "vote" for the Electoral College.
(Muppet Wiki photo)

Elmo took it upon himself, along with several other muppets who were voting, to try and understand how the U.S. Electoral College works. "Elmo just did some math and Elmo is worried," writes Alexandra Petri of The Washington Post. At first, the Count loved how the College worked, but then he said, "I love counting, but the Electoral College is not about counting! It is about making things not count! The Electoral College belongs in the trash!" Oscar the Grouch had some feelings about that. . .

A critical wildlife pathway that began with "a handful of frustrated hunters and 20 deer imported from South Carolina," is now a reality writes Dan Chapman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "A burgeoning wildlife corridor stretches from Atlanta’s western suburbs to the Talladega National Forest in Alabama, a 30-mile stretch of public and private lands where deer, bear, at-risk bats, and federally endangered fish have more room to roam, and more chances to survive." Read about the corridor's unique beginnings here.

Sugar maples can live to be 300 to 400 years old.
(Adobe Stock photo)

In a forest, all flora and fauna eventually die, but in the case of an old and beloved sugar maple, life went on as saws and woodworking turned the tree into bowls that could be held, used and treasured, writes Daryln Brewer Hoffstot for The New York Times. Tree "turner," Corey Snyder, "presented me with three beautiful, honey-colored bowls: one for our son, one for our daughter, and one for us. . . . One has light streaks of green because of mineral deposits. They are different shapes, sizes and thicknesses. I asked him how he chose what form the bowls should take. 'I let the piece of wood dictate,' he said. . . .The old maple had spoken."

There are roughly 180,000 known moth and
butterfly species. (Princeton U Press graphic)

The world of moths is mysterious and vast. For all of us, there is much to learn and fall in love with. "As humans drop off to sleep, the invisible world of moths comes to life. Across the planet, billions of the insects take flight on their nocturnal errands," report Michael J. Coren and Alice Li of The Washington Post. "Over two nights in the desert, I discovered just how easy it is to fall in love with an unloved insect. And why 'mothing' may be the best way to discover the miracle of biodiversity in your own backyard."

As bananas battle for survival, scientists are working to save them from extinction. "Two diseases threaten to wipe out the banana as we know it, and scientists are racing to breed a fruit of the future," reports H. Claire Brown of The Wall Street Journal. "Chiquita Brands International last month said it bred a new banana called the Yelloway 1 that is resistant to one of the major diseases and shows promise in resisting the second. . . . Using a genetic bank of about 150 banana varieties, the Chiquita team has focused on breeding an edible, disease-resistant banana."

NOAA plans to consider expanding the new Chumash Heritage Marine Sanctuary in the years
ahead, after new infrastructure is built for offshore wind farms. (NOAA photo via NPR)

A new national marine sanctuary isn't just a win for sea creatures and sea lovers, it's the first such designation led by Indigenous people, reports Lauren Sommer of NPR. "More than 4,500 square miles of ocean will soon be protected by the federal government off the Central California coast. The Biden administration is creating a new national marine sanctuary, which will be the third largest in the U.S. . . . The new Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary will be managed in partnership with tribes and Indigenous groups in the area, who will advise the federal government."

Free webinar on Friday about demystifying LexisNexis for research-based reporting; registration takes 2 minutes

The National Press Club Journalism Institute is hosting a learning webinar on accessing and customizing the LexisNexis database on Friday, May 17 at 11:30 a.m., E.T. 

Register here.

LexisNexis provides a library of legal, business, government, high-tech and news articles, which are starting points for researching story ideas. Its database also provides access to articles that are paywall-protected.

Because LexisNexis houses so much information, the database can be confusing. To teach reporters how to navigate this resource, award-winning investigative reporter and editor Brad Hamilton will walk participants through how to customize LexisNexis to source stories, find unexpected story angles, and identify and reach potential sources through LexisNexis’ "Contact References" database.

LexisNexis is a fee-based database service that some newsrooms provide staff access to. Most public libraries offer access to their communities, and National Press Club members have free access to the LexisNexis database as part of their annual membership. Hamilton will also provide journalists an avenue to access LexisNexis at a discount.

Program finalized for National Summit on Journalism in Rural America, July 7; hotel deadline extended one week

The program for the National Summit on Journalism in Rural America, July 7 in Lexington, Ky., and online, includes some of the latest research on rural journalism; and the experiences of some successful rural publishers and start-ups, both digital and print; philanthropy for rural jouranalism; efforts to change state policies to help local news; and university programs to fill gaps in local news coverage.

The summit will be a hybrid event, but most presenters will appear in person. Registration is free, and required; register here. The summit will be held at the Campbell House Curio Hotel, 10 minutes from the Lexington airport. A block of rooms at $139 per night has been extended to Friday, June 30.

The summit is sponsored by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues (publisher of The Rural Blog) at the University of Kentucky. Here's a closer look at the program:

The state of rural newspapers and the rise of ghost newspapers: Zachary Metzger, Northwestern University, will report on the latest data in the Medill School's continuing State of Local News study.

Rural publishers’ and readers’ views of alternate-revenue models: Nick Mathews, University of Missouri, will report on a study he did with Teri Finneman of the University of Kansas and Pat Ferrucci of the University of Colorado, which included an ongoing intervention with rural papers.

What it's like to be the subject in an alternate-revenue research experiment: Joey Young of Kansas Publishing Ventures, partner in the interventional research, will give his perspective on the study.

What rural publishers think about the future: Ross McDuffie, chief portfolio officer of the National Trust for Local News, will report on a survey of rural publishers that is now in the field.

Finding alternative-revenue success at a twice-weekly: David Woronoff, publisher of The Pilot in Southern Pines, N.C., will explain how his newspaper has broadened its revenue base.

Finding alternative-revenue success at a small daily: Jack Rooney, The Keene Sentinel, Keene, N.H., will do likewise, following up on the Sentinel's presentation at last year's summit.

Reviving Gannett ghosts: Jeremy Gulban, CEO of CherryRoad Media, owner of many former Gannett Co. papers, discusses the difficulty of reviving rural newspapers that lost most of their circulation and revenue under ownership of the nation's largest chain.

Rural journalism as a community builder: Bonita Robertson-Hardy, co-executive director, of the Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group, will discuss how accurate narratives, including high-quality journalism, help build trust and advance equitable rural prosperity.

Philanthropy for local news: Duc Luu, a jouralism officer at the Knight Foundation, moderates a panel with Richard Young of CivicLex, a local digital startup that focuses on local government and civil society; and Lillian Ruiz of Ci-X Strategies, which helps develop thriving public squares that communicate harmony, resilience and cohesion.

Broader rural news: Tim Marema, editor of The Daily Yonder, and Alana Rocha, editor of the Institite for Nonprofit News’s Rural News Network, will discuss how their online platforms bring a focus to broader rural issues and topics by exploring local examples.

Solutions journalism: Mary Steurer, government reporter for the Casper Star-Tribune, will discuss will for solutions-journalism reporting projects and beats in rural news deserts that have few existing resources. as well as ideas on how solutions journalism can be used to build trust in rural communities. Also participating: Melissa Cassutt, rural media manager of the Solutions Journalism Network.

Turning readers into correspondents and reporters: Lindsey Young of Kansas Publishing Ventures will discuss "Earn Your Press Pass," a program that she developed and is being used by state newspaper associations to help newspapers members fill gaps in local reporting.

Digital start-ups going against chain-owned small dailies: The experiences of Lynne Campbell of the Community News Brief in Macomb, Ill.; Jennifer P. Brown of the Hoptown Chronicle in Hopkinsville, Ky.; Debra Tobin of the Logan-Hocking Times in Logan, Ohio; and Nicole DeCriscio Bowe, who is just starting The Owen News in Spencer, Ind.

Seeking state policies to help local journalism: Anna Brugmann, director of policy at the Rebuild Local News Coalition, will discuss how it has turned its attention to state governments, and report on some legislative successes, including a tax break in Washington state and California House passage of a bill that would require tech platforms to give publishers money to hire journalists.

Retreating to Facebook: What do you do when you publish one of the best small weeklies in America but have reached a turnign point in life and have to give up printing your newspaper? Laurie Ezzell Brown of The Canadian Record in Texas and Ryan Craig of the Todd County Standard in Kentucky talked about how they still report on Facebook, and Craig reports on his growing audience. 

Bringing students into communities to report local news: Richard Watts of the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont moderates a panel with Alan Miller of Denison University in central Ohio and Christopher Drew of Louisiana State University.

Maintaining and growing print circulation: Patrick Schless of the Lewis County Press's Community Journalism Project says, "Strengthening community newspapers starts with print first; it is what the staff believe in, what the current subscribers know, and what the small-town advertisers understand." He's working with 70 rural papers to strengthen print product while building a bridge to a hybrid future.

Where do we go from here? Concluding roundtable, moderated by Benjy Hamm, incoming director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.

The day will conclude with a cash-bar reception and optional dinner, which carries a $50 fee. The rest of the day is free of charge, thanks to the Institute and its parent units: the UK School of Journalism and Media and the College of Communication and Information.

Save the date: July 7 for the third National Summit on Journalism in Rural America in Lexington, Ky., and online

The Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues (publisher of The Rural Blog) will hold its third National Summit on Journalism in Rural America Friday, July 7, in Lexington, Kentucky. This will be a free, hybrid event, with substantial online participation and presentations.

We plan to have a wide range of news-industry professionals, journalism funders, academic researchers and community developers who realize that communities need local journalism. The program is still being developed but will include presentation of research of new business models for local journalism, presented by Nick Mathews of the University of Missouri (research colleague of Teri Finneman of the University of Kansas, a major presenter at the last Summit), success stories from innovative rural publishers such as David Woronoff of The Pilot in Southern Pines, N.C., and funders such as Duc Luu of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

We are planning a full day and are interested in your ideas for presenters and programming that help answer the question the Summits and the Institute for Rural Journalism seek to answer: How do rural communities sustain journalism that supports democracy? Please email your ideas to al.cross@uky.edu.

The Summit will be held at The Campbell House hotel on US 68 in Lexington, the same highway that took attendees to the second Summit last June, but this time much closer to Blue Grass Airport. A block of rooms will be available at $139 per night; information on that, registration and more on programming will be forthcoming soon.

Rural readers in the Great Plains are more willing to support newspapers with alternative revenue than publishers think

As rural newspapers adapt to the digital age and look for more revenue, a new study suggests that their readers are more willing to support them with non-subscription revenue than publishers think.

That's what researchers found in Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas when they asked 106 rural publishers and people in rural areas (without a town of 10,000 or more population) about new ways to finance newspapers. They found "a clear disconnect between what revenue streams publishers are willing to implement and what revenue streams readers are potentially willing to endorse," says the paper, published in Journalism Research.

Teri Finneman

Teri Finneman of the University of Kansas, Patrick Ferrucci of the University of Colorado and Nick Mathews of the University of Missouri-Kansas City asked publishers about the viability of 16 possible revenue sources: print subscriptions, digital subscriptions, legal notices, other advertising, marketing services, graphic-design services, email newsletters, memberships (defined as a perk beyond a subscription), events, government support, grants, donations, foundations and other large donors, commercial printing, and sale of office supplies. The 414 readers (who were not necessarily readers of the surveyed publishers' papers) were asked about 12 sources: print subscriptions, digital subscriptions, advertising, taxpayer support, donations, events, memberships, email newsletters, marketing services, graphic design services, and office supplies and/or commercial printing.

The publishers' top four were advertising, print subscriptions, digital subscriptions and legal notices, all getting at least 70 percent support and the rest with less than 50 percent. Readers' top choice was events. "The popularity of this option is not surprising coming from rural areas where 'there’s nothing to do,' and arguably provides an opportunity for newspapers to fill a central community engagement role in person, not just in print," the researchers wrote. "The second option that rural residents were very likely or somewhat likely to support was print subscriptions, adding further evidence that print is still a mainstay in rural America."

Graph by The Daily Yonder, adapted by The Rural Blog, shows revenue preferences of rural newspaper publishers and rural readers (not necessarily of those publishers' newspapers) in Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

But the next three options — email newsletters, memberships and donations, all in the 40-50% range — were "a striking contrast to the publishers, who ranked e-newsletters and memberships toward the bottom of their choices. . . . the results of the reader survey overwhelmingly illustrate how community members would support their local news organizations in a multitude of manners not available to them currently."

Why didn't digital subscriptions score better with readers? "Many rural news organizations utilize digital subscriptions that are essentially only a PDF version of the print product," the researchers write, noting previous research that found "Readers, historically, find PDFs of newspapers not engaging, not something worth much time and, therefore, not innovative."

The paper is the completion of research discussed by Finneman at the second National Summit on Journalism in Rural America, where she revealed only data for North Dakota. At the third Summit, to be held in Lexington, Ky., July 7, Mathews will discuss the research and another project, looking at experimentation with new revenue sources by a small newspaper group in southeast Kansas.

News-media roundup: Citizens want info on government and its meetings; bad news vs. good news; style points . . .

Glenda Arnett accepts the Citizen of the Year award from
Steve Henry of the Brinkley Chamber of Commerce.

Glenda Arnett of Arkansas' Brinkley Argus was getting ready to take the front-page photo of the local chamber of commerce's Citizen of the Year on Feb. 23, just as she has for more than 50 years. “They began reading about the person, and I couldn’t really hear what they were saying when they announced the winner,” she recalled. “I asked my sister, ‘Whose name did they call?’ and she said, ‘It’s you.’” One nominator said of Arnett, “Glenda is the epitome of everything that is great about Brinkley. She is dedicated to the town and volunteers for innumerable charitable activities through civil and religious organizations. ... There are few lives in Brinkley that she hasn’t touched.” There are thousands of Glenda Arnetts at rural newspapers across the nation. Read more about her in Arkansas Publisher, the newsletter of the Arkansas Press Association. 

Google map highlights towns in study.

What readers want: Sarah Stonbely, research director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, surveyed residents about what they need from their local news outlets. Rural Blairstown, urban Paterson (next to Montclair), and the state capital of Trenton are very different, but many of their news needs are the same, Laura Hazard Owen reports for NiemanLab, which she edits.

"All three communities had lost most of their existing local news outlets over the years," Owen writes. "All wanted more service journalism, in the form of information about municipal government meetings or contact information for local leaders. And all relied heavily on local Facebook groups for news, even though they also understood Facebook’s flaws."

Stonbely told Owen, "One might assume that there isn’t a ton of interest in municipal meetings, because they’re kind of boring. So I was really excited to hear that people wanted to know more, to have a list. And it’s easy — it’s kind of low-hanging fruit, right? It shouldn’t be that difficult to keep an updated list of when and where and what the meetings are."

Stonbely's report suggests building a community calendar with help from trusted local organizations, with true collaboration, "beyond just asking them to contribute content, so that trust is built in from the beginning." Also, "Engage to a greater extent on Facebook, and be present on Facebook groups that are relevant. . . . This is where most of the traffic is and where you’ll have the greatest visibility.'

Bad news gets clicks, but many want good news: "A new study has found that negative words in headlines increased click rates, while positive words decreased them," Joshua Benton reports for NiemanLab. "Each additional negative word increased the clickthrough rate by 2.3%." Axios notes, "The human instinct towards negativity has been well-documented, but Joshua Benton writes that this study, which drew on data from Upworthy’s hyperbolic headlines, is unusually quantifiable . . . Upworthy did extensive A/B testing on headlines, with editors required to write 25 headlines for each article. One surprise was the headlines with words associated with sadness did better than headlines associated with fear or anger."

"People find bad news more interesting than good news," Amina Khan writes for the Los Angeles Times, reporting on a study of 1,156 people in Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, France, Ghana, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, Senegal, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States: "The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, hint that this human bias toward negative news might be a large part of what drives negative news coverage. But the results also revealed that this negative bias was not shared by everyone, and some even had a positive bias: a sign that there may be a market for positive news."

Style points: The Associated Press has updated its Stylebook on several topics, including: using LGBTQ+ instead of just LGBTQ, to make it more inclusive, AP says; a new entry on euthanasia, medically assisted suicide, physician-assisted suicide that spells out proper usage for each term; a new entry on the Civil Rights Movement, which it says should be capitalized when referring to the specific historical period in the U.S., mainly in the 1950s and '60s; and the addition of B.C.E. and C.E. as acceptable options in referencing a calendar year in the period before Christ and anno Domini: in the year of the Lord, respectively. C.E. means the Common Era; B.C.E. means before it.

The New York and Michigan Solutions Journalism Collaborative has compiled a Caregiving Coverage Style Guide to help writers "avoid language that reflect negatively on aging," the Local Media Association reports. "The entries are based on – and credited to – sources including the Associated Press Stylebook, AARP’s Caregivers Glossary, the National Center on Disability and Journalism’s Disability Language Style Guide, and the Changing the Narrative project."

Santos story illustrates demise of local news ecosystem; lots of commentary, but 'No one is ... being paid to run down tips'

The fact that a Long Island weekly's revealing coverage of congressional candidate and now Rep.-elect George Santos wasn't picked up by other news outlets until after the election illustrates the demise of the local news ecosystem, writes Steven Waldman of the Rebuild Local News Coalition.

“If this had run 25 years ago, it would have been gobbled up,” Grant Lally, the publisher and owner of the North Shore Leader, told Waldman. “There’d have been 20 follow ups from Newsday and other publications and the weeklies.” But the weeklies that once served Long Island towns have "mostly merged into larger chains, and many don’t even have editorial offices in the covered towns anymore," Waldman reports. "Another part of this case, though, is the attention economy."

Steven Waldman

Waldman explains, "Succeeding in media today requires doing good journalism and then building your own audience for it, and the North Shore Leader didn’t successfully disseminate their scoop. They didn’t mention their story on their Facebook or Instagram accounts (not updated since 2021), nor did they tweet about it, though that stems more from them not having a Twitter account. Which isn’t really surprising since the paper doesn’t have anyone working social media hard—in part because they’ve shrunk." Lally told him, “We lost half our advertising during Covid and most of it really hasn’t come back.”

Because "the local media ecosystem is compromised, even when someone manages to get a good story, the rest of the system can’t amplify it or pursue it," Waldman writes. "If a small paper broke a story, it would be picked up by a bigger paper, or The Associated Press, which would prompt the TV stations and radio stations to dive in. Now the hyperlocal small newsrooms rarely do investigative work, and when they do, the bigger players don’t pay attention. And in smaller communities, the weekly papers are the entire foodchain, so their demise is even more consequential."

There are stil more than 6,000 weeklies, but many of them, and some dailies, are “ghost newspapers . . . slim papers full of wire copy, press releases and ads," Waldman notes. "One consequence of this hollowing out is that voters have little to no information on which to base their choices in local elections. This would seem to be a fairly significant problem for, you know, democracy. And ironically, the more local the election, the worse the coverage is likely to be. But the harm goes much deeper. Other studies show that areas with less local news have more corruption, fewer competitive elections, less resident involvement in PTAs, and even lower bond ratings. . . . There’s now evidence that the decline of local news exacerbates polarization, too. Studies show, for instance, that in areas with less coverage, voters are less likely to split their tickets. That’s because the vacuums created by the contraction of local news are filled largely by national cable TV, radio, and social media. The contraction of local news accelerates the nationalization of politics while at the same time, we have less of the kinds of information that binds together communities—everything from obituaries to high-school sports. And as "many communities have moved from good information, to no information, to deceptive information, a new wave of “pink slime” sites—often set up by political activists—to impersonate traditional news sites while actively promoting particular candidates or businesses."

Waldman, who runs Report for America, notes the book, News Hole, by media scholars Danny Hayes and Jennifer Lawless, who wrote that most discussions about the problems of democracy “don’t account for the most dramatic change in the civic life U.S. communities have experienced in the last 20 years: the decimation of the local news media.” He promotes his coalition's main cause, the proposed Local Journalism Sustainability Act, which would give tax credits to newsrooms to pay local journalists, to small businesses that advertise in local news outlets and to consumers who purchase local news: "Perhaps Rep. Santos could co-sponsor the bill."

Screenshot from CNN

UPDATE, Jan. 7: On his Saturday morning CNN program, Michael Smerconish said "mythomanic" Santos also benefited from a late redistricting that turned the formerly Democratic district into a marginally Republican one and left little time for other Republicans to organize a primary campaign. But his six-minuite segment is mainly about the "systemic failure that is only getting worse" in local news. He concluded, “George Santos is what you get when everyone with a laptop is a wannabe journalist, but no one is left being paid to run down tips, and that should make all of us nervous. The next time you hear about the closure of a newspaper, or the scaling back of a newsroom, think about George Santos and how many more like him might be getting away with something.”

Noon ET Thursday: Free online session on how to use academic research as an investigative reporting tool

Neil Bedi, Rachel Lovell and Denise-Marie Ordway

Academic research can be a crucial tool for reporters to investigate problems and hold the powerful accountable. The Journalist's Resource at Harvard University is holding a one-hour webinar at noon ET Thursday to learn how scholarly studies and collaborating with researchers can strengthen news coverage — and help journalists at each stage of the investigative reporting process.

The presenters will be:

• Neil Bedi, a ProPublica reporter. He won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for a Tampa Bay Times investigation focusing on predictive policing. He was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for a series investigating high death rates at a Florida children’s hospital’s cardiac surgery unit.
• Rachel Lovell, an assistant professor of criminology and director of the Criminology Research Center at Cleveland State University. She's also an advocate for reporter-researcher collaborations and has helped journalists investigate issues such as sexual violence and human trafficking.
• Denise-Marie Ordway, who trains journalists in research methods as part of her role as managing editor of The Journalist’s Resource. She was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting for an investigation into hazing at Florida A&M University that she led while at the Orlando Sentinel.

This event is free, but registration is required. Registrants will get details on how to join the session.

Researchers say rural journalists properly define 'hate speech' but struggle to apply the definition to local events

"Journalists who cover rural areas in the United States say they are afraid to report on hate groups, and this fear is exacerbated by close community ties and limited resources among rural journalists," researchers from four universities write in a paper recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Journalism Practice.

The researchers used “hate speech” as definitional term in 33 interviews with U.S. journalists reporting in rural communities. "Rural journalists articulate a clear definition for hate speech, but struggle to apply that definition to events within their communities, even as they articulate numerous forms of hate," the researchers write. "Journalists often dismissed acts of hate using the residual category of 'not hate, but …' to signal something that they felt was out of place or unsuitable but did not rise to the legal definition of hate speech and thus was not worth reporting on."

The researchers are Greg Perreault of Appalachian State University, Ruth Moon of Louisiana State University, Jessica Fargen Walsh of the University of Nebraska and Mildred Perrealult of East Tennessee State University.

Airbnb listings that advertise Southern culture a surprisingly decent way to define the South, data journalist writes

Share of a state's Airbnb listings that mention terms such as "Southern hospitality," "Southern cooking" or "Southern charm," to name a few. (Washington Post map using Airbnb listing data)

It can be kind of hard to specifically define the South. "The South isn’t just geographic. Plenty of states in the southern half of the United States aren’t even remotely Southern. It’s not entirely historical — it probably goes beyond the boundaries of the Confederate States of America, but doesn’t encompass every former slave state on the Union side. It’s entirely cultural. And culture is notoriously hard to measure," Andrew Van Dam reports for The Washington Post. "Normally, an argument like this would be settled by the Census Bureau, the ultimate arbiter of all things dweeb. But the Census definition of the South seems wildly generous, sweeping up every state from Delaware in the East to Oklahoma in the West."

Data journalists such as himself have been trying—and failing—to find a decent yardstick for some time. But "a final answer remained elusive until we noticed just how many places on Airbnb advertise their 'Southern hospitality' or their 'Midwestern charm,'" Van Dam writes. "All those Airbnb hosts were, we realized, creating a one-of-a-kind map of America’s true cultural boundaries. Airbnb listings represent hundreds of thousands of pages of text capturing exactly how Americans describe their home regions to outsiders, and every single word of it has a geographic location attached."

What's a weekly newspaper? What's a daily? Changes in the industry may be turning the terms into anachronisms

The State Journal in Frankfort, Ky., the state capital, once
published six days a week; now it prints two days a week. 

What's a weekly newspaper? One that publishes three or fewer times a week, per the longstanding industry convention? What about the small dailies that now print only two or three times a week but publish new information online most days? Which raises the question, what's a daily newspaper?

"Rising costs and shrinking demand for printed publications have changed the very definition of 'daily' newspapers," reports Greg Burns of the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University. "Publishers from coast to coast – at weeklies as well as dailies – are reducing the days of the week they print, filling the gaps with e-editions and around-the-clock online access. The once-routine, seven-day-a-week print run is disappearing, with 42 of the largest 100 newspapers now delivering a print edition six or fewer times a week. Eleven of those largest dailies publish in printed form only one or two times a week.

"Some weeklies, too, are cutting back on their publishing frequency from three to two times to only once a week, even as many others supplement their print editions with daily subscriber e-newsletters – similarly defying the traditional idea of what makes a 'weekly' a weekly." The terminologies, used since daily papers began in the U.S. more than two centuries ago, may now be anachronistic.

“If you’re publishing new information daily, how much longer are we even going to use the terms daily and weekly?” ask Sara April of the newspaper brokerage Dirks, Van Essen & April. More importantly, she told Burns that some weeklies are now more valuable than dailies.

"While thousands of weeklies have folded since 2005, many in affluent, growing markets maintain strong cash flow and command relatively high valuations when sold," Burns writes. "In contrast to large dailies, which rely on subscribers for more than half of their revenue, weeklies continue to receive most of their revenue from local businesses that buy advertising and services from them and sponsor their various print and digital publications."

Burns' story is part of the State of Local News 2022 report from Northwestern's Medill School.

National summit sparks a continuing effort for innovation and sustainability in rural journalism; here's an initial report

Penny Abernathy of Northwestern University was the first presenter at the rural journalism summit.

By Al Cross

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

"I leave hopeful for community newspapers," one attendee said as she left the National Summit on Journalism in Rural America, which concluded Saturday. And there were reasons to have hope.

At a time when newspapers must get more revenue from their audiences, who won't pay good money for bad journalism, there's plenty of evidence that good journalism is good business, even if you're not the only paper in your market. "It's still possible to run a successful small-town newspaper, if you do it right," said Marshall Helmberger, co-publisher of the Timberjay in Tower, Minn.

His co-presenter, Sharon Burton, won applause when she said "I wish people in this business would stop writing our obituary." Burton publishes the Adair County Community Voice in Columbia, Ky. She said the county's top elected official told her that she keeps the official from doing wrong.

That fit a statement from the Summit's first presenter, Penny Abernathy of Northwestern University: "A strong news organization build democracy and it builds community." To sustain such organizations, "There's not going to be one business model, there are going to be many," Abernathy said. "It just depends on what kind of community you're in."

The Summit had a research question: How do rural communities sustain local journalism that supports local democracy? The question was based on the increased need for community support for newspapers or any other form of news media, in an environment where people are "bombarded with information," as Burton described it.

Many local news media are getting more support from their communities with membership models that give subscribers extra benefits, but many publishers are reluctant to ask their readers for more. At least in the Great Plains, that attitude is off base, said Teri Finneman of the University of Kansas, reporting on her team's recent survey of publishers and readers in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas.

Finneman found that 40 percent of readers said they are likely or very likely to donate to their local paper to keep it going. She and Kansas Publishing Ventures, which publishes four weeklies, are testing that by implementing such a model later this month. "This is live, ongoing research," which should produce its first report this fall, she said.

At the close of the Summit, I observed that we are in a fast-moving environment in which news publishers and people who want to help them need to remain in contact, so the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues will create a platform for Summit attendees and others to share information, questions and answers. And we will hold another Summit via Zoom in a few months, again focused on innovation and sustainability.

The Summit was held at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Kentucky, where the first summit was held 15 years ago. "It was a once-thriving community that faced oblivion only to be saved by a collaborative effort. Shaker Village, now Kentucky's largest National Historic Landmark, was a fitting setting for the rural journalism question that we need to keep asking," wrote Tom Silvestri of The Relevance Project of the Newspaper Association Managers. "A jam-packed agenda covered a lot of ground, from the state of community journalism, to groups working to uplift the industry, to the roles of philanthropy and national funders, to newspapers being run as non-profit organizations, to examples of journalism adapting to change, innovating and responding to coverage needs, to the research needed to help community journalism, and to new business models that can be viable options based on dynamic data."

Watch The Rural Blog for more details on discussions, questions and answers from the Summit.

Researcher testing new business model for community newspapers among speakers at rural journalism summit

A journalism professor who is researching alternative business models for community newspapers, and is about to test one of them at a paper in Kansas, will be a major presenter at the National Summit on Journalism in Rural America, to be televised on YouTube June 3 and 4.

Dr. Teri Finneman

Teri Finneman, an associate professor at the University of Kansas, is among 20 journalism professionals on the program for the summit. Most are practitioners, some are academics, and some are both; Finneman is publisher of the Eudora Times with her journalism students.

Other speakers at the summit, to be held at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Kentucky, include Penny Abernathy of Northwestern University, Jason Alcorn of the American Journalism Project, Jonathan Kealing of the Institute for Nonoprofit News, publishers Terry Williams of the Keene (N.H.) Sentinel, Dennis Brack of the Rappahannock News in Virginia, Bill Horner of the Chatham (N.C.) News+Record, Marshall Helmberger of the Timberjay in Tower, Minn., Jody Lawrence-Turner of the Fund for Oregon Rural Journalism and Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro of Columbia University, co-founder of the National Trust for Local News. It will be livestreamed at https://ukci.me/ruralj starting at 1:15 p.m. Friday, June 3.

The summit is being held by the University of Kentucky's Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues. Its director, Al Cross, said "Penny Abernathy and Teri Finneman were the first two academics we invited to be part of this event, which seeks to answer the question: How do rural communities sustain local journalism that supports local democracy? We think the answer must come not just from practitioners and academic, but from communities."

Finneman has examined possible new business models for community papers, and this summer will test one that "moves away from heavy reliance on advertising and cheap subscriptions," says a KU news release. "If the new model is successful in use of memberships, e-newsletters, events and new content direction, plans call to distribute a new model available for rural weeklies across the country." The research is funded by KU's William Allen White School of Journalism & Mass Communications, the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association Foundation and the state newspaper associations of Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas.

Publishers might be surprised to hear that 40 percent of small-town newspaper readers in a Great Plains survey by Finneman and her research partners (Pat Ferrucci of the University of Colorado and Nick Mathews of the University of Missouri) said they would be very likely or likely to donate, in addition to subscription costs, to support their local paper.

“There’s a tremendous disconnect between what readers say they are willing to support and what publishers are willing to consider,” Finneman said. “This business model we’re testing is all about being proactive if the day comes when newspapers lose another revenue source in legal notices, having a safety net in place and evolving.”

Publishers were presented with 15 potential revenue streams and asked which they would be willing to try. They were most receptive to the traditional sources of advertising, subscriptions and legal notices from governments. The least popular options were memberships, e-newsletters, direct government support and large private donations. But among the 400-plus readers surveyed, memberships and e-newsletters were among the most popular responses.

The model developed by Finneman, Ferrucci and Mathews includes memberships in which readers can get different levels of benefits. "The model will also work to engage community members, especially young residents, and focus on preferred reader content," the news release says.

The model will be tested at Joey Young's Kansas Publishing Ventures, which has Harvey County Now in Newton and the Hillsboro Free Press and will get $10,000 to participate in the experiment. “Just knowing Joey and the team there, there’s a lot of enthusiasm, there’s a passion for journalism and there’s a willingness to try, that isn’t there with many other places,” Finneman told Harvey County Now.

The newspaper's story said, "Harvey County Now hopes its participation in the project will present findings that can help other news organizations build strong and sustainable local newsrooms and enjoy some of the success the publication has had."

Friday webinar will teach you how to use free Google Tools to punch up your business and data reporting and graphics

A hands-on digital workshop on Friday, May 13, aims to teach journalists how to use free Google Tools to strengthen your reporting. The workshop goes from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. ET and costs $10. It's presented by a partnership of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Google News Initiative and is sponsored by the Mid-America Press Institute. Click here for more information or to register.

From the website: "In this hands-on workshop, SPJ Google News Lab trainer Mike Reilley will show you how to use free Google tools that can help your newsroom build interactive charts, maps, visualizations and more. Tools we’ll cover: Google Flourish, Google Dataset Search, Google Fact Check Explorer, Google Trends, MapChecking.com, Google Earth Studio, Earth Engine Timelapse, Public Data Explorer, advanced search, data scraping with Google Sheets and Google Flourish. Prior to the session, set up a free account at http://flourish.studio. Participants will receive handouts with exercises, links to tools and more."

Using those programs, Reilley will teach participants easier ways to scrape data from websites or PDFs and turn it into graphics (some interactive); how to scrape and track both real-time and historic stock-market data; and how to tell visual stories with satellite data, maps, and more.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Set up a free Google Earth Studio account as soon as possible, since Google must approve applications before granting access.

Today is the deadline to apply for a project that will help journalists test-drive strategies to increase reader trust

Today is the deadline to apply for Trusting News' new Pluralism Network, a project in which journalists will learn and test new strategies to increase reader trust in the news media. Click here for more information and click here to apply.

Trusting News, a collaboration of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute and the American Press Institute, will explore five questions through the new Pluralism Network. Stipends for three of the projects are funded by George Mason University's Mercatus Center and cross-disciplinary, cross-idealogical collaborative the New Pluralists. From the project's website:

• What strategies or tools could help editors assess whether individual stories are contributing to complexity and curiosity rather than overgeneralizations and polarization? Read more about our anti-polarization checklist, which comes with a $2,000 stipend for participating newsrooms.
• How can newsrooms adopt practices around national wire-service content that help audiences differentiate it from local news? And what resources would be helpful for journalists writing headlines on those stories to avoid triggering polarized reactions and feedback? Read more about our wire news project, which comes with a $2,000 stipend for participating newsrooms.
• How can newsrooms incorporate outreach efforts with maximum impact and efficiency to learn about the needs and perceptions of people with low trust in news? Read more about our outreach and listening project, which comes with a $500 stipend for individual participating journalists.
• How can hiring editors and human-resources teams update interview practices to learn more about the "dimensions of difference" that job candidates could add to their staffs? Read more about our hiring project.
• How can newsrooms talk to their audiences about their election coverage in a way that highlights shared goals and taps into a collective desire for understanding and curiosity? Read more about our election coverage messaging project.

Trusting News will publish what it's learned this summer, just in time for the midterm elections. In the meantime, participating journalists can share what they're learning with each other via a Slack channel. 

News media roundup: How to reach audiences that mistrust the news; media literacy podcast; a fact-checker's toolkit

Six cues used to make snap judgements about whether to trust a news source (Trust in News Project graphic)

Here's some recent news about media literacy, misinformation, and disinformation:

It's possible to reach people who mistrust the news, but you can't just relying on good reporting and writing, according to a recent Trust In News Project study by the Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford. Great headlines, graphics, photos, and more are essential too. The study also categorizes six cues audiences use to make snap judgements about which sources to trust (see graphic above). Here's a write-up about the study from Poynter and here's the study itself.

A fact-checker for Snopes discusses how she tells real news from fake and shares the toolkit she and colleagues use. Read more here.

Last year, Illinois became the first state to require all high school students to be taught media literacy skills. NPR podcast "In Case You Missed It" takes a deep dive into why media literacy is an essential skill today, as well as what people need to know who didn't learn about it in school. Listen to it here.

Here's a reminder to consider your source's motives and fact-check outrageous "trends" before reporting: Facebook parent company Meta hired GOP consulting firm Targeted Victory to help turn the public against social-media rival TikTok and draw attention away from Meta's privacy and antitrust issues. The nationwide media and lobbying campaign "includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor," Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell report for The Washington Post. Internal emails obtained by the Post show that the firm wanted to portray "the fast-growing app, owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, as a danger to American children and society." Facebook has already been under fire for engineering its algorithm to push users toward false and inflammatory news.

Quick hits: Church sues town over new limits on days for feeding hungry; new resources on rural hunger for journalists

Here's a roundup of stories with rural resonance; if you do or see similar work that should be shared on The Rural Blog, email heather.chapman@uky.edu.

A church in rural Oregon is suing the town over a new local ordinance restricting how many times a week the church can give free meals to the needy. Read more here.

The Rural Health Information Hub has updated its resource guide for journalists for rural hunger and access to healthy food. Read more here.

The chief justice of the Iowa Supreme Court says she'd like to see more programs encouraging lawyers to live and practice in rural Iowa. Student loan debt is an impediment to that, she noted. Read more here.

Mayfield, Ky., faces long-term psychological damage from the recent tornado. Read more here.

Rural adults are more likely to be pessimistic about cancer and feel overwhelmed by information about cancer prevention, a new study shows. Read more here.

Publishers of rural newspapers invited to take quick survey

Tony Baranowski

Research on rural journalism and small-town newspapers is lacking. Tony Baranowski of the Iowa Falls Times Citizen is trying to fill some of the gap with a survey of rural newspaper publishers, to wrap up his work in the NewStart program at West Virginia University. Because such research is relatively rare, it's important that he have a broad sample.

The survey has 19 questions, is easy to complete via SurveyMonkey. Tony would like to wrap it up in about two weeks. The heart of it is about revenue, so it's designed for publishers, but in community journalism the publisher and editor roles often overlap, so editors should feel free to take a look. It's at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/SXGZ7BH.

Weekly honored after filling revenue gap with sponsorships, grants and relief money, and collaborating with J-schools

Chatham County is next to the Research Triangle of  Raleigh,
Chapel Hill and Durham, N.C. (Click on map to enlarge it.)

A weekly newspaper in the heart of North Carolina is showing that a small news outlet can develop new sources of revenue to maintain the quality of its journalism.

"This is the story of a $120,300 juggling act involving human capital, dollars and sense," University of Kentucky journalism professor Buck Ryan writes in the latest installment of his case study of the Chatham News + Record, a 3,800-circulation weekly.

The paper won 28 news awards in the 2020 North Carolina Press Association contest for 2020, more than any other small weekly and more than any other newspaper except for three metro dailies, Ryan reports: "But alas, the awards carry no fiscal benefits. The cruel reality for community newspapers is that quality is necessary but not sufficient for profitability. Every day is a street fight for sustainability."

Ryan tells how Editor-Publisher Bill Horner III and two partners bought and combined two money-losing newspapers, the News and the Record. "From the start, Horner was consumed by the juggling act facing every community newspaper leader: revenue and staffing. He remains the only original staff member on the news side and the head worrier about plugging holes in a sinking advertising-revenue ship, bleeding up to $2,000 a week."

Horner filled the gap with $37,300 in grants from Facebook and Google, $18,000 from local sponsorships and $60,000 in a forgivable Covid-19 relief loan, "plus $5,000 in underwriting from the Missouri School of Journalism to support an innovation intern." The paper has also worked with the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Ryan gives details in a narrative and an interview with Horner, available here.

Post and Courier reports on, and partners with other S.C. newspapers to help fill, gaps in accountability journalism

Newspapers in Holly Hill and Santee, S.C., have been among
those that have closed in rural areas of the Palmetto State.
(Photo by Andrew J. Whitaker, The Post and Courier)

"Corruption is flourishing in the rural corners of South Carolina as newspapers fold or shrink coverage amid a financially crippling pandemic," Glenn Smith and Tony Bartelme report for The Post and Courier of Charleston, which is trying to do something about it by partnering with rural papers.

"Seven of our state’s newspapers closed their doors in the past year, joining more than 60 that shuttered across the nation as the coronavirus strangled an industry already battered by shrinking revenue and draining job cuts," Smith and Bartelme report. "The losses hit hardest in the vast rural stretches of the Palmetto State."

The reporters' story accompanies a special project they started with Joseph Cranney and Avery Wilks, "Uncovered," which calls it "a project to cast new light on questionable government conduct, especially in smaller towns. We’ll work with community newspapers, leveraging The Post and Courier’s investigative resources with reporters who know their towns inside and out. We'll publish our findings simultaneously." The story carries the headline, "News deserts and weak ethics laws allow corruption to run rampant in SC."

Allendale County (Wikipedia map)

Their first example: Allendale County, which lost its only newspaper in 2015. Since then, "The state took over the county’s problem-plagued school district for the second time while three of Allendale’s public officials went to jail on embezzlement charges."

Rural papers aren't known for investigations. They still discourage corruption, said experts such as Chief Mark Keel of the State Law Enforcement Division told the Post and Courier, which reports:

"Often, the corruption comes to light when local suspicions or complaints end up in the community newspaper, prompting someone in power to reach out to SLED for help, Keel said. Kristine Artello, a corruption expert and professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, interviewed former federal prosecutors and investigators for a study into what triggers corruption cases and the tools investigators need for these cases to succeed. One surprising finding: Newspapers and law enforcement often had a synergistic effect. Old-school investigators told her 'they would come into the office in the morning and the first thing they did was read the newspaper and make circles in the articles, saying, "This smells funny. I want to investigate that." And that’s what they started with.' But as communities lose newspapers, they lose the kinds of clues law enforcement needs to make cases, Artello said."

The Post and Courier's stories offer many examples from South Carolina but one takes a broader look, quoting Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, publisher of The Rural Blog: “We’re in a crisis in local journalism in this country, and it was a crisis before the pandemic came along.” He says just covering government meetings isn't enough: “Covering a meeting is like sitting in a train station and watching trains pick up and let off passengers,” Cross said. “You might have some idea what is going on, but you don’t really know unless you get on that train, ride it and ask questions.”