AP to stop naming minor crime suspects, as more newsrooms agree to delete stories from their archives

"The Associated Press told its journalists on Tuesday to no longer name suspects in minor crimes or publish photos of them "in brief stories about minor crimes when there is little chance the organization will cover the case beyond the initial arrest . . . out of concern that such stories can have a long, damaging afterlife on the internet that can make it hard for individuals to move on with their lives," the AP's David Bauder reports. "The AP said it will also not link to local newspaper or broadcast stories about such incidents where the arrested person’s name or mugshot might be used. The AP will also not do stories driven mainly by particularly embarrassing mugshots."

The AP's announcement comes after several news organizations have said they would start removing stories from archives, under limited circumstances.  In 2019 the Cedar Rapids Gazette implemented a case-by-case appeals process for removing old stories, and The Boston Globe announced a similar policy this year.

A 2018 survey found that "some 80 percent of news organizations had some policy about removing stories from archives, up from less than half a decade earlier. But in some cases, the policies aren’t written down, aren’t talked about in public or aren’t even publicized in their own newsrooms," Bauder reports. 

In community newspapers, the "long tail" of online information can be an issue in real time. In 2007 The Anniston Star chose not to name a high-school football player whose ineligibility forced his team to forfeit its perfect season, for fear his mistakes as a juvenile could haunt him for decades.

The survey about removing material from archives was conducted by journalism researcher Deborah Dwyer. Her Unpublishing the News website covers the issue extensively and includes resources for newsrooms, including a recent webinar with the News Leaders Association (see below).

Study: Rural residents with disabilities less likely to trust news, follow health advice on pandemic than urban peers

Trust in information about covid-19 by metro status of county. (University of Montana chart; click the image to enlarge it)

Rural Americans with underlying health conditions are at a higher risk of catching covid-19 than their urban counterparts but are less likely to trust reliable information sources and less likely to follow public health recommendations for the pandemic, according to a study from the University of Montana's Research and Training Center on Disability in Rural Communities.

Rural respondents reported lower rates of all practices recommended to lower the spread of covid-19, including handwashing, avoiding crowds, social distancing, and avoiding at-risk individuals.

The sources respondents trusted for health information tended to make the biggest difference in their attitudes. Rural residents were less trusting of any covid-19 information across the board, with one exception: though President Trump was the least-trusted of any information source among all areas, rural residents reported the highest relative level of trust in him. Rural residents also tended to place little trust in the news media, whether local or national news.

A Bloomberg story out of Texas illustrates the disdain many rural residents feel for warnings about the pandemic, where "the disease is seen as more threatening to personal freedoms than personal health," Thomas Black reports. "I'm not worried about it," retired truck driver Jeff Donaldson told Black. "It's all just about the politics."

The state's Republican governor, Greg Abbott, initially resisted strong measures to combat the disease, but he's now advocating for such measures as infection rates rise in Texas. Rural residents told Black the contradictory advice from public officials was one reason they wouldn't wear a mask.

Community Newspaper Holdings converts three papers to online-only after merging (in effect closing) several others

Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., which recently "merged" or closed newspapers in Alabama, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky and Oklahoma, has converted a daily and a weekly in Southern Kentucky to online-only, following the strategy it recently took with a daily in Eastern Illinois.

Glasgow Daily Times publisher Bill Hanson announced Tuesday that the day's print edition would be its last, due to "steep losses in revenue" from the coronavirus pandemic "on top of burdensome print delivery costs, newsprint and ink expenses, and the production outlay required to run the presses. We urge Daily Times subscribers to continue to support the newspaper online."

Last week, giving identical reasons, CNHI did likewise with the Wayne County Outlook, a weekly in Monticello, which operates as a satellite of its daily Commonwealth-Journal in Somerset. The daily is now in a position to get the public-notice advertising for the county.

Glasgow will still be served by a weekly, the Barren County Progress, owned by a small regional group, Jobe Publishing Inc., which is owned by Jeff Jobe, this year's president of the Kentucky Press Association.

CNHI has taken the online-only strategy with one other paper, the Shelbyville Daily Union in Illinois. Its primary strategy has been to "merge" smaller papers into larger ones, in effect closing them. That began in Alabama in April, when the North Jefferson News in Gardendale was merged with The Cullman Times. The towns are 40 miles apart and in non-adjacent counties.

That looked much like the May merger of The Morehead News and two other weeklies in northeastern Kentucky with CHNI's Ashland Daily Independent. In Indiana, the company merged the Batesville Herald-Tribune and the Rushville Republican into the Greensburg Daily News, and the Zionsville Times-Sentinel into the Lebanon Reporter; in Iowa, it merged the Centerville Iowegian into the Ottumwa Courier, and The Pella Chronicle and the Knoxville Journal Express with the Oskaloosa Herald; and in Oklahoma, it folded the Edmond Sun into the Norman Transcript, though the two towns are on opposite sides of Oklahoma City.

CNHI news vice president Bill Ketter told The Rural Blog, "Again, the reason is financial, tied to insufficient local advertising and subscribers. We are providing news coverage of these communities by the merged newspaper. CNHI’s goal is to save newspapers and serve our local communities in the best way we can. But given the overall economic challenges facing the newspaper industry, we cannot operate our smallest markets at a financial loss. Thus the alternatives of digital only and merged newspapers."

Rural Alabama publisher calls for KKK to 'night ride' against Democrats who want to raise taxes; outcry ensues

UPDATE, Feb. 20: Directors of the Alabama Press Association have censured Goodloe Sutton and suspended his newspaper's membership. "The members have a right under the bylaws to address the question of expulsion of the newspaper at the next membership meeting," APA said.

Goodloe Sutton in 2015
(Montgomery Advertiser photo by Alvin Benn)

A newspaper publisher in rural Alabama is drawing criticism after he wrote a Feb. 14 editorial calling for "the Ku Klux Klan to night ride again" against "Democrats in the Republican Party and Democrats [who] are plotting to raise taxes in Alabama."

Goodloe Sutton has worked at the Democrat-Reporter in Linden since 1964 and inherited the paper from his father in the 1980s, Melissa Brown reports for the Montgomery Advertiser. The paper has lost much of its circulation and struggled financially in recent years, the Advertiser reported in 2015.

When the Advertiser asked Sutton about the editorial, he said, "If we could get the Klan to go up there and clean out D.C., we'd all been better off." Asked to clarify what he meant, Sutton said "We'll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them."

Sutton, who is about 80, told the Advertiser he was calling for the lynchings of socialist-communists, not Americans, and compared the Klan to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The Klan, he said, "wasn't violent until they needed to be" and "didn't kill but a few people." Sutton said he welcomed comments, calls or boycotts of the paper, Brown reports.

Red marks Linden in Marengo County;
Demopolis is at north border (Wikipedia)

An outcry against the editorial began after student journalists at Auburn University posted it on Twitter. The Southern Mississippi University School of Mass Communications and Journalism removed Sutton from its Hall of Fame, the Advertiser reports, and the Auburn University Journalism Advisory Council revoked a community journalism award it had given him, The Auburn Plainsman reports.

"Sutton and the newspaper received national acclaim in the 1990s for their reporting on a corrupt local sheriff," Brown reports. But in 2015 he landed the paper in the public eye for a different reason, after running a headline titled "Selma black thugs murder Demopolite Saturday night." Demopolis (2010 population 7,483) is home of the daily Demopolis Times and the largest town in Marengo County, which had 21,027 people in 2010. Linden had 2,123.

Democratic officials in the state swiftly denounced the editorial. "Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), who prosecuted two members of the Klan for their role in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four young girls, called the editorial 'disgusting' and demanded Sutton’s immediate resignation," Antonia Farzan reports for The Washington Post. "Echoing the call for Sutton’s resignation was Rep. Terri A. Sewell (D-Ala.), who wrote, 'For the millions of people of color who have been terrorized by white supremacy, this kind of ‘editorializing’ about lynching is not a joke — it is a threat.'"

UPDATE, Feb. 22: Auburn journalism professor John Carvalho writes for the Advertiser that he was warned that Sutton was racist when the school honored him in 2009, but kept quiet about it, and that "allowed racism to fester and even grow. And now, within the current political climate, it is once asserting itself more strongly than ever."

Landmark is now solely a chain of community newspapers

The Batten family's sale of The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, announced yesterday, will have no effect on its chain of more than 50 community newspapers, the president of the Kentucky-based community group told The Rural Blog this morning.

Standing, L-R: Mike Abernathy. president of Landmark Community
Newspapers, and Frank Batten Jr. (Virginian-Pilot photo by The' N. Pham)

Mike Abernathy, president of Landmark Community Newspapers, said the group remains for sale, with other Batten properties, and will eventually sell, but is "not being actively marketed." The papers are weeklies, except The News-Enterprise in Elizabethtown, Ky., and the Citrus County Chronicle in Crystal River, Fla.

The Virginian-Pilot, including its real estate, was bought for $34 million by Tronc, which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, the Baltimore Sun and the Daily Press of Newport News, Va., in the same metropolitan area as Norfolk. In a press release, Landmark Media Enterprises General Counsel Rusty Fridell said, "In order to most effectively continue its important work, The Virginian-Pilot must have the benefit of the resources of a large organization."

Landmark put itself up for sale more than a decade ago, and has sold in pieces. It sold The Weather Channel to NBC Universal for $3.5 billion, and later sold the Greensboro News and Record and The Roanoke Times, to BH Media Group, owned by Warren Buffett. "The Virginian-Pilot is Virginia's largest paper with Sunday circulation of 132,000," notes Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute. "The sale leaves Tronc and BH Media, which also owns the Richmond Times-Dispatch, as the two big local news players in the state."

Agricultural publication with small staff does a three-part series on the rural opioid epidemic

The Rural Blog doesn't compile an annual list of the best rural journalism of the year past, because we don't have the resources to make a comprehensive review. But if were able to do one for 2017, we would likely include a three-part series on the rural opioid epidemic by Farm and Dairy, an agricultural newspaper based in eastern Ohio, that has three reporters. Chris Kick, Katy Mumaw and Catie Noyes spent nine months reporting on opioids in three rural Ohio and Pennsylvania counties in the paper's circulation area that have high rates of drug-overdose deaths. "Addiction: A Rural Reality" was edited by Aimee Tenzek and designed by art director David Hartong. A special web page, created by Tammy Reese and coordinated by Sara Welch, has stories and information not in the print edition, as well as audio and video. It's an ambitious piece of public-service journalism.

Editor Susan Crowell wrote in a column introducing the November series that it might be the most important thing she had done in her 30-plus years at the newspaper: "Some of you may think the subject of drug addiction doesn’t belong in the pages of Farm and Dairy. You read this newspaper because it shares the stories of farm families, of agriculture, of rural life — not to read about the opioid epidemic that litters the pages of your local daily newspaper. But I think you’re wrong. It’s exactly because we share the stories of farm families and of rural life that we can’t ignore the issue. We’re not immune to its ravages. We all need to know more about this problem that’s right in our midst, whether you live in a city or on a farm. We all need to fight stereotypes — that people with an addiction are low income, or the products of a single-parent home, or didn’t go to church when they were growing up, or any other false impression of someone who might be fighting a substance abuse battle." Crowell concluded, "Every life is worth saving."