Nominations sought for the Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism by June 15

Tom and Pat Gish

Each year the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues presents the national Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, tenacity and integrity in rural journalism, named for the couple who exemplified those qualities as publishers of The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Ky., for 52 years.

Nominations for the Gish Award may be made at any time, but the deadline for new nominations to be considered for this year's award is Monday, June 15. The winner will receive the award at an event in Lexington, Ky., on Oct. 22.

To make a nomination, please send a detailed letter explaining how the nominee shows the kind of courage, tenacity and integrity that Tom and Pat Gish demonstrated at their weekly newspaper in the Central Appalachian coalfield. They withstood advertiser boycotts, business competition, declining population, personal attacks, and even the burning of their office to give their readers the kind of journalism often lacking in rural areas, and were the first winners of the award named for them. Tom died in 2008 and Pat in 2014. Their son, Ben, is the editor and publisher of the Eagle and serves on the award selection committee.

Additional documentation may be submitted after the nomination, and may be requested or required. Send your nominating letter, initial documentation and any questions to Institute Director Benjy Hamm at benjy.hamm@uky.edu.

The Institute seeks nominations that measure up, at least in major respects, to the records of the Gishes and other previous winners. Other winners have been the Ezzell family of The Canadian Record in the Texas panhandle; Jim Prince and Stanley Dearman, current and late publishers of The Neshoba Democrat in Philadelphia, Miss.; Samantha Swindler of The Oregonian for her work at The Times-Tribune in Corbin, Ky., and Jacksonville Daily Progress in Texas; Stanley Nelson and the Concordia Sentinel in Ferriday, La.; Jonathan and Susan Austin of the Yancey County News in North Carolina; the late Landon Wills of the McLean County News in Kentucky; the Trapp family of the Rio Grande Sun in northern New Mexico; Ivan Foley of the Platte County Landmark in northwestern Missouri; the Cullen family of the Storm Lake Times-Pilot in northwest Iowa; and Les Zaitz of the Malheur Enterprise in eastern Oregon. In 2019, the award went to three reporters whose outstanding careers revealed much about the coal industry in Central Appalachia: Howard Berkes, retired from NPR; Ken Ward Jr., then with the Charleston Gazette-Mail; and his mentor at the Gazette, the late Paul Nyden. In 2020 the award went to the late Tim Crews of the Sacramento Valley Mirror; in 2021 to the Thompson-High Family of The News Reporter and the Border Belt Independent in Whiteville, N.C.; in 2022 to Ellen Kreth and the Madison County Record of Huntsville, Ark.; in 2023 to Craig Garnett of the Uvalde Leader-News in Texas; in 2024 to Eric Meyer and the Marion County Record in Kansas; and in 2025 to Lisa Stayton and The Mountain Citizen of Inez, Kentucky.

The Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, based at the University of Kentucky, is focused on helping sustain journalism in rural communities in the United States through information, expertise, training, outreach and other programs.

The Mountain Citizen of Inez, Ky., wins the 2025 Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism

A scrappy little newspaper that has fought for more than 30 years for clean water and open government in its Appalachian county is the winner of the 2025 Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism.

The Mountain Citizen is a weekly paper serving the 11,000 people of Martin County, 231 square miles along Kentucky’s northeastern border with West Virginia. For decades, the Citizen has been the key watchdog on the local water district, which has long had problems providing clean and adequate supply, and on coal companies and local government.

Tap water in Martin County often runs brown, and the Citizen’s efforts prompted state Public Service Commission investigations of the Martin County Water District in 2002, 2006 and 2016. This year, the paper revealed that a state agency had failed to correctly calculate Martin County’s scores in a water-funding competition for poor and underserved counties, and that in 2018 the county’s water was some of the most corrosive in the nation, more so than in Flint, Michigan, in 2015.

“The Mountain Citizen has spent decades overcoming obstacles and opposition to inform its community about serious problems with its water supply and other important issues,” said Benjy Hamm, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism. “Its work represents the best of rural journalism and everything the Gish Award was established to honor – courage, integrity and tenacity.”

In recounting the paper’s water work, owner Lisa Stayton wrote, “When you live here and see your neighbors carrying bottled water into their kitchens, you understand this is about survival. And you worry because you know that many of your neighbors can’t afford to buy bottled water and are drinking tap water that you wouldn’t drink yourself.”

The paper’s water reporting began in 1993, when it revealed that a coal company had so badly cracked the bed of a creek that it had to put a plastic liner in the creek to keep its water out of an underground mine. The paper reported several coal-slurry spills, then got an important scoop in 2000 when it obtained and published maps of a defunct mine that was the conduit for a massive spill from a surface-mine pond, which polluted streams and valleys with an estimated 250 million tons of waste.

When the Citizen forgot to renew its corporate charter in 2000, its corporate name was legally claimed by the water district’s board chairman, who had been the subject of critical reporting by the newspaper. The paper kept using its name, defying a court order, and was fined for contempt of court, but after two years the state Court of Appeals threw out the charge and the fine.

Though the paper’s future was in jeopardy, then-Editor Gary Ball, a former coal miner, continued its strong stances. When the state attorney general’s office announced it would have investigators in the field for the 2002 general election, he told the Lexington Herald-Leader that they were “paper tigers” who were six weeks late, since the groundwork for vote fraud is laid well before an election.

In 2003, the Citizen reported that the county schools spent nearly $250,000 on travel over four years, including airfare for spouses of board members, prompting the schools to refuse complimentary copies that the newspaper had sent to all classrooms. In 2012, the paper challenged the school board’s private discussion of the superintendent’s contract and was upheld by a binding opinion from the state attorney general. In the same year the attorney general ruled the paper was entitled to child-abuse records withheld by the state.

The Citizen was founded in 1990 as a consolidation of the Martin County Mercury and The Martin Countian, a newspaper that had won national attention for the crusading reporting and editorial stances of owner-publisher Homer Marcum. The Citizen took similar approaches; when the school system was no longer required to publish the names and salaries of teachers, the paper did that on its own. It withstood competition from other newspapers and by 2001 was the county’s sole paper.

The award is named for Tom and Pat Gish, who published The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Kentucky, for more than 50 years. Their son and successor, Ben Gish, is on the award selection committee. “I read The Mountain Citizen regularly (we trade subscriptions),” he wrote. “They do a really good job.”

Stayton and the Citizen will receive the Gish Award Nov. 13 in Lexington, Ky., at the annual Al Smith Awards Dinner of the Institute for Rural Journalism. The dinner will also include presentation of the Al Smith Award for public service through community journalism by Kentuckians to Bill Estep, who recently retired from the Lexington Herald-Leader after chronicling the stories of Appalachian Kentucky for more than 40 years.

 

The keynote speaker will be Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies.

Other Gish Award winners have been the Ezzell family of The Canadian Record in the Texas panhandle; Jim Prince and Stanley Dearman, current and late publishers of The Neshoba Democrat in Philadelphia, Miss.; Samantha Swindler of The Oregonian for her work at The Times-Tribune in Corbin, Ky., and Jacksonville Daily Progress in Texas; Stanley Nelson and the Concordia Sentinel in Ferriday, La.; Jonathan and Susan Austin of the Yancey County News in North Carolina; the late Landon Wills of the McLean County News in Kentucky; the Trapp family of the Rio Grande Sun in northern New Mexico; Ivan Foley of the Platte County Landmark in northwestern Missouri; the Cullen family of the Storm Lake Times-Pilot in northwest Iowa; and Les Zaitz of the Malheur Enterprise in eastern Oregon.

In 2019, the award went to three reporters whose outstanding careers revealed much about the coal industry in Central Appalachia: Howard Berkes, retired from NPR; Ken Ward Jr., then with the Charleston Gazette-Mail; and his mentor at the Gazette, the late Paul Nyden. In 2020 the award went to the late Tim Crews of the Sacramento Valley Mirror; in 2021 to the Thompson-High family of The News Reporter and the Border Belt Independent in Whiteville, N.C.; in 2022 to Ellen Kreth and the Madison County Record of Huntsville, Ark.; in 2023 to Craig Garnett of the Uvalde Leader-News in Texas; and in 2024 to Eric Meyer and the Marion County Record in Kansas.

Jeremy Gulban is serious about saving local newspapers. 'It’s kind of crazy,' but he's trying to find a way.

Jeremy Gulban

Jeremy Gulban is a man on a mission to save at least 92 community newspapers from shuttering their doors. While he's out in the trenches facing tariffs, polarized audiences and stiff competition, "Gulban is discovering in ways large and small just how hard it is to revive America’s ailing local news outlets," reports Katherine Sayre of The Wall Street Journal. "Americans are increasingly distrustful of print media, podcasts are ascendant as go-to news sources and even finding human reporters to hire has proven tough."

Over the past five years, Gulban has purchased dozens of small newspapers through his company, CherryRoad Media. "Today, the top 30 or so of Gulban’s newspapers are profitable, about 30 post mediocre results and about 30 are losing money. The company had $30 million in revenue last year and wasn’t profitable overall," Sayre writes. "Gulban needs between 15% and 20% of households in his communities to subscribe to be economically viable. . . . Across the company, about 8% of households subscribe now, but that ranges from 2% to 69%, depending on the paper."

Gulban began his foray into print news because he felt "that big tech companies like Meta Platforms and Alphabet’s Google had too much control over the flow of information and commerce for local businesses," Sayre explains. Gulban told her, "If we made the rational business decision, we would take our best-performing markets, say that’s what we’re going with. But that’s not what I want to do. I want to figure out how to make this work.”

Part of Gulban's plan was to hire dedicated reporters who interact with their community. "In some markets, Gulban can’t find reporters willing to do the job," Sayre adds. "The company searched for two years for a full-time reporter at its Crookston Daily Times in Minnesota, offering a salary of $40,000. The newspaper was shuttered in February."

Some people in small towns have reached out directly to Gulban for help. "Kitty Mayo and other residents in the area of Two Harbors, Minn., lobbied Gulban to start a newspaper there after the Lake County News-Chronicle closed in 2020," Sayre reports. "Gulban agreed. The Lake County Press launched in 2022. Mayo said she asked an editor at another CherryRoad newspaper about Gulban before she contacted him. The editor told her: 'This guy, he’s legit. He wants to save small newspapers. It’s kind of crazy. I don’t know if he can do it.'"

How much referral traffic to publishers do AI chatbots provide? Practically zero.

'AI presents an existential threat to the news and
media industry.' (AI image by AI)

AI chatbots steal and repost news created and paid for by humans while failing to refer any meaningful traffic to the publications, a new report finds. Chatbot click-through rates, or CTRs, to original content, are abysmal.

"Tollbit, an analytics and licensing platform for publishers and AI companies, has released its first AI User Agent Index, a quarterly report that tracks overall trends in the scraping habits of the AI industry," reports News/Media Alliance. "The report details that the click-through rates for AI chatbots are 95.7% lower than traditional Google search, with a referral rate of just 0.37%." According to industry figures, 3% is considered the average CTR from a Google search, and anything above this is good.

For many publishers and writers, AI content theft is not surprising; however, "Tollbit's data confirms what publishers have known for years — generative AI chatbots are not providing anywhere near the amount of traffic as traditional search," News/Media Alliance CEO Danielle Coffey said in a statement. "By illegally scraping our content, repackaging it and giving it to consumers without adequately directing them to our sites, AI companies are using our own content to undermine our businesses."

When chatbots "redeliver" news via the web without a click-through to the original publication, news and media organizations miss out on subscription and advertising income. In essence, bots steal original content, which costs publications what a consumer may have paid to read it, and they remove to possibility of future income when no click-through traffic is provided.

“With AI click-through rates almost 96% lower than traditional search, which we believe is already at inadequate return rates, the shift to AI presents an existential threat to the news and media industry," Coffey said. "Something has to change. But that doesn’t mean we want to stop the growth of AI. . . .We’re just asking for responsible AI. Artificial intelligence companies must compensate publishers for the content they use, for the long-term health of both of our industries.”

The majority of Americans agree that media scrutiny acts as a check on politicians

Pew Research Center graph, from Pew's American trends panel and center phone survey data.

Despite the somewhat contentious relationship many Americans have with news outlets, most citizens still agree that "media scrutiny keeps politicians from doing things they shouldn’t," reports Sarah Naseer on a Pew Research Center survey conducted and released this year. This opinion has remained a constant over the past 40 years, even as the government's majority party affiliations have changed.

The Pew Research Center began "asking Americans about the news media’s role in investigating and reporting on public officials to hold them accountable since the mid-1980s," Naseer explains. "That was about a decade after The Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal contributed to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974."

In Pew's 2024 survey, about "three-quarters of Americans (74%) said criticism from news organizations keeps political leaders from doing things that shouldn’t be done, while far fewer (24%) said this type of scrutiny keeps leaders from doing their job," Naseer reports. "The last time such a large share of Americans expressed the view that media criticism helps hold political leaders accountable was in 2016, just before (Donald) Trump was elected the first time."

The survey also asked respondents if "they see the news media as generally fair to all sides when reporting on politics and social issues, or if they think the media tend to favor one side," Naseer adds.
"About three-quarters of U.S. adults (77%) say news organizations tend to favor one side when presenting the news on political and social issues. Far fewer (22%) believe news organizations deal fairly with all sides. In surveys going back almost 40 years, most Americans have viewed news coverage as biased toward one side."

Throughout the survey's 40-year history, political parties have consistently held separate beliefs about media fairness, with Republicans more likely to see media as favoring one side more than Democrats. Naseer reports, "In this year's survey, about nine-in-ten Republicans (88%) say news organizations tend to favor one side when presenting the news on political and social issues, compared with 67% of Democrats."

Sixty-nine percent of Americans are worried about the 2024 presidential election, but there are steps to reduce stress

Shannon Sauer-Zavala
Licensed Clinical Psychologist,
University of Kentucky

Today is Election Day in the United States, but the country may not know the results of some races until later. And while most U.S. citizens know conscientious ballot counting can be time-consuming, unknowns often stress the human mind. To manage worry and prevent catastrophizing, Shannon Sauer-Zavala for The Conversation shares science-based approaches to reduce election tension.

If this particular election feels distressing, rest assured, that you are not alone. Sauer-Zavala writes, "A recent survey found 69% of American adults are seriously stressed about the 2024 presidential election. It’s difficult not to be worked up about politics in today’s polarized climate. Regardless of which side of the political aisle you sit on, you may find yourself glued to your browser or TV, gobbling up every tiny tidbit of news."

Being mindful and accepting of stressful feelings can keep them from skyrocketing. Sauer-Zavala explains, "Be present. Anxiety can draw you into an uncomfortable spiral of 'what-ifs' about the future. When you make a point to be present, you remind yourself what is actually happening right now, rather than letting hypothetical fears take over."

When the news feels like impending doom, take a deep breath and "shift away from rigid, all-or-nothing thinking about the future," Sauer-Zavala recommends. "When people are anxious, they tend to focus on the worst-case scenario. For example, you might be telling yourself, 'With this candidate in office, things will be terrible and I won’t be able to cope.' . . . Try thinking through what you’d do if the undesirable candidate takes office – thoughts like 'I’ll donate to causes that are important to me' and 'I’ll attend protests.'"

Concentrating on healthy daily behaviors that reinforce a sense of balance and peace also keeps worry from taking over your day or week. "Remember the goal of 24-hour news networks is to increase ratings. It’s in their interest to keep you riveted to your screens by making it seem like important announcements are imminent," Sauer-Zavala adds. "As a result, it may feel difficult to disconnect and take part in your usual self-care behavior. . . . Go for a walk or, better yet, to bed. Keeping up with healthy habits can help reduce your vulnerability to uncontrolled anxiety."

Community newspapers can benefit from more effective promotion and marketing

Benjy Hamm

By Benjy Hamm

Director, Institute for Rural Journalism

ESPN has long promoted itself as the “worldwide leader in sports.” You can forgive its audience if they don’t realize that ESPN has been losing millions of customers who have been “cutting the cord” from cable and satellite TV.

ESPN’s long-time business model -- and that of cable TV -- has been collapsing in recent years, even though it remains profitable and has retained a loyal audience. Sound familiar? But in the face of many difficulties, ESPN has never stopped relentlessly and effectively promoting its shows, content, employees and overall brand.

When I talk to my students and community groups, most people have a highly favorable opinion of ESPN and overestimate its average audience and business outlook.

Compared to ESPN and most TV and radio stations, newspapers are reticent to promote themselves, outside of an occasional story about awards they’ve won, a house ad during National Newspaper Week or subscription flyers. That approach is grounded in a news philosophy 200 years old that valued the anonymity of journalists – emphasizing that the stories are more important. And it has continued for other reasons, too, including the fact that many newspaper journalists don’t see the need for promotion, and some even find it unseemly.

Our modesty – and in many cases silence – about the value of what journalists do and the importance of strong community newspapers might have worked OK when the media world was less competitive and newspapers were flourishing. But in this era of an attention economy and endless demands on people’s time, a lack of marketing and promotion is damaging.

That vacuum also has allowed others to define us, and frequently in extremely negative terms. When I speak to community groups or at events, even loyal newspaper readers express concerns that “no one reads a newspaper” anymore, that newspapers are dying and that “everyone gets their news on their phone.” You know that’s not true. A lot of people read your stories, your great journalism changes lives and changes laws, and the cell phones people use are simply another way news and information is delivered.

When I ask community members how well their phone covers local council meetings, they are often confused by the question. But we know the answer. It doesn’t. The local community newspaper journalist is frequently the only person covering those meetings. Even much of the discussion about community news on social media is commentary on facts reported by journalists, not original reporting by social media sources.

We probably all know what it’s like to be the only person – not just journalist – in the audience at a local meeting, budget session or court hearing. Community newspapers produce a significant amount of original, exclusive content in their communities. Yet, few people realize those facts.

If we don’t promote our work, who will? If we don’t develop marketing campaigns for our news organizations, staff and products (Ex. special sections), then residents won’t fully value what the newspaper means to that community.

Allowing other people to define community newspapers hurts in other ways, too. Large foundations that plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to support journalism in the United States are proposing spending millions on digital start-ups or giving large sums of money to urban news organizations to increase their coverage of rural areas. There’s little talk about helping the thousands of newspapers already in existence in these communities. I have heard these large funders speak at conferences, and they do not seem to know much about the strengths and importance of community newspapers.

Not all of these problems are new. When I worked at a newspaper in South Carolina, we were surprised to see the results of a study that measured the most trusted sources for news in our region. The TV stations ranked highest in every category, even though local newspapers produced many more stories overall and were responsible for nearly all of the major investigative and enterprise coverage.

The researcher said the results were similar in every region where he conducted surveys, and he attributed it to how often TV stations promoted their work and their journalists – in addition to that personal “connection” of seeing someone on TV. He said newspapers did little or no promotion and took for granted that residents would understand their value and recognize their outstanding qualities.

I have seen examples of newspapers that effectively promote what they do – in print, online, through social media and at community events. In many cases, the ones that do well with promotion and marketing are in competitive markets.

At the Institute for Rural Journalism, we would like to learn more about the ways that community newspapers are successfully promoting themselves and the overall importance of good journalism in local communities.

If you have examples that have proved successful, please send them to me at benjy.hamm@uky.edu. I will follow up in a future column with your ideas. In the meantime, if you’re not doing much promotion, consider ways your newspaper can help residents realize that you’re the leader in local news coverage for that area and that what you do is of huge value to the community. Feel free to reach out if you are unsure of what to do.

Benjy Hamm is director of the Institute for Rural Journalism, which is based at the University of Kentucky. He previously served as editorial director for Landmark Community Newspapers, as an editor for The New York Times Regional Newspaper Group and as a reporter and editor for The Associated Press.

Local newspapers may have only a few employees doing most of the work. PBS report focuses on one example.

Eads, Colo., mural on the side of the Kiowa County Independent
building. (Photo by Chase McCleary, Rocky Mountain PBS)

As many newsroom staffs shrink across the nation, some independent rural newspaper owners are working almost every job in the shop to maintain local news coverage with integrity and avoid the possible pitfalls of outside ownership. Reporter Chase McCleary from Rocky Mountain PBS met with Betsy Barnett, the owner, publisher, editor, ad-sales rep, designer and only full-time reporter of the Kiowa County Independent newspaper in Eads, Colorado. Because of other newspaper closures, Barnett's paper is reporting on five counties.

"In a span of about two weeks at the end of July and in early August, five local newsrooms in Colorado shuttered, all of them were located in the eastern Colorado plains: the Plainsman Herald, the Burlington Record, the Lamar Ledger, the Fort Morgan Times and the Brush News-Tribune," McCleary writes. "The Herald was independently owned and operated, as it had been since it opened in 1887, nearly 140 years ago. . . . " 

Barnett is wearing so many work hats to keep her paper open and community-centered. McCleary explains, "Barnett has been running the Kiowa County Independent since 2016. She intends to retain full ownership and independence to avoid the fate of some neighboring publications that sold, and were subsequently shuttered by larger media conglomerates." Barnett told McCleary, "They don’t have that community understanding of what a newspaper means in a community. To them, it's just a purchase. And if you don’t have your finger on the pulse of the community, you’re done.”

As local and more rural newspapers have closed in Colorado, news deserts have emerged, and like many places in the United States, regions with no news outlets are more likely to fall victim to misinformation or gossip mills. "According to a 2023 study from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Colorado newspapers had declined by over 20% in the last five years," McCleary reports. "Barnett noticed that areas without news sometimes became 'rumor wells,' where competing voices began spreading mis- or disinformation."

For smaller papers to survive several avenues can be explored. Corey Hutchins, a professor at the Colorado College Journalism Institute, "noted a few alternative business strategies newsrooms might take to stay alive, including exploring non-profit and public benefit corporation status and chasing alternative sources of funding," McCleary explains. "He noted that some newsrooms are also, perhaps surprising to some, focusing less on digital and more on print."

Smaller papers rely on community support and letting readers know their contributions are needed and appreciated can provide additional income. Hutchins told McCleary, "People should care about what’s happening to their own local source of news and information. How are you supporting news where you live?”

Postponed: Report for America's information session that was scheduled for today will be held at a later date

Report for America has matched more than 650 corps members with hundreds of local newspapers, public radio stations, digital platforms and television outlets. (RFA photo)

The Report for America information session that was scheduled for 3 p.m. today has been postponed. A make-up date and time will be announced soon. 

Here is information about Report for America's program for journalists interested in participating. 

Report for America is a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms. The organization is adding 50 positions for next year and is encouraging rural and community news organizations to apply for the opportunity to get additional help for their newsrooms.

The Report for America program is designed to help newsrooms report on under-covered issues and communities. As part of the program, RFA pays half of a journalist’s salary the first year, a third of the salary the second year and 20% the optional third year.

According to Report for America, host newsrooms also will receive:
-- Diverse, talented slate of candidates to choose from
-- Local fundraising coaching and resources to help with the news organization’s share of the costs, including the opportunity for no-cost fiscal sponsorship to accept donations
-- Extra training and mentoring for journalists

“We recognize the difficulties modern newsrooms encounter, from recruiting skilled journalists to offering the necessary mentorship and support,” said Earl Johnson, vice president of recruitment and alumni engagement at Report for America. “Partnering with Report for America enables local newsrooms to address critical news gaps, diversify their staff, and foster sustainable local backing within their communities.”

Report for America has matched more than 650 corps members with hundreds of local newspapers, public radio stations, digital platforms and television outlets since its launch in 2017. Nearly $30 million has been raised by local newsrooms with Report for America’s assistance.

The application deadline is Sept. 13. To learn more, visit www.reportforamerica.org.

National program wants to help newsrooms add more than 50 positions; news organizations can apply for help now

Report for America, a national service program, wants to help newsrooms across the United States -- and particularly in rural areas -- add more than 50 positions next summer. Applications are open for newsrooms interested in hosting journalists for up to three years, with part of the salary paid by the Report for America program.

According to Sam Kille, vice president of communications for Report for America, the program is designed to help newsrooms report on under-covered issues and communities.

Kille writes, "Through the program, host newsrooms receive:
-- Diverse, talented slate of candidates to choose from
-- Subsidized salary support for up to three years
-- Local fundraising coaching and resources, including the opportunity for no-cost fiscal sponsorship to accept donations
-- Extra training and mentoring for journalists

“We recognize the difficulties modern newsrooms encounter, from recruiting skilled journalists to offering the necessary mentorship and support,” said Earl Johnson, vice president of recruitment and alumni engagement at Report for America. “Partnering with Report for America enables local newsrooms to address critical news gaps, diversify their staff, and foster sustainable local backing within their communities.”

The application deadline is Sept. 13. More information about how the program works can be found here.

Report for America wants to expand its reach into rural areas where news gaps are prominent, and newsrooms owned or led by journalists of color. 

Kille specifies that newsrooms must demonstrate the following to Report for America:

Need — "Explain why the beat you’re proposing is vital to your audience and the community. We’re particularly interested in important beats that no other newsroom in your area is covering, or covering well. Also, why do you need our help to support this position?"
Support — "We look for newsrooms where corps members will receive good editing and mentoring, so they can do their best work."
A commitment to inclusion — "Newsrooms demonstrating a commitment to inclusion and supporting a diverse staff are important in our selection process."
A commitment to fundraising — "Where applicable, we ask our host newsrooms to try to raise money from local funders to pay for part of their corps member’s salary. Our development team can help you do this. We believe local philanthropy is key to strong local newsrooms and want to work with partners that believe this, too."

Report for America will help to provide up to half of the journalist’s salary and offer newsrooms tools to raise funds to support their share. Nearly $30 million has been raised by local newsrooms with Report for America’s assistance.

Report for America has matched more than 650 corps members with hundreds of local newspapers, public radio stations, digital platforms and television outlets since its launch in 2017.

Report for America will hold online information sessions with newsrooms and partner organizations throughout the application period. For more information, visit www.reportforamerica.org or send an email to: recruitment@reportforamerica.org.

One lawsuit over the Marion County newspaper raid settled for $235,000, but more claims are pending

Marion County Record raid, Gruver's desk at bottom right
(Screen capture of surveillance video via Kansas Reflector)

It has been almost a year since the Marion County Record was raided by police supposedly investigating charges of identity theft and illegal use of a computer by the Kansas weekly newspaper. In the process of confiscating newsroom property, the city's chief of police, Gideon Cody, injured Record reporter Deb Gruver's hand while "forcibly obtaining her personal cellphone," reports Emmett Lindner of The New York Times. "Gruver has reached a $235,000 settlement as part of a lawsuit she filed over the search, which set off a national discussion about press freedoms."

Gruver, who resigned from the paper after the raid, "said in a letter to the editor that she 'no longer wanted to work in a town where the majority of leaders clearly don’t respect the Fourth Estate or the U.S. Constitution,” The Record reported.

Another lawsuit, filed by the Record's publisher, Eric Meyer, alleges that the raid, which included "seven law enforcement officials spending more than two hours in Meyer’s residence, where his mother was at the time" contributed to her death the next day, Linder reports. Four other Record employees also have suits pending.

While Gruver's settlement ends one chapter of the raid's fallout, the entire investigation and the later reversal of the authorized searches that allowed it are still more broadly worrisome, particularly for smaller newspapers that investigate local authorities. Linder explains, "Less than a week after the raid, Marion County’s top prosecutor, Joel Ensey, ordered officials to return the seized devices because there was insufficient evidence to justify the searches. . . .The raid also came after The Record had questioned Cody about his departure from the Kansas City Police Department, following accusations that he had made sexist and insulting comments."

The raid didn't just have negative outcomes; there was also a silver lining. Meyer told Linder, "One of the things that we’ve seen out of this is that the people who have responded to us have come from across the political spectrum. There aren’t too many things in this world right now that bring Democrats and Republicans together.”

The "Radically Rural" conference is slated for Sept. 25-26; interested rural journalists can apply to attend for free

The community development conference, "Radically Rural," is offering rural journalists an opportunity to attend the 2024 summit in Keene, New Hampshire, Sept. 25-26, free of charge. The funding covers registration, travel, lodging and meals for the summit.

To apply to be a sponsored journalist, submit this brief application. The application deadline is Friday, May 24 at 11:59 p.m. E.T. The Knight Foundation alongside the Lenfest Institute for Journalism is underwriting these spots.

This 7th annual event is about learning and connecting with rural journalists from across the country, sharing ideas and fostering collaborations to serve communities better and support the sustainability of news organizations. The Radically Rural team is developing conference tracks and will announce them soon.

For more information, contact Jack Rooney at jrooney@keenesentinel.com or Emily Lytle, Radically Rural's Community Journalism co-track leader, at lytle@rjionline.org

Quick hits: Are media outlets ready for an 'extinction-level event'? A new National Park; the best rural water

Photo by Yosh Ginsu, Unsplash

Are media outlets ready to rethink and reinvent themselves to survive? That's a big question with so many possible answers. In her commentary for The New Yorker, Clare Malone recounts the rise and fall of U.S. news outlets and asks, "Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?" Malone writes, "Even as outlets have tried to complement news coverage with other offerings, they've faced a fresh dilemma: news subscriptions —the great hope of media — are now directly competing with entertainment ones."

Wikipedia map

America's National Parks are a source of national unity alongside land and historic preservation. The Amache National Historic Site officially opened as the newest national park this year. Amache is in southeastern Colorado, one mile outside of Granada. "It was one of 10 incarceration sites used to detain thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II," reports Lauren Penington of The Denver Post. The park is meant to remind us of past injustices and provide a place of reflection and healing for our country's past mistakes.

With all the twists and turns life can throw at us, sometimes words of wisdom can give us peace and reassurance that this, too, shall pass. Progressive Farmer's "Faith" section reaches out this week with quotes to ponder and embrace, such as this one from Martin Luther King Jr.: "Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase."

Kobu photo, Unsplash

Water, water everywhere, and the best sips are in Columbus, Wisconsin. "Many people know Wisconsin for its milk or beer, but did you know that the state is also home to some of America's best-tasting water? Earlier this year, Columbus Utilities in Columbus, a small city northeast of Madison, won the gold medal at the National Rural Water Association's 25th Annual Great American Water Taste Test," reports Claire Reid of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The taste test and awards ceremony took place at the NRWA's annual Rural Water Rally in Washington, D.C."

As younger Americans weigh the costs versus benefits of a college degree, some opt to work for companies that offer great-paying jobs that don't need a degree. "Walmart is giving bigger bonuses and adding stock awards to their annual pay packages, pushing the total compensation for the best ones to more than $400,000 a year," reports Sarah Nassauer of The Wall Street Journal. "The retail giant has thousands of store managers who act as midlevel executives. Each can often oversee a store with 350 workers and $100 million in annual revenue. Many start as clerks and climb the ranks without college degrees."

Case backlogs are a major source of criminal trial delays.
(Tingey Law Firm photo, Unsplash)

The case backlog in U.S. courts increased during the pandemic years, but the shortage of attorneys and judges pre-dates Covid-19. "The pandemic worsened problems that already had caused state and local court delays, legal experts say. The hurdles include insufficient funding, judicial vacancies, lawyer shortages and delays processing digital and physical evidence," reports Amanda Hernández of Stateline. In rural Vermont, "There were over 35,500 pending cases statewide, according to data from the Vermont Judiciary. About 42%, or 15,294 of those pending cases, are criminal cases. That's double the amount of pending criminal cases pre-pandemic."

How Facebook has hurt community papers; a new study examines problems beyond finances

Nick Mathews

As many local newspapers struggle to sustain their business and audience, Facebook remains a staunch competitor for revenue and readers. A new study by Nick Mathews, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri's journalism school, "analyzes the impact of Facebook on rural and small-town news organizations' daily operations," reports Austin Fitzgerald. "Mathews zeroes in on the social media platform's increasing dominance of community news that was once the domain of local newspapers — birthday announcements, new jobs, and the sorts of daily life events readers once clipped from newspapers and tacked on their refrigerators."

The analysis by Mathews and Benjamin Toff, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, is a new way to examine how and why local news outlets are struggling. Mathews told Fitzgerald: "The economic challenges that these social platforms have created are well understood, so in this piece, we took a different tack. We're looking at the actual content of publications that are being impacted. It's not just an economic crisis — it's an existential one."

Benjamin Toff

"'We Were Facebook before Facebook': The Existential (Not Only Economic) Threat to Community Weekly Newspapers in the US" was published in Digital Journalism in December 2023. Fitzgerald reports, "Mathews and Toff interviewed owners and editors of weekly newspapers in Virginia to better understand Facebook's impacts on content and what they mean for local news organizations. . . . According to highly respected research from Penny Abernathy at Northwestern University, Virginia has seven counties without a local news source and 94 counties with only one source."

"One editor had a very poignant concern," Mathews told Fitzgerald. "They were concerned their newspaper is not telling the full story of their community anymore. People might not understand how important that submitted content is for weekly newspapers. These papers still want to highlight the individual successes and stories of their communities, but community members are posting that content elsewhere." Fitzgerald reports, "Mathews said this loss of a critical component of local news has forced weekly newspapers into a difficult position, in which they see themselves in direct competition with a social media giant and are increasingly forced to fill the gap in local coverage with national and other less-relevant news."

Mathews is also one of the authors working on a new book, which looks at how newspapers are "finding creative ways to repair and strengthen connections with their communities," Fitzgerald writes. Mathews told him: "They do things like monthly mingles, just hosting people in their offices with beer, wine and snacks. These meetings are so phenomenal to meet people, and it's hard to have animosity toward people if you have actually met them. You're not going to turn around and call them 'the lying media' if you just talked to them."

Rural Mirages: Shattered newspapers and ‘ghosts’ with little local news, but some communities have spunky startups

This is a condensed version of an article published today in the 2023 State of Local News Report from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. For the full version, click here.

By Al Cross

Director emeritus, Institute for Rural Journalism, University of Kentucky  

The mistaken front page

On Sept. 5, The Hutchinson News in central Kansas greeted readers with a front-page feature about the Hutchinson Senior Center, with a photo of seniors kayaking on a lake with a thickly forested shore. But that’s not the landscape in Hutchinson, pop. 40,000, or the name of its senior center. The story was about the center in Hutchinson, Minnesota, and was written by a confused freelancer who got the assignment from a Gannett Co. editor 140 miles away, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, because the News had no news reporters on its staff.

What Gannett’s public-relations office called an “oversight,” in declining an interview about the flub, reflected the shrinkage of American newspapers, which finally hit non-metropolitan America just before the pandemic. The one-two punch led to many closures and mergers, and to continued declines in the quantity and quality of small-town papers. But in some places, print and online start-ups are succeeding, showing that local residents still want local news and will pay for a good product.

In Hutchinson, a 16-year-old high-school debater, Michael Glenn, started The Hutchinson Tribune on Substack on July 4; is publishing about five times as many local-news articles as The Hutchinson News, which prints twice a week; and says he and his partner, a local librarian, are starting to sell advertising for a growing audience.

Legacy newspapers are slowly adapting to the digital era, but many have not fully faced up to their greatest-ever existential challenge.

About two-thirds of weeklies are owned by chains, and the decline of most weeklies is visible in fewer pages, less news coverage and limited or non-existent office hours. In many towns, gone are the days when local residents could drop into their local newspaper office to place a classified ad or news item, and engage in conversation that could give the paper even more information, because the newspaper no longer has an office that is open to the public without appointment.

That’s the case even at some daily papers, such as the Kentucky New Era in Hopkinsville and The Paducah Sun, headquarters paper of Paxton Media Group, one of the largest owners of non-metropolitan papers. In these towns of 31,000 and 26,000, respectively, an appointment is needed to enter the newspaper office.

Paxton recently bought five more newspapers from Gannett, which has been shedding smaller papers – largely by selling them to CherryRoad Media, a firm created only three years ago by Jeremy Gulban, an information-technology entrepreneur. He now has more than 80 papers, 60 bought from Gannett, which he says ran them so far into the ground that some are proving hard to stand up.

The downward spiral of news, ads and circulation left most of those papers with two types of subscribers and single-copy buyers, Gulban said: "People who just like the ritual of getting the paper and really don't care what's in it ... and people who hold a position in town where they feel like they need to get the paper. . . . People who were truly looking for news had just given up and kind of moved on."

Retail advertising largely disappeared, he said, and “revenue from obits, legal and classified, was nearly double the display advertising in a lot of cases . . . so really, what you have is, you got a ghost newspaper, right? It really has no relevance in the community. And you know that's a vicious cycle.”

Gulban said he has invested in editorial and ad staff, most often hiring former employees, and that the fate of the papers will largely depend on their local leadership and the response of their communities. And he says printed newspapers will remain a core element of his business model; to that end, he recently bought the Hutchinson News printing plant from Gannett.

The demand for reliable local news has been demonstrated in Hutchinson and many other places in rural America. In some places with chain-owned dailies that have become ghost newspapers, or in places where chains closed county-seat papers, there are new print and online news outlets. Two examples are The Community News in Macomb, Ill., and the Logan-Hocking Times in Logan, Ohio.

Lynne Campbell, a former regional publisher for GateHouse Media, which bought Gannett and took its name, said at July’s National Summit on Journalism in Rural America that The Community News started on a copy machine, was 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, Campbell said. Now the paper has two paid editions per week and a midweek free edition, “so that everybody could get a little bit of the local news,” and is billing $40,000 a month, much of it in legal ads, since the Gannett paper, now called the McDonald County Voice, “is down to less than a hundred subscribers” and no longer has a storefront, Campbell said. The county has 27,000 residents, most in Macomb.

In southeast Ohio, Logan is home to 7,200 people, in a county of 46,000, and the Logan Daily News, with an office open just nine hours a week, and the Logan-Hocking Times, owned by Debra Tobin, a former editor at the Times. After she and several other staffers quit the Adams Publishing Group paper, she started the Times online, charging $7.99 a month for access. “Within six months we had 700. We're over a thousand,” she said in July. “That wasn't good enough for me, though, because I wanted to do something else, because a lot of people don't have computers” or good internet access. “So I decided to do a print newspaper,” which is distributed free on Fridays, the day after the digital edition, and is funded by advertisers who sponsor pages.

While the demand for local news in non-metropolitan areas is being met in different ways, publishers are still searching for new business models.

Image from PBS NewsHour

There is longstanding resistance among rural newspapers to raising subscription prices and single-copy charges, but The Recorder in Monterey, Virginia, has charged $5 a copy since 2017, and when the pandemic eliminated most of its ad revenue, Publisher Anne Adams appealed to readers for donations and they helped her stay in business. Recently she has expanded her coverage area to a third county in the Alleghenies. Rural Great Plains publishers told University of Kansas professor Teri Finneman that they recoiled from the idea of asking for donations, saying it would be an admission of failure or personal weakness. But other publishers have put donations into their business model, and more are exploring the option of going nonprofit so they can avoid income taxes, qualify for grants and offer their supporters tax deductions for donations. And as the story of Hutchinson shows, the demand for local news is driving different approaches.

The old pipeline from journalism schools to rural weeklies is drying up, so it’s time to turn local residents into journalists

Graphic via Arkansas Press Association; click to enlarge

By Joey Young

The path into journalism has historically been fairly set in stone: university, J-school degree and then working your way up into the industry. In the past, many started at small community weeklies to get experience and then found their way up, eventually working for the best papers in the country.

For years, that system worked for all involved. The community weeklies got freshly trained college graduates to cut their teeth at their rural newsrooms, and the larger papers were able to weed out candidates and use the rural weeklies to train up basic skills you didn't get in college.

That system is dead. No longer do college students consider rural weekly newspapers as a part of their journalism path.

Much like everything else in our industry, the old ways are going away, and new ones are forging ahead. Not everyone is thrilled about it, but all of us are going to have to get used to it, regardless.

Simply put, a combination of low pay, high debt and minimal entertainment options are making it difficult for new college graduates to consider weekly newsrooms, even if they wanted to.

Many fresh faces aren't interested in working in a community of 2,500 people with no good bar while being six figures in debt to their university and making $25,000 a year with no benefits, if they are even lucky enough to make that.

We aren't a good value proposition anymore—not when you can go into any number of other fields and live in a larger city with more things to do and better pay and benefits.

This has left our industry with a huge problem and a need for a mindset shift with employment.

Joey and Lindsey Young

Lindsey and I think there is a better way, and we aren't just preaching this, we practice it as well.

In 2022, we developed a program for the Kansas Press Association called Earn Your Press Pass. This program was created to give basic concepts of journalism and training to people who already live in a community so they can help fill gaps in the newsroom.

No longer are you left praying a recent graduate will see your ad and view your community worthy. You can recruit people who already see your community as worthy and want to help make it better in your newsroom.

Earn Your Press Pass gives what amounts to high-school level journalism training in an on-demand video format that, in its first year, has been deployed by over 20 state press associations.

Shifting our focus to recruiting people who already live in town allows us to change the value proposition, like we did with Tammy, someone we recruited from a life of retail work and was super excited to change professions with training.

Tammy read the paper, was engaged in the community, and had both her kids already in the school system, so she knew the players in town and interacted with them. What she lacked in journalism training she had in knowledge about the community and connections within it.

We just filled in the gaps. Now, she is a fabulous reporter who is happy to no longer be in retail. She went from a path that did not—and could not—include a journalism degree to being a great community journalist.

This recruitment strategy could be used with baristas, bartenders, wait staff, and any number of people who live in your community but are looking for a career that is viewed as more professional.

Our newsroom suffers from very little turnover as a result of this strategy. Recruiting full-time, part-time, and freelance people from the community and offering on-demand training means you have people who already live in town and want to stay.

Journalism is important, and to maintain this incredibly important institution in rural and disadvantaged communities, we have to change the variables. Earn Your Press Pass and a willingness to see someone different as a solution to an opening in your newsroom is just one way we can maintain this incredibly important fixture in democracy.

Joey and Lindsey Young are the majority owners of Kansas Publishing Ventures, which publishes three weekly newspapers in south central Kansas. They also developed the Earn Your Press Pass training platform being used all over the country as a training and recruitment solution for the industry.

Facebook, Instagram allow ads saying election was stolen; AP allows weeklies to use its story debunking the claim

Meta Platforms is letting ads on Facebook and Instagram question the legitimacy of the 2020 election, The Wall Street Journal reports. "Meta made the change last year, but it hasn’t gained wide attention," the Journal's Salvador Rodriguez writes. "The company decided to allow political advertisers to say past elections were 'rigged' or 'stolen' but prevented them from questioning the legitimacy of ongoing and coming elections."

The change was one of several "the social-media company and other platforms have made to loosen constraints on campaign advertising," Rodriguez reports. "Executives at Meta made the decision based on free-speech considerations after weighing past U.S. elections in which the results might have been contested by a portion of the electorate, according to people familiar with the issue."

"An Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump has found fewer than 475 — a number that would have made no difference," AP's Christina Cassidy reported in December 2021. At the request of the Institute for Rural Journalism at the University of Kentucky, AP agreed in 2021 to allow weekly newspapers that are not AP subscribers to republish the story and its sidebars with details on individual states, if they alos include links to it and the sidebar. (The institute publishes The Rural Blog; if you have republished the AP material, please email al.cross@uky.edu.)

"Some candidates already appear to have questioned elections in ads," Rodriguez reports, noting that Trump ran a Facebook ad in August saying “We had a rigged election.” Rodriguez writes, "Katie Harbath, a former Facebook public-policy director who wasn’t involved in the decision, said it would be challenging for social-media companies to preach free speech yet ban politicians from questioning the results of the 2020 election, which has become such a significant part of the public discourse." Harbath leads the elections program at the Integrity Institute, which studies and addresses the social harms of internet platforms.

A 16-year-old in Hutchinson, Kansas, tries to revive town's strong tradition of local journalism as chain newspaper fades

Part of The Hutchinson News' Sept. 5 front page

Hutchinson, Kansas, became known in the newspaper business two months ago for one of the bigger goofs in the era of "ghost newspapers" edited from afar with no staff reporters. Now it's becoming known as the home of the Hutchinson Tribune, started by a 16-year-old high-school debater who is publishing more local news than The Hutchinson News, owned by Gannett Co.

On Sept. 5, the News offered readers a front-page feature about the Hutchinson Senior Center, with a photo of seniors kayaking on a lake with a thickly forested shore. But that’s not the landscape in Hutchinson, pop. 40,000, or the name of its senior center. The story was about the center in Hutchinson, Minn., and was written by a confused freelancer who got the assignment from an editor 140 miles away, because the News had no news reporters on its staff.

Michael Glenn started the Tribune on Substack on July 4 with a city-council story and is publishing about five times as many local-news articles as the News. He told The Rural Blog that he and his partner, local librarian Gina Long (who formed their limited-liability company (she owns 40%, he has 60%), are about to start selling advertising for a growing audience. Today, the Tribune had 36 local-news articles on its website and the News had six.

Screenshot of Michael Glenn's interview with Mike Blinder of Editor & Publisher

Glenn told Editor & Publisher that he got the idea when he suggested to his debate teacher that they subscribe to the News as well as The New York Times, and she informed them of how the paper had declined from its Pulitzer Prize-winning days. Glenn said he had no journalism training other than the "Earn Your Press Pass" course developed by Lindsey and Joey Young, publishers of Kansas weeklies. Joey Young is a Hutchinsion native and has been a mentor, Glenn said.

The Tribune sells $8 monthly subscriptions and accepts donations, but Glenn told The Rural Blog that he and Long make clear that supporters "have no sway or voice." He told E&P that they tell readers, “The Tribune will become a more quality news source the more subscribers we get.” Asked his motivation, he said “I feel I have a duty to give back to my community . . . Without a quality news source in the community, it allows government to do a lot of things.” The Tribune held three forums for school-board candidates and one for City Council hopefuls.

Effort to raise $1 billion for local news, which just got past $500 million, says it will raise the rest of it at the local level

When the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation recruited the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and other major philanthropies to a campaign to raise money to reinvigorate local news, their hope was that they could get pledges for $1 billion over the next five years. They raised more than $500 million, but their reach exceeded their grasp. Now Press Forward is going local.

“Our goal is to raise the next $500 million at the local level,” MacArthur President John Palfrey said in a press release Friday. “For local news to be sustainable over the long term, communities will need to stand up and support their local news providers. We will need to invest in local news the same way that we invest in arts and culture, hospitals, or our alma maters. We are building a movement.”

Press Forward announced its first local chapters in Alaska, Minnesota, Kansas, Philadelphia and Springfield, Illinois. Palfrey wrote about the effort in The Atlantic, which gave his piece a pithy headline: "We’re making a $500 million investment. The other half is up to you."

He wrote, “Democracy in America is in crisis. The dramatic decline of local news is a major part of this crisis, and there are great ideas and organizations to fund, across all 50 states, to address it. These models include public media operations, nonprofit media start-ups, and for-profit companies. They include television, radio, and digital-only outlets as well as intriguing combinations of all three.”

Most of those efforts have focused on urban areas, but the National Trust for Local News is expanding its rural footprint, and plans to buy more existing media outlets, which is sees as the only way to accomploish a broad rescue of journalism in rural America.

In Press Forward's identification of three types of local ecosystems -- flouishing, expanding and nascent -- rural America's place was clear: “Too many Americans live in news deserts, in communities at risk of becoming news deserts, or in places where existing news sources are struggling to meet the information needs of audiences. In some of these places, a donor or group of donors are coming together to support local news and information for the first time.” Those include the Press Forward chapters in Alaska, Minnesota and Springfield, Ill.

Press Forward said its national donors will announce the first round of grantmaking in December, and issue grantmaking guidelines early next year. To express interest in forming a chapter, go here.

$2.25 million in new funding will increase statehouse reporting; awards are designed to 'fill gaps' in coverage

Wyoming Public Media received a CPB
statehouse reporting grant. (WPM logo)

Americans need fact-based statehouse coverage with consistent, insightful and informative reporting by well-trained journalists. But amid newspaper closings and journalist layoffs, that type of reporting is in short supply. To address staffing needs, the "Corporation for Public Broadcasting is providing $2.25 million to assist seven public media newsrooms and NPR with statehouse reporting," Tyler Faulk reports for Current. "The grant program responds to a 'drop in the overall number of full-time statehouse reporters across the country,' CPB said in a press release announcing the grants."

In the release, CPB President Patricia Harrison said the grants will “address an urgent need as we increase the number of journalists at public media stations reporting statehouse news and policy decisions. Their coverage will be made available to all citizens in those seven states.”

The two-year funding grants will go to:

• Alaska Public Media in Anchorage — $196,588 for a full-time, year-round state government reporter.
• Connecticut Public in Hartford — $217,775 for a full-time, year-round state government reporter.
• WHYY in Philadelphia — $300,000 to provide multimedia enterprise coverage of the state government in Delaware.
• Louisville Public Media in Kentucky — $294,727 to expand its state government news team to four journalists.
• KOSU in Stillwater, Okla. — $250,000 to add a full-time journalist to report on state government and public policy issues.
• Wyoming Public Media in Laramie — $360,999 to partner with Jackson Hole Community Radio in hiring a multi-platform journalist covering state government and a full-time digital content coordinator.
• KERA in Dallas — $250,000 to support one editor and one reporter focused on investigative reporting for the Texas Newsroom.
• NPR in Washington, D.C. — $380,577 to add a second state government editor who will work with station reporters to identify trends in legislation and governance across states and to provide training for state government reporters.
  
  The grants require the stations to "share their state government coverage with public media and other outlets across the state," Faulk reports. "In Connecticut, for example, the reporting will be shared with WSHU in Fairfield, Conn.; public media stations in the New England News Collaborative; Spanish-language news outlets; and the nonprofit digital news organization CT Mirror."
  
  "Recipients were chosen from 20 proposals and 'fill gaps' in state government coverage that were identified in CPB’s 2022 study of public media’s statehouse coverage."