Report for America touts 'the single biggest hiring announcement of journalists in recent memory,' many rural

Report for America will place a record 250 emerging journalists in 164 local newsrooms in 46 states and Puerto Rico in 2020; that's more than four times larger than the 2019 class and marks the single largest hiring announcement of journalists in recent memory, its website says. A considerable number of the winning newsrooms pitched projects with a rural angle (list below).

Though the newsrooms have been chosen, the journalists who will fill those slots have not. Applications for reporting slots are being accepted until Jan. 31, and will be chosen through a national competition. Click here to apply. The selected journalists and their newsroom pairings will be announced in April, and the journalists will begin work in June. About 50 RFA reporters will continue their work from last year.

Report for America is a national service program that places emerging journalists into local newsrooms for one to two years. An initiative of The GroundTruth Project, RFA was created as a direct response to the expansion of news deserts that leave communities uninformed on local issues.

Here are some RFA winners that pitched projects with a rural angle:

• The Associated Press in Frankfort, Ky,: State legislature, especially issues affecting Appalachia (54 of the state's 120 counties).
• Lexington Herald-Leader: 1) Health care in Appalachian Kentucky and watchdog reporting in Eastern Kentucky (filled by a current corps member); 2) a photojournalist for rural communities.
• WFAE 90.7 FM, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, and the Digital Public Library of America, all in Charlotte, N.C.: a partnership using radio and Wikipedia to fill news deserts.
• KOSU 91.7 FM in Oklahoma City: Agriculture and rural issues in Oklahoma.
• Rappahannock News & Foothills Forum in Washington, Va.: The changing nature of public services.
• 100 Days in Appalachia in Morgantown, W.Va.: White supremacy groups in Appalachia.
• Charleston Gazette-Mail: In addition to four other beats, coverage of poverty in southern West Virginia (filled by current corps member).
• West Virginia Public Broadcasting: State government and southern West Virginia (filled by a current corps member).
• The Victoria Advocate in Victoria, Texas: 1) rural counties surrounding Victoria; 2) rural health care (filled by current corps member).
• KUER 90.1 FM in Salt Lake City: Indigenous issues in southern Utah (filled by current corps member).
• The Spectrum in St. George, Utah: National parks.
• Southern Illinois Local Media Group (Randolph County Herald Tribune): Town of Chester.
• Kansas City PBS: Rural issues in Missouri.
• The Columbus Dispatch: Rural issues in central Ohio.
• WKSU 89.7 FM in Kent, Ohio: Rural health care.
• The Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Mass.: Legislative coverage affecting rural western Massachusetts.
• New Hampshire Union Leader and Sunday News in Manchester: Northern New Hampshire.
• Valley News in West Lebanon, N.H., and White River Junction, Vt.: 1) Environment and climate in the Upper Connecticut Valley; 2) photojournalism in northern New Hampshire.
• Vermont Public Radio in Colchester: The Northeast Kingdom.
• VTDigger.org in Montpelier: Southern Vermont.
• The Cordova Times on the southern Alaska coast: Native communities.
• The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, Calif.: Native American issues in the Coachella Valley.
• The Mendocino Voice in Booneville, Calif.: The effect of environmental regulation on salmon runs, wildfires, the economy and other issues.
• Ouray County Plaindealer, a weekly in Ridgway, Colo.: North-central Ouray County.
• KIVI-TV, Nampa, Idaho: Agriculture and rural issues, including immigration and effects of climate change.
• Post Register in Idaho Falls, Idaho: Rural health care.
• Herald and News in Klamath Falls, Oregon: Endangered species, water rights and issues associated with a dam removal.
• Malheur Enterprise, a weekly in Vale, Oregon: Latino communities in eastern Oregon (filled by current corps member).
• South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion, S.D.: Ethnic communities, including Native Americans.
• Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming: Native American Issues on the Wind River Reservation (filled by current corps member).

Retired editor says saving local news means jettisoning nostalgia, focusing on three core values of journalism

In order to save local journalism, we have to let go of nostalgia and focus on three core values, writes retired editor and newspaper-association manager Dennis Hetzel.

The first, and most important, he writes, is that you shouldn't try to choose between quality and quantity of local news; you have to have both. "Here's my hypothesis: Outlets with 'lots of local news' do better with audience growth and retention and probably financially," Hetzel writes. "Alisa Cromer of Local Media Insider has been examining the traits of successful papers. Beyond geographic and demographic advantages, she found this commonality: 'For the super-healthy newspapers, exclusive local news is more than a product; it is their superpower.'"

Dennis Hetzel

Hetzel believes publications should put a higher priority on finding the best ways to harness artificial intelligence, social media, reader submissions, staff structures, partnerships with other organizations or publications, and other strategies that generate more local content but leave reporters time to report in-depth stories.

The second core value is mentoring and training new journalists, Hetzel writes. Young reporters have a harder time finding mentors these days because reporters and editors are often stretched thin and don't have the time. Also, publications generally have smaller training and travel budgets for professional development. Young reporters are passionate about what they do, but they can be lured to other professions with higher pay and better support. So news outlets, universities, press associations and news nonprofits must do a better job of nurturing young talent.

The third core value: great visuals and smart storytelling. Audiences love great photography and multimedia, but photography budget cuts have shifted the task to reporters with smartphones. "Sometimes that's good enough, but certainly not always," Hetzel writes.

Hetzel has been a reporter, editor, general manager and publisher at newspapers in Madison, Wis.; York, Pa.; and Cincinnati. In his 13 years as editor and publisher of the York Daily Record, the paper won awards from the Scripps Howard Foundation a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.

Why not give a struggling newspaper to the community instead of closing it? Quebec paper is giving it a shot

Canadian newspapers are facing most of the same problems as their American counterparts: more than 250 Canadian media outlets closed between 2008 and 2019. A small paper in Quebec, The Gleaner, was almost one of them, but instead of closing the financially struggling paper in November 2018, owner Gravité Media decided to try and give the paper's rights to the community it served, Karen Longwell reports for Harvard University's Nieman Lab.

The Gleaner, an English-language paper, was established in 1863 and serves several rural towns in the Chateauguay Valley west of Montreal. Gravité reached out to Stéphane Billette, the local National Assembly of Quebec member at the time. Billette then spoke with Hugh Maynard, chairperson of The Gleaner's steering committee, who called a public meeting, Longwell reports.

Nearly 40 people showed up to the meeting, and non-profit organization Chateauguay Valley Community Information Services was created, with Maynard at the helm. As a symbolic gesture, Gravité sold the newspaper rights to CVCIS for $1, Longwell reports. The paper's sale to CVCIS marked its return to local ownership. It was locally owned until 1985, then was sold to a succession of media chains, ending with Gravité in 2017.

"An 11-member steering committee got to work publishing the paper again. The committee consisted of former Gleaner journalists and editors, along with a retired secretary, an artist, a cartoonist, a retired teacher, a website designer, and a farmer," Longwell reports. "Many of the community volunteers had some background in media but several had no journalism experience."

Chantal Hortop, a former Gleaner editor, told Longwell that some people stepped in because they valued the newspaper, even though they had no experience in journalism or communications. "They just felt strongly that The Gleaner had to keep going, and if there was a way to do it with community effort, we were going to make it happen," Hortop told Longwell.

The newly owned paper relaunched with its first print edition of 5,000 copies on June 5. Volunteers distributed the paper for free from a booth at an area carnival. The paper has published monthly issues since then, and on Oct. 9 formalized the nonprofit and elected a board of directors. Though advertising and community fundraising has more than covered printing costs, the board hopes to find a way to start paying contributors. The board plans to move The Gleaner toward a biweekly print schedule starting in January with weekly updates online, and hopes to secure 1,500 subscribers.

The reaction to The Gleaner's comeback has been positive. "I have seen more than one person hug the newspaper," CVCIS committee member Lorelei Muller told Longwell. "It is our valley news. It is what connects us. If something big happens in the area, sure CTV or CBC or whoever is going to cover something big, but they don’t have our day-to-day stuff, our regular community news."

Op-ed: Some aspects of journalism have changed over the years, but the need for a free press remains the same

Kathy Kiely

Some superficial aspects of journalism have changed over the years, but the need for a free press remains the same, writes University of Missouri journalism professor Kathy Kiely in an op-ed for the upcoming National Newspaper Week, Oct. 6-12.

It's not just the switch from printing presses to digital layout, or the advent of social media that's different these days. An increasing number of places lack local news, as University of North Carolina professor Penny Abernathy has documented in her research on news deserts; more than 1,300 communities have lost their local paper since 2004. But, Kiely writes, journalists should resist the temptation to dwell on that.

"Real newshounds don’t wallow in the cozy memories of a sepia-stained past. We are about the now and the next. Our job has always been to help our communities recognize the today’s challenges of today and turn them into the tomorrow’s promise," Kiely writes. "Yes, it’s awkward that of today’s biggest challenges involves us —the newshounds. We’ve always been better at telling your story than telling our own. Yet this is your story too: The future of democracy is inextricably bound up with the future of a free press."

How a rural N.C. paper transformed itself to a 24/7 digital-first publication and raised subscription revenue 493%

Columbus County, North Carolina
(Wikipedia map)

The News Reporter of Whitesville, North Carolina, transformed itself from a twice-weekly print paper with a minimal website to a 24/7 newsroom that focuses on online news. Since the new website launch in April 2018, it has doubled its pageviews and increased circulation revenue by 48 percent, print circulation by 90%, and digital subscription revenue by 493%. Though the paper has lost advertising revenue, the increased subscription money made up for it "almost to the dollar," Publisher Les High told Kristen Hare of The Poynter Institute.

High and his team accomplished the change with lessons from the University of North Carolina's Knight-Temple Table Stakes program, which was a joint creation of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The program, launched in 2015, first worked with The News Reporter and seven other North Carolina newspapers to try mobile and digital news practices, then kept honing the techniques as it expanded in subsequent years. The project has identified seven major "stakes" that can help newsrooms improve their digital footprint.

The newspaper was founded in Columbus County in 1896 and has been owned by the same family since 1938. Like many papers, it saw a decline in print circulation and ad revenue for years before its digital overhaul, Jenny Clore (the paper's director of marketing) writes for Better News. Shifting to a digital-first strategy allowed it to tick the boxes on the first four stakes: Serve targeted audiences with targeted content; publish on platforms used by your targeted audience; produce and publish continuously to meet audience needs; and funnel occasional users to habitual and paying loyalists.

Before making the change, Penny Abernathy from the UNC Hussman School of Media and Journalism encouraged High and his team to gather data to make sure they were taking the right steps. They did this with a survey and focus groups, Clore reports.

The News Reporter posted more and sooner on social media and the web. Before, it had kept stories offline until they appeared in print, but this resulted in low engagement since the stories were old news by the time they appeared online, Clore reports. The paper also made video posts a bigger priority, since those get a lot of views. And, the publication examined its analytics to see what kind of stories readers were looking at, and launched weekly newsletters based on that data.

The changes weren't just online. The paper switched from Monday/Thursday print publication to Tuesday/Friday, which meant reporters who were posting online all the time got Sunday off, and started delivering by mail, not by carrier, which saved money. Many papers have abandoned carriers.

Eight months after the website had launched and readers were accustomed to looking for news on it, The News Reporter launched a metered paywall. A longtime donor sponsored digital subscriptions for every student and teacher at the local high school, which the paper hopes will increase civic engagement among students. They also recently began offering corporate subscriptions, which employers can buy at a slight discount and offer to employees as a benefit.

Read more here for comments on what worked, and Les High's other advice to publishers who want to make similar changes.

Study shows who's more likely to pay for local news, and who's more likely to think local news outlets are prospering

Pew Research Center graphic; click the image to enlarge it.

Only 14 percent of Americans pay to get news of their locality through subscription, donation or membership, but who's more likely to pay? The Pew Research Center has the facts and some ideas.

"Americans ages 50 and older are more likely to pay for local news than their younger counterparts,"  Mason Walker reports for the center. Pew polling found that 29% of those 65 and older and 15% of those 50-64 "say they have paid a local news organization in the past year," Walker writes. "By comparison, just 9% of those ages 30 to 49 and 7% of those 18 to 29 say they have done so."

White Americans and those with a college degree are more likely to pay for local news. About 22% of Americans with a degree say they've paid for local news in the past year, compared to 13% of those with some college education and about 10% of those with a high school diploma or less.

Americans who prefer local news in print are much more likely to pay for it than those who prefer it from other sources. About 39% of people who prefer print have paid in the past year, compared to 16% for people who prefer it from radio, 12% who prefer it from news websites or apps, 10% who like their news on TV, and 8% who like to get local news via social media, Walker reports.

"U.S. adults who are more civically engaged – those who have participated in a political event in the past year or are currently active in or a member of a local group or organization in their community – are far more likely to pay for local news than those who are less engaged," Walker writes. About 29% of people active in their community say they've paid for local news in the past year, compared to 14% of people who are somewhat active and 6% of people who are inactive in their community.

People who feel attached to their community are more likely to pay for local news too: 24% who said they were highly attached said they had paid for local news in the past year, compared to 14% of those who feel somewhat attached and 7% who said they feel not very or not at all attached. 

Pew asked how important it is to follow 11 local news topics, including weather, crime, politics and sports. Those who were highly interested in five or more topics were no more likely to pay for local news than those who said they were interested in fewer topics. The only exception: People who said they were interested in following none of those topics were less likely to pay for local news.

"Notably, those who express interest in a broader range of topics are much more likely to say their local news media are doing well financially," Walker reports. "For instance, among those who say five or more topics are important for their daily lives, almost eight in ten (79%) say their local news outlets are doing well financially, compared with just 55% who say no topics are important."

Majorities of all groups think local news outlets are doing well financially; people with a college degree, those 18-29, and whites are a little less likely to believe that. Only 63% of people who prefer their news via print or radio believe their local news outlets are prospering, compared to 77% of people who prefer TV news. People who prefer their news online fall between the TV and print/radio consumers. Moreover, people who feel highly attached to their community are much more likely to believe their local news outlets are doing well financially (75%) versus 64% of people who are not very or not at all attached to their communities.

Study: Local papers are still the biggest producers of local, original, and important journalism in their communities

Chart by Napoli and Mahone; click on the image to enlarge it.

Newspapers have traditionally provided the majority of local journalism, but local papers have been hit hard by economic challenges, "which raises questions about whether these papers still serve as the lynchpins of local reporting in their communities, and whether other types of outlets are stepping up to take their place," Philip Napoli and Jessica Mahone of Duke University write for Harvard University's Nieman Lab.

With those questions in mind, Napoli and Mahone did a study to see which types of news outlets are the most significant journalism sources in 100 randomly sampled U.S. communities. The research is an extension of a previous study that looked at all media outlets in those same 100 communities and analyzed a week's worth of news stories to see how original, local, and important they were. That study found a surprising shortage of local news in some papers.

In the latest study, "The results show, fairly convincingly, that despite the economic hardships that local newspapers have endured, they remain, by far, the most significant providers of journalism in their communities," Napoli and Mahone write. "And while there is great hope and expectation that newer, online journalism sources will emerge to compensate for the cutbacks and closures affecting local newspapers, our study has shown that this has yet to take place."

The study found that newspapers accounted for about 25 percent local news outlets in the sample, but produced almost 50% of original news stories and nearly 60% of local stories—more than TV, radio, and online-only news outlets combined. "Local newspapers also produced just over 38 percent of the stories that addressed a critical information need. And, when we focused exclusively on stories that met all three of these criteria, local newspapers accounted for almost 60 percent of those stories," Napoli and Mahone report. "In sum, by all of the criteria we employed to assess local journalism output, local newspapers over-performed relative to their prominence amongst local media outlets."

They note that online-only news sources do not punch above their weight the way that local newspapers do. Online-only outlets make up 10% of local news outlets in the communities surveyed; they had just under 10% of original stories, 13% of the local stories, about 11% of stories that addressed critical information needs, and 10% of those that met all three criteria. That distinction is food for thought for those who expect online-only sources to replace print, Napoli and Mahone write.

"While legacy newspapers have declined, they certainly have yet to be displaced as vital producers of local journalism. And the long hoped for emergence of online-only outlets as comparable providers of local journalism still appears to be a long way off," Napoli and Mahone write. "As policymakers and philanthropic organizations concerned about local journalism consider their next steps, and where to invest their efforts and resources, it may be worth keeping these numbers in mind."

Napoli is a public policy professor and faculty affiliate with the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy at Duke University, and leads the News Measures Research Project. Mahone is a research associate at the DeWitt Center and supports the News Measures Research Project.

Rural Illinois weekly shows a print-only story can go viral, but another editor says a lesson wasn't learned

Conventional wisdom in modern journalism is that the future is digital, and the bigger your news organization's online footprint, the better. Without a digital presence it's more difficult for a wider audience to hear about an important story. But there are still cases in which rural papers that rely on print subscriptions and print advertising, can break news of considerable interest, even if not online.

The DuQuoin Weekly in Southern Illinois recently broke a big story: State officials had removed a country music band Confederate Railroad from the DuQuoin State Fair in August because they considered its name racist. The paper and its sister publication, the Pinckneyville Press, didn't put the July 3 story on its Facebook page or mostly defunct website because they thought it would hurt paper sales, Jackie Spinner reports for Carbondale-based Gateway Journalism Review.

“It didn’t take long for us to learn we were competing with ourselves when we throw stories up on Facebook or on the website," Jeff Egbert, publisher and co-owner of the newspapers, told Spinner. The story went viral anyway, as readers shared pictures of the story on social media, which was then picked up by regional, statewide and nationwide news outlets (most crediting the Weekly). "It’s a reminder that for community newspapers, word-of-mouth still goes a long way," Spinner reports.

The Weekly scooped the Du Quoin Call, but the daily has followed up. In its latest story, John Homan reports, "A Marion business has lined up the band for a September concert, and the Williamson County Fair and the city of Harrisburg have also been trying to get them."

In a comment on the above report, Editor Ben Kleppinger of the Advocate-Messenger in Danville, Ky., wrote: "Sounds like they learned exactly the wrong lesson. The story wound up online and on social media anyway, but it didn't come from the newspaper and the newspaper gained zero ad revenue or online subscription money from all those additional eyeballs. The story went viral without any financial benefit for the community journalists who did the reporting. Perhaps someday the epitaph on the DuQuoin Weekly's tombstone will read 'never competed with itself online'."

In an editorial for his paper, titled "You may not realize who originally reported the news you consume," Kleppinger wrote, "We publish our work for the benefit of our readers and our communities. Once it’s published, it often gets snapped up by other media organizations and republished for their audiences. Whether or not these secondary media outlets acknowledge the source of the story, they certainly never return any of their revenues from re-publishing back to the community journalists with boots on the ground in the communities where the news happened. The megaphones of radio, TV and national news outlets can be great for spreading important information beyond a small community, to the region, the state, the nation or even the world. But the system as it’s built now is broken. As a result, the public’s ability to get that important information in the future is at risk. . . . The redistribution of local papers’ news by other media companies has helped create an assumption among the general public that news is free."

Tracking readers' online news habits is difficult; analysis of news sites' recent Facebook trends helps a little

Local News Resource Center chart; click to enlarge it.

If you want your news organization to be a big hit on Facebook, post more photos. That's the key takeaway from a recent analysis of local newspaper and news sites' Facebook pages. 

The Local News Resource Center of the Local Media Association pulled public metrics from the Facebook pages of 2,678 local newspapers and news sites (but not broadcasters) from May 1-30, 2019 to gather a snapshot of online behavior and trends. They divided publishers into tiers based on the number of page likes, then analyzed posting frequency, what kind of content was posted (links, photos, videos, plain text, etc.) and the interaction rate, which is the number of post engagements— i.e, likes, shares, or comments— divided by the number of page likes, reports Emilie Lutostanski of the LNRC.

They found that the biggest Facebook pages, all major metro publishers, posted an average of 34 times per day, and that the pages with the fewest followers posted an average of twice a day. The majority of posts— 83 percent— were links, followed by 11% photos, 2.6% statuses and owned video, 0.6% shared video, and 0.3% other video. But photos got the highest median interaction rate, at 0.27%, followed by 0.26% for links, 0.22% for Facebook videos, 0.15% statuses, and 0.8% for other videos, Lutostanski reports.

The analysis is one way of trying to crack a tough nut. Identifying how Americans get news online and interpreting survey respondents' answers about their online news habits has been a longtime problem in measuring online news use, Elisa Shearer reports for the Pew Research Center.

Pew Research Center chart; click on the image to enlarge it.

Many online news sources don't fit neatly into survey categories, and as news organizations have expanded their online presence, pollsters have added more and more survey categories. That makes it hard to track apples-to-apples data over the past 20 years, Shearer reports.

Also, it can be difficult to parse just how a survey respondent thinks about news. "For example, when a respondent is getting news from nytimes.com, does she primarily remember getting news online or getting news from The New York Times newspaper brand, whose flagship product is a print newspaper?" Shearer reports.

Regardless of how Pew pollsters phrase their questions, it's clear that the internet is approaching primacy. More Americans get their news from social media than print newspapers, and the share of Americans who get their news online is approaching the share who get it from TV.

Journalism schools advise students to embrace all types of work, expand their job searches beyond metro areas

"The news business is on pace for its worst job losses in a decade as about 3,000 people have been laid off or been offered buyouts in the first five months of this year," Gerry Smith reports for Bloomberg. "The cuts have been widespread. Newspapers owned by Gannett and McClatchy, digital media companies like BuzzFeed and Vice Media, and the cable news channel CNN have all shed employees."

The trend has been driven by several factors: "Local newspapers have seen much of their advertising revenue vanish as readers move online. They’ve also struggled to attract many digital subscribers after past rounds of layoffs and buyouts eroded their quality," Smith reports. "Digital-media startups, funded by venture capitalists seeking growth, aggressively hired journalists, then scaled back to focus on profitability. Almost everyone is struggling to compete with Facebook and Google, which accounted for three-fourths of U.S. online ads sales last year."

The changing market has led journalism schools to adjust their instruction. Researchers interviewed 113 faculty, staff and administrators from 44 U.S. journalism programs, and found that J-schools have been increasingly encouraging students to not think of journalism as "coherent career path," Amy McCaig reports for Futurity, a nonprofit university research news site. "The post-Watergate media era, where you would work for a local paper or TV station and work your way up to retirement with a nice pension, is behind us," study coauthor Max Besbris of Rice University in Houston told McCaig.

Instead, Besbris and coauthor Caitlin Petre of Rutgers University found that journalism professors are advising students to accept the fact that they may need to do temporary or freelance work for news organizations, or work in public relations, McCaig reports. Students are also advised to hone their skills in photography, social media, graphic design, editing, and recording. Such skills can make students more marketable, especially if publications are looking for a "one-man-band" journalist.

Any edge can help in such a tight journalism job market. Al Cross, a University of Kentucky journalism professor and director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, which publishes The Rural Blog, advises job hunters to widen the scope of their search beyond urban areas: "Many people looking for journalism jobs should consider small newspapers. We still get inquiries from them, looking for staff. And refugees from metros should consider buying a small paper if it’s financially viable. Many have closed because they couldn’t find buyers. There are some bargains out there, and the non-financial rewards of community journalism can be great."

New editor at rural N.H. paper, at 30 the youngest ever, aims to help it increase its digital presence

Maggie Cassidy

The new editor at the Valley News in West Lebanon, N.H, is breaking barriers: Maggie Cassidy, 30, will be the paper's youngest-ever editor and its first woman when she takes over the 25-person newsroom next week, though neither of those things landed her the job, Kristen Hare reports for the Poynter Institute.

"She has really been the driving force behind our movement to more of a digital presence, and she has really earned the respect from all of her colleagues in the newsroom," said publisher Dan McClory in an article announcing the hire.

As the daughter of a journalist and a careful but dedicated advocate for digital news, Cassidy is well-placed to help a newspaper embrace new technology. "What I think strikes a lot of people about Maggie is the bridge that she provides between the old and the new," said Martin Frank, the 30-year veteran editor she's replacing. Frank has been the editor of the Valley News for the past five years.

West Lebanon, N.H., is across the Connecticut
River from White River Junction, Vt. (Google)

"The old, he said, are the principles of good journalism. The new is how to apply those principles to new forms of journalism," Hare reports. It will be a challenge: many residents in the area don't have much internet access and some still use dial-up. But Cassidy, who became the paper's first web editor in 2012, has been working to increase the paper's digital presence while still respecting old-school tenets of journalism such as factual accuracy even with breaking news; that can suffer sometimes in the report-it-now world of digital news.

The stereotype of small newspapers being slow to change is a little bit true, Cassidy said, but told Hare that her experience has been that "journalists want to do good work, they want to reach readers in the best way . . . but they don't want to do something for the sake of doing it."

The Valley News, named for the Connecticut River valley, serves 24 towns in Vermont and 22 in New Hampshire. It is owned by Newspapers of New England, a family company that owns 10 papers, including the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire's capital and the Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, Mass.

Package from six-month investigation explores lack of clean, reliable drinking water in Appalachian parts of Ky. and W.Va.

A collaboration among media outlets aims to bring attention to the lack of clean, reliable drinking water in Eastern Kentucky and Southern West Virginia and spur public debate and change. Will Wright of the Lexington Herald-Leader, Caity Coyne of the Charleston Gazette-Mail, and Molly Born of West Virginia Public Broadcasting spent nearly six months interviewing dozens of residents, water district officials and experts before yesterday's publication of the multimedia "Stirring the Waters" package. The series was coordinated by The GroundTruth Project's Report for America initiative, a national service program funded in Appalachia by the Galloway Family Foundation.

Among the investigation's key findings:

• Because water districts in Central Appalachia are understaffed and underfunded, they can't adequately perform routine maintenance. That leads to quality and reliability problems for customers and doesn't address long-term infrastructure problems.
• Some districts routinely produce water with high levels of dangerous chemicals that can harm the most vulnerable customers, such as infants, pregnant women and the elderly; this violates the Safe Water Drinking Act.
• Grants are the most sought-after source of funding for water projects, but there has been less and less of that money available in recent years. Low-interest loans are an increasingly popular source of funding, but the debt can overwhelm small water systems.
• Some grant funding awarded to districts are so narrowly focused that they can't be used to fix water districts' most pressing problems.
• Bill collection is the only real source of revenue for community water systems, but as the population in Central Appalachia drops, so do water systems' revenues.
• Local politicians often pressure water boards to keep rates unchanged rather than raise rates gradually, which sometimes leads to financial catastrophe.
• Nine community water systems in Southern West Virginia have been under boil water advisories for longer than five years. The state is aware of this, but there's no indication it's doing anything to help.
• A clearinghouse for West Virginia infrastructure projects estimates that $17 billion is needed to correct the state's water and sewage problems and connect everyone to central systems. That number will rise the longer problems are ignored.

Survey: Americans think internet media help inform people, but should be more regulated, less filtered

Just a few days after Alex Jones' ouster from most social media platforms, the Knight Foundation and Gallup teamed up to dig into Americans' attitudes about the media's role as content gatekeepers.

"For the survey, 'Major Internet Companies as News Editors,' Knight and Gallup asked more than 2,000 U.S. adults for their opinions on whether the platforms are doing a good job of delivering the news, whether they need to change, and if so, how," Mathew Ingram reports for Columbia Journalism Review. "The good news is that more than half of those surveyed said they believe internet companies in general help people become better informed about the world around them. The bad news is that about 85 percent feel the platforms aren’t doing enough to stop the spread of misinformation."

Respondents worried that platforms needed to stop fake news, but more than 60 percent said they were concerned that removing any content from news feeds gives people a biased picture of the news and restricts the expression of some viewpoints, and 80 percent said internet platforms should show all users the same news information without filtering it.

"Then there’s the real kicker: Almost 80 percent of those who responded to the survey said they believe internet companies should be regulated like traditional media—although it’s not clear exactly what they meant by this," Ingram reports. "Newspapers aren’t subject to a lot of regulation about what kind of content they can publish, apart from obscenity rules. Broadcasters are regulated and licensed by the FCC, but in general, the mainstream press are free to publish misinformation in much the same way that Facebook is, with one very important difference: They can be sued for slander or defamation, and Facebook can’t." Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects internet platforms from such lawsuits.

State of New Jersey may subsidize local news coverage

New Jersey could become the first state to provide funding for local journalism, though it's not a done deal. "Last month, both houses of the New Jersey legislature passed the 'Civic Info Bill.' The bill sets up a nonprofit group that will be supported by five of the state's universities. A board of directors will approve grants to strengthen local news coverage," Brain Stelter reports for CNN. Gov. Phil Murphy signed a state budget Sunday night that allocates $5 million for the effort, but he hasn't signed the authorization bill.

The Free Press Action Fund, a liberal public interest group, has been lobbying for such a bill for more than two years, on the grounds that print newspapers are losing staffing and resources and digital start-ups aren't filling the void.

"In New Jersey, this is compounded by the fact that the state is located between two big cities, New York and Philadelphia, that are in other states. The practical effect: Less coverage of hyperlocal issues," Stelter reports. "So advocates and state lawmakers argued that public funds should support 'civic information' -- news coverage, yes, but also things like databases and media literacy initiatives."

Newspaper consultant finds big differences in weeklies and dailies about online value; starts site, 'State of Newspapers'

Kevin Slimp

Kevin Slimp, a leading consultant to community newspapers, has started a website, State of Newspapers, with news, research and features about the industry, and advice for it. Slimp has been taking informal surveys for years, and his latest one found an interesting divide between publishers of weekly and daily newspapers, showing that the former aren't as keen on the web as the latter.

When asked, "How do you feel about the following statement: 'Our business would do just as well or better without a digital version'," 59 per cent of daily publishers chose the response, "That's ridiculous. We would be in worse shape without a digital/online edition." But 68 percent of weekly publishers (those printing three or fewer times a week) chose one of the other responses: "I believe that is true" (22.8 percent) or "It might be true, but I'm not sure" (45.5 percent).

"After visiting thousands of newspapers during my career, and speaking to thousands more at conferences, there's not much that catches me off guard about our industry these days. But I was a little surprised by the vast differences between the way daily and weekly newspaper publishers view the benefits of their digital efforts," Slimp writes. "The results are even more striking when asked about the benefits of social media. Only 22 per cent of non-daily newspaper publishers report seeing any benefit, financial or otherwise, from their social media efforts. Compare that to 60 per cent of daily newspaper publishers who see some type of benefit from their social media efforts and it's clear there are some real differences between the results of social media at daily and non-daily newspapers."

Reporting package on rape in Okla. up for Scripps Howard award for community journalism; announcement today

Tulsa-based digital newspaper The Frontier is in the running for a Scripps Howard Award for its five-part series "Shadow Land: How rape stays hidden in Oklahoma."

The Frontier's year-long investigation uncovered "a war within a war that requires some victims to fight for their own justice while government and private agencies fight for money, personnel and proven training methods to assist victims," Mary Hargrove and Kassie McClung report. "Victims can fall prey to overworked nurses, police and prosecutors in rural counties who do not have the time, training or manpower to thoroughly investigate. And their cases die."

Oklahoma's shortcomings are reflected in most states, and so are the possible solutions, Hargrove and McClung report.

The other two finalists in the Community Journalism category are "Home Sick" by the Capital News Service of the University of Maryland and "Addicted at Birth" by the Bristol Herald Courier in Bristol, Va., noted on The Rural Blog yesterday. All the award winners will be announced at 2 p.m. today.

Younger adults prefer text, not broadcast, for news

Here's a somewhat encouraging bit of research for newspapers and other media that rely on text stories, not necessarily on paper: "When asked whether one prefers to read, watch or listen to their news, younger adults are far more likely than older ones to opt for text, and most of that reading takes place on the web," reports Amy Mitchell of the Pew Research Center.

Overall, more Americans (46%) prefer to watch their news than to read it (35%) or listen to it (17%), a Pew survey found this year. "But that varies dramatically by age," Mitchell reports. The younger the reader, the more likely he or she is to get news online. "About eight in ten (81%) of 18- to 29-year-olds who prefer to read their news also prefer to get their news online; just 10% choose a print newspaper. The breakdown among 30- to 49-year-olds is similar. News readers who are ages 50-64, on the other hand, are more evenly split between a preference for the web (41%) and print paper (40%), while those 65 and older mostly still turn to the print paper (63%)."

"There is also evidence that younger adults who prefer to watch their news are beginning to make the transition to doing so on a computer rather than a television," Mitchell writes. "While 57% of 18- to 29-year-old news watchers prefer to get their news via TV, 37% cite the web as their platform of choice. That is far more than any other age group, including double the percentage of 30- to 49-year-old news watchers."