Thieves took most print copies of rural weekly with story on alleged rape at police chief's home; increased story's reach

UPDATE, Jan. 20: Mike Wiggins tells the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, "The thief returned all of the stolen newspapers to our office Thursday night, confessed to the crime and was cited for petty theft this morning." The Plaindealer reports that it is not disclosing the thief's relationship to the sexual-assault case, and "The theft was not connected in any way to the three defendants in the case, their families or the Ouray Police Department."

Front page of the latest Ouray County Plaindealer

By Corey Hutchins
Inside the News in Colorado

This week, a front-page story appeared in the small and mighty Ouray County Plaindealer about a 17-year-old girl’s allegations of being raped by teenagers at the home of a police chief.

What happened next? Papers started disappearing from newspaper boxes around the county, said the paper’s owners, Erin McIntyre and Mike Wiggins.

Here’s more from a note to readers in an email Thursday: "All of our newspaper racks in Ouray and all but one rack in Ridgway were hit by a thief who stole all the newspapers. From what we know so far, it seems this person put in four quarters and took all the papers at these racks. It’s pretty clear that someone didn’t want the community to read the news this week. … Whoever did this does not understand that stealing newspapers doesn’t stop a story. We’re not going to stop doing our job, which is to shine light on important issues in our community and keep you informed. This person is not going to shut down the freedom of the press by stealing a few hundred newspapers. Our community won’t stand for it and we won’t, either."

McIntyre also said the young newspaper publishers were working with a printing plant in Montrose to get another press run published on Thursday. “I'll leave it up to you to draw your own conclusions on which story they didn’t want you to read,” she wrote. Online, a backlash was surging.

When news of the alleged newspaper thefts hit social media Thursday afternoon, Colorado journalists began sharing a link to the online version of the rape allegations story, including an editor at the Colorado Sun, Denver Post staffers, prominent Denver TV anchor Kyle Clark, and others. (The Plaindealer made the story free to read on its website; other stories are not.) The Post ran details of the rape allegations, naming two suspects; the story led with news of the stolen papers.

Ouray County (Wikipedia map)

Clark also included a broadcast segment about it on his "Next" show Thursday evening, indicating the sexual assault story was the news someone was trying to suppress. “We have a link to the article at the Next section of 9News.com,” Clark told his audience Thursday evening. “I recommend you read it if for no other reason [than] that because somebody doesn’t want you to see it.”

If that was the case, the pilfered periodicals produced a classic Streisand effect. The online version prominently displayed mugshots of the three young men arrested for suspected sexual assault, including the Ouray police chief’s stepson; the front-page print story did not.

McIntyre said Friday she hadn’t looked at how much traffic the online story generated, but she said more than $2,000 in donations had flowed in to the newsroom since they publicized the thefts. “People are angry this happened,” she said in a text message Friday morning. “Law enforcement is going to catch this person and we plan on pressing charges.” (She pointed to a 2022 state statute that makes the act of interfering with the lawful distribution of newspapers a finable offense.)

“If you hoped to silence or intimidate us,” Plaindealer co-owner Wiggins said, “you failed miserably.”

Quick hits: Apply for NPF awards; old buildings revived as arts spaces; rural LGBTQ adults face more challenges

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

In one rural Minnesota town, old buildings get new life as arts spaces. Read more here.

Southerly, a nonprofit newsroom that covers environmental issues in the South, is taking applications for paid 12-week remote community reporting fellowships. Read more here.

Dealing with dementia: Rural caregivers of dementia patients can apply for a free, six-week online workshop and university study that aims to teach participants new strategies for reducing stress, managing difficult behavior, better self-care, and planning for the future. Participants will be paid up to $80 for completing study surveys. Read more here.

Awards: The National Press Foundation is accepting entries for its 2022 awards honoring the best in journalism. Work published or broadcast between Sept. 30, 2021 and Sept. 30, 2022 is eligible. Of particular interest to rural and community journalists are the Innovative Storytelling Award and the Feddie Reporting Award for outstanding coverage of federal laws or regulations and their effect on local communities. Both awards have a prize of $5,000. Read more here.

More evidence of Army's lax attitude toward sexual assault: A first-of-its-kind analysis shows that Army soldiers are more likely to be locked up ahead of trial for drug offenses than for sexual assault under a system that gives commanders control over such decisions. But sexual assault defendants often threaten, hurt, or even kill their victims when allowed to go free before trial. Read more here.

Whoda thunk it? One of the oldest rodeos in America is in New Jersey. Read more here.

Rural LGBTQ adults are more likely than their urban counterparts to be depressed and/or anxious, and less likely to seek and find mental-health care. Read more here.

All the hogs in California: Delays in California pig welfare rules frustrate small hog farmers in other states, who will be affected by the fallout. Read more here.

Class comment: Dolly Parton once pushed back against being called a hillbilly, saying "We had a great deal of class." Read more here.

A new online platform tracks consumer opinions on meat. Read more here.

School probe wins Arkansas weekly Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Journalism from Harvard's Nieman Foundation

Madison County Record photo by Shannon Hahn

The Madison County Record, a rural Arkansas weekly with a staff of five, beat out The Washington Post and a collaboration of the Miami Herald and ProPublica to win the 2021 Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Journalism from Harvard University's Nieman Foundation.

The Record won for its "unflinching investigation . . . into attempts by the Huntsville, Ark., school board to cover up sexual assault allegations by junior high school basketball players," said the award announcement. The paper, which has a circulation of 4,000, "found that the local school board members sought to conceal not only the assault allegations but also their decision to reduce the recommended punishment for some students and to throw out punishment for others."

The package is called "Title IX," after the federal civil-rights law that prohibits excluding Americans from educational programs on the basis of sex. The Record began its investigation after concerned parents shared Title IX documents with the paper because they worried the district wouldn't be transparent in its review of the assaults. The paper investigated via interviews and records requests, and turned down other papers' offers of partnership in order to protect sources' anonymity.

Huntsville in Madison County
(Wikipedia map)

When the school district tried to get a gag order to prevent sources from speaking to the paper, The Record hired legal counsel and got a favorable ruling. "The reporters persisted in their investigation despite public backlash, a loss of advertising, and letters and social media comments that questioned their integrity and attacked their decision to print the stories," the Nieman Foundation reports. "Due to the attention The Record’s reporting brought to the school board, in February 2022, 19 people filed to run for seven school board seats. In comparison, no one filed during the last school board election. The Huntsville School District also admitted to several FOIA violations and a district judge ordered board members to undergo FOIA training."

One Taylor Award judge, USA Today investigative reporter Pat Beall, praised The Record: "This small paper was punching far, far above its weight class, from its initial decision to publish stories critical of the community’s popular basketball team to its willingness to push back on violations of public-meeting laws. This strong, impactful series cannot be read outside the context of how the fairness and accuracy of these stories, published by a family-owned, third-generation newspaper in a small community where school basketball is king, would have been challenged in ways no national or major regional news organization would have experienced. These stories allowed the voices of young victims to eloquently rebut the adults’ attempts to dismiss the abuse."

Pulitzers announced; here are some with rural resonance

The 2020 Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday, and several in journalism have rural resonance.

The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica won in the Public Service category for "Lawless," a yearlong investigation maonly by ADN reporter Kyle Hopkins into the sexual assault crisis in rural Alaska, and how lax public safety and law enforcement made it worse. It also won the small-market Frank A. Blethen Award for Local Accountability Reporting from the News Leaders Association.

Editor Jeffery Gerritt of the Palestine Herald Press in Texas won for writing "editorials that exposed how pre-trial inmates died horrific deaths in a small Texas county jail—reflecting a rising trend across the state—and courageously took on the local sheriff and judicial establishment, which tried to cover up these needless tragedies," the judges said. Gerritt won two other national prizes for the editorials, as The Rural Blog reported yesterday.

The staff of The Washington Post won in Explanatory Reporting "for a groundbreaking series that showed with scientific clarity the dire effects of extreme temperatures on the planet," the judges said. The Post was a finalist in the Public Service journalism category for its reporting on the opioid epidemic.

Ida B. Wells, who died in 1931, received a special posthumous award recognizing her pioneering investigative journalism on lynchings, much of it in rural areas of the Deep South. The award comes with a bequest of at least $50,000 to support her mission; recipients will be announced at a later date.

Quick hits: How to deal with conspiracy theories in the pandemic; a program to help rural sexual-assault survivors

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

How can local officials deal with conspiracy theories during the pandemic? Read it here.

Genetic engineering could bring back the American chestnut tree. Here's the latest update.

A Penn State program aims to better help rural sexual assault survivors through telehealth and more. Read about it here.

An energy analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists discusses what coal communities need to recover from the pandemic. Read it here.

Pandemic hurts rural mass transit agencies. Read more here.

Series about the sexual assault crisis in rural Alaska up for annual Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting

A newspaper series about the sexual assault crisis in rural Alaska is one of six finalists for the annual Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, awarded by Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.

The Anchorage Daily News partnered with ProPublica's Local Reporting Network to produce "Lawless," a series that uncovered a sexual-assault crisis in rural Alaska and how the lack of public-safety services makes it worse. After the series ran, Attorney General William Barr declared the lack of law enforcement in rural Alaska a federal emergency, and his Department of Justice promised more than $52 million to improve the situation. The U.S. attorney in Anchorage announced the hiring of more rural prosecutors, and Gov. Mike Dunleavy said the state will hire 15 more state troopers.

Daily News reporter Kyle Hopkins pursued the story after he discovered that more than 70 rural towns didn't have local law enforcement, and that the state hadn't enforced village police hiring standards. In some towns, convicted criminals, including sex offenders, had been hired as police officers, Clark Merrefield reports for Journalist's Resource.

The series also recently won a Scripps Howard Award in the Community Journalism category. The Goldsmith Prize winner receives $25,000, and the other five finalists receive $10,000. The prize is funded by the Greenfield Foundation. The winner was meant to be announced Thursday, but the awards ceremony was canceled because of coronavirus precautions. The winner will be announced soon online, according to the Goldsmith Awards website.

Documentary on missing and murdered indigenous women premieres in Las Vegas; nationwide tour planned

"Somebody's Daughter," a documentary about the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women, premiered last week in Las Vegas at the Four Directions and Nevada Tribal Nations Native American Presidential Forum.

"The all-indigenous production presented by Alter-Native Media addresses racism, colonialism and genocide, while focusing on missing and murdered indigenous women victims from the Blackfeet Nation and confederated Salish Kootenai tribes in Montana," Nora Mabie reports for the Great Falls Tribune in Montana.

Click here for more information about the film, or click here to watch the trailer. The film will be screened on March 21 at the Indigenous Film Festival in Missoula. After that, the film's creators are planning a nationwide tour.

New law in S.D. aims to address epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women; other states working on it too

A new law in South Dakota aims to address the epidemic of missing and murdered Native American women in the state. There is no official count of such cases, which are often unreported or slip through the cracks of the justice system. The new law, which went into effect July 1, requires "the state Division of Criminal Investigation to collect data on missing and murdered indigenous people, and create procedures and training for investigating cases involving women and children," Lisa Kaczke reports for the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls.

Republican Sen. Lynne DiSanto of Box Elder, who sponsored the unanimously supported bill, said she hopes the law helps families feel like the state cares about the victims, and hopes it improves collaboration between tribal and non-tribal law enforcement, Kaczke reports.

"Native women have been dehumanized or sexualized and the media has historically solidified those stereotypes," Kaczke writes. "Native American communities also struggle with alcohol, drugs and poverty, which can factor into the belief that Native women aren't important."

Republican Rep. Tamara St. John, a historian for the Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux Tribe, told Kaczke she doesn't think law enforcement is deliberately not helping, but said "Native women can be perceived as marginalized and outside scope of the American justice system and for that reason, can be easily targeted or a family won't be assisted."

South Dakota isn't the only state trying to address the issue. North Dakota passed similar bills, Montana created a missing persons specialist to look into it, and Minnesota just enacted a new law that creates a task force on missing and murdered indigenous women, Kaczke reports. A recent University of Montana School of Journalism package brought attention to the phenomenon as well.

National governments are taking action too. A yearslong government inquiry in Canada recently released a huge report on human rights abuses against indigenous women. U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, is trying to pass a law to address the issue as well. "Savanna's Act, which would require the federal Department of Justice to develop protocols for cases involving missing and murdered Native Americans, was reintroduced earlier this year after stalling in Congress last year, and a hearing on the federal bill took place earlier this month," Kaczke reports.

Feds postpone anti-abortion 'conscience rule' for medical providers that could disproportionately affect rural areas

The Trump administration has agreed to postpone a rule that would allow medical workers to decline to participate in abortions "or other treatments on moral or religious grounds while the so-called 'conscience' rule is challenged in a California court," The Associated Press reports. "The rule was supposed to take effect on July 22, but the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and its opponents in a California lawsuit mutually agreed Friday to delay a final ruling on the matter until Nov. 22."

Though such a rule is likely more popular in rural areas, which tend to be more socially conservative, it could also disproportionately affect rural residents since there are fewer pharmacies and medical providers. Women who want to fill a prescription for birth control pills or abortifacients, or be provided emergency contraception after a rape from a hospital, may not have the means to travel to get those things if they are denied at facilities closer to home.

The Trump administration's proposed rule "would require institutions that receive money from federal programs to certify that they comply with some 25 federal laws protecting conscience and religious rights," the AP reports. The California lawsuit  "alleges that the department exceeded its authority with the rule, which President Trump announced in May."

Montana journalism school project and Canadian inquiry put spotlight on violence against Native American women

University of Montana School of Journalism graphic illustration for this year's Native News reporting package

In the past three years, 671 Native American women have gone missing and/or been murdered in the U.S., according to an impressive news package from the University of Montana School of Journalism. The real number is likely much higher, since the data is often poorly collected by federal, state and tribal governments.

The disappearances and deaths "are not just numbers or data to be formed into graph lines, but women’s lives ended or hanging in the limbo of disappearance. The 2019 Montana Native News Project investigates the complex crisis of Native American women disappearing in Montana, who they leave behind and how communities are trying to address the issue," write the project editors and advisers. The school covers the Native communities in the state and produces an annual report.

Women, especially women of color, continue to suffer worldwide because of trauma and inequality, but Native American women are on the forefront of confronting the issue, the editors write. The Sovereign Bodies Institute, which worked with the journalism students on the project, began raising awareness about it by creating a database of missing and murdered indigenous women.

The issue is receiving increasing attention in Canada, too. Human rights abuses against indigenous women and girls have led to violence that amounts to genocide, according to a years-long government inquiry that released its findings Monday. The report of more than 1,000 pages also highlights violence against LGBT+ indigenous people, is "the conclusion of more than two years of research involving at least 2,380 people who shared their stories or artwork with the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls," Merrit Kennedy reports for NPR.

The report recommends many actions to end the violence. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who ordered the inquiry, promised to develop a plan for meaningful action, Kennedy reports.

Newspapers' probe details decades of sexual abuse by Southern Baptist pastors and staff, and leaders' failure to act

The headquarters of the Southern Baptist Convention in
Nashville (Associated Press photo by Mark Humphrey)

Nearly 400 Southern Baptist leaders and volunteers have been accused — and about 220 took plea deals or were convicted of — sexually abusing as many as 700 victims in 20 states, some of them children as young as 3 years old, over the past two decades, and dozens of cases are still pending, says an investigation by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News.

The problem has persisted because the denomination has an informal ordination process, pastors tend to move around frequently, and church leaders have mishandled, hidden or ignored complaints —and because the Southern Baptist Convention has refused to enact substantive reforms.

The newspapers dug deep, spending more than six months collecting and cross-checking news stories, prison and court records, sex offender registries, and other documents, as well as conducting hundreds of interviews with victims, church leaders, offenders and investigators. They focused on Texas, but looked at documents from 20 states and cited examples from several, and produced an online database and multimedia package in their three-part report, the first piece of which ran Sunday.

Since 1998, more than 380 people who worked or volunteered at Southern Baptist churches have been charged with sex crimes. Many confessed, or were convicted or successfully sued, and more than 90 are in prison today. "Scores of others cut deals and served no time. More than 100 are registered sex offenders. Some still work in Southern Baptist churches today," the papers report. Many of the more than 700 victims were shunned by their churches, encouraged to forgive their abusers or even get abortions following rape. The news package includes a database of 220 convicted church officials.

The Southern Baptist Convention has 47,000 churches, but its oversight of them is almost nonexistent. The churches are particularly vulnerable to predators because of the denomination's practice of local ordination. "It's a perfect profession for a con artist, because all he has to do is talk a good talk and convince people that he's been called by God, and bingo, he gets to be a Southern Baptist minister," said Christa Brown, who wrote a book about being molested as a child by her Southern Baptist pastor. "Then he can infiltrate the entirety of the SBC, move from church to church, from state to state, go to bigger churches and more prominent churches where he has more influence and power, and it all starts in some small church. It's a porous sieve of a denomination."

Victims have pressed for reforms for years with little success; several of the perpetrators have been presidents and prominent leaders in the SBC. In 2007, victims asked SBC leaders to create a registry of current and former pastors or volunteers who had been convicted or credibly accused, but it didn't happen. In 2008, victims asked SBC leaders to track sexual predators and take action against churches that harbor or hide predators, but the leaders rejected almost every proposed reform. In 2018, victims once again asked leaders for such a registry but were denied. Wade Burleson, former president of Oklahoma's Baptist convention, told the papers that leaders rejected the reforms because of the local autonomy that is fundamental to the denomination, and because some feared lawsuits if the reforms didn't prevent sexual abuse.

August Boto, interim president of the SBC's Executive Committee, helped write the rejection of reforms proposed in 2008. He told the Chronicle and the Express-News that there is only so much SBC leadership can do to stop sexual abuse: "The fact that criminal activity occurs in a church context is always the basis of grief. But it's going to happen. And that statement does not mean that we must be resigned to it." 

Though SBC leaders said they were troubled by predators, they said they couldn't interfere with local church problems. However, the papers note that the SBC has dis-affiliated from at least four churches in the past 10 years for welcoming homosexuals. "The SBC governing documents ban gay or female pastors, but they do not outlaw convicted sex offenders from working in churches," the papers note.

Meanwhile, "At least 35 church pastors, employees and volunteers who exhibited predatory behavior were still able to find jobs at churches during the past two decades. In some cases, church leaders apparently failed to alert law enforcement about complaints or to warn other congregations about allegations of misconduct," the papers report. "Some registered sex offenders returned to the pulpit. Others remain there, including a Houston preacher who sexually assaulted a teenager and now is the principal officer of a Houston nonprofit that works with student organizations, federal records show. Its name: Touching the Future Today Inc."

Southern Baptist leaders have appeared more concerned about public blowback than in reform. A few years after popular Southern Baptist preacher Leslie Mason's 2003 conviction on two counts of sexual assault, he returned to the pulpit. When Michael Leathers, then the editor of the Illinois Baptist State Association's newspaper, published a story about it, state Baptist leaders told him he might be fired and lose his severance pay. Leathers resigned. 

J.D. Greear

SBC President J.D. Greear of North Carolina told the Chronicle in an email that any church that "proves a pattern of sinful neglect — regarding abuse or any other matter — should absolutely be removed from fellowship from the broader denomination." But he also wrote in the email that his authority is limited because of local autonomy. "Change has to begin at the ground level with churches and organizations," Greear wrote. "Our churches must start standing together with a commitment to take this issue much more seriously than ever before." Greear, 45, was elected last year on a platform of reaching out to and listening to women and minorities. 

One victim, Anne Marie Miller, said Greear has been supportive of her pending case against a missionary whom she says assaulted her as a teenager in the late 1990s, but that she doubts Greear's election will bring about change. "I was really, really hopeful that it was a turning point, but I've been disappointed that there hasn't been any meaningful action other than forming committees and assigning budgets, which is just good old Baptist red tape," Miller told the papers. "That's just what you do — you form a committee, and you put some money towards it and no change actually happens."

UPDATE, Feb. 12: How did Baptist media operations handle the story? A senior editor at Baptist Press wrote an 1,170-word story focusing on Greear's reaction; at midday Tuesday, it was the top-trending story on Kentucky Today, an online newspaper of the Kentucky Baptist Convention. It did not have a story on Kentuckians in the database, as the Louisville Courier Journal did.

Missouri weekly sheds light on violent bullying in small town

Edina, Missouri (Missourian map)

Big dailies often get the lion's share of attention (and newspaper awards), but stories like this prove that papers of all sizes produce great journalism -- like The Edina Sentinel, a weekly in the Missouri town of 1,200.

After hearing rumors of sexual assaults involving the Knox County Middle School football team, Editor Echo Menges investigated. Three seventh- and eighth-grade players had allegedly sodomized up to five fifth- and sixth-grade players with metal objects while other students watched, over the first several weeks of the football season.

Numerous people called the Sentinel, wanting to know the facts, but the school superintendent and sheriff wouldn't confirm details of the incident, and the school board wouldn't let parents talk about it at a recent meeting. So Menges began talking to the children and parents. The town's small size means the assaults are relevant to a higher percentage of the town, but also made it harder for Menges to investigate. Many of her sources insisted on anonymity, which she granted. If she's asked in court to reveal those sources and refuses, she would face jail time since Missouri doesn't have a shield law protecting journalists from having to reveal anonymous sources. But: "This is an important enough story that I would be willing to go to jail for it," Menges told Anna Brett of The Missourian, the newspaper of the Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, Mo.  The Sentinel published Editor Echo Menges' investigation last Friday.

Photography project examines rural sexual assault in Iowa

Photo by Jacob Fiscus

Rebecca McKinsey, a reporter at the Daily Times Herald and Jacob Fiscus, owner of the Photography by Fiscus studio in Carroll, Iowa, (pop. 10,103), have teamed up to produce a heart-wrenching photo project about rural sexual assault survivors.

The project is called Every 98 Seconds because someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every 98 seconds, on average. It features interviews and photos of 13 western Iowa residents who have been sexually assaulted or are parents of children who were assaulted, ranging from a 13-year-old girl and 17-year-old boy to a 53-year-old woman. The photos are expressive and personal without revealing the subjects' identities. The project was released in April to coincide with Sexual Assault Awareness Month and aims to remind viewers that sexual assault can happen to anyone, even friends, family and neighbors.

McKinsey and Fiscus previously collaborated on two other photo projects: People of the Library, which featured locals who use the Carroll Library and helped ensure the success of a library modernization referendum, and Hindsight, which captured the memories, insights and wisecracks of Carroll residents age 90 and over. All three projects can be seen at The Faces of Iowa.

Bristol Herald Courier wins Scripps Howard Award for Community Journalism with 'Addicted at Birth' package

The Bristol Herald Courier has won a Scripps Howard Award in the Community Journalism category for its "Addicted at Birth" package about how the opioid epidemic hurts babies. Judges commented: "The newspaper, with a circulation of 16,500, investigated the problem from all angles, outlined solutions and educated the community. The impact is wide-ranging for taxpayers, hospitals, families and schools. The Bristol Herald Courier not only reported what’s happening but foreshadowed what the community could face in the future."

The 65th annual awards were announced yesterday. The Scripps Howard Foundation, which is the philanthropic arm of E.W. Scripps Co., will present more than $170,000 to the winners in a live ceremony in Cincinnati on April 19. The event will be live streamed on Facebook and YouTube.

Tulsa-based online-only news outlet The Frontier was a runner up in the Community Journalism category for "Shadow Land: How Rape Stays Hidden in Oklahoma".

Also of rural interest, GateHouse Media was the runner up in the Multimedia Journalism category for "In the Shadow of Wind Farms". And the Malheur Enterprise in Vale, Oregon, was a runner up in the Distinguished Service to the First Amendment category for "Deadly Decisions – The Fight for Records".

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.