Many farmers have a second job, and some have cashed in by sharing farm life across social media channels

                 Zoe Kent posts her farm life films on medial platforms like Instagram and YouTube.

As farm income has dipped over the last two decades, some farmers have built a second income by posting about their "life and times" on the farm, reports Amira McKee of The Wall Street Journal.

When the Welker family from Montana was facing some lean years, Nick Welker, his brother Scott, and their father, Bob, decided to share their ag adventures through short films and reels posted to social media. 

The three men started their online careers with "viral videos in the mid-2010s, followed by the restoration of a Big Bud tractor — a hulking machine with a cult following among tractor enthusiasts," McKee writes. The three Welkers have joined "a growing class of 'aginfluencers' monetizing farm life."

For the Welker family, their "social-media business now provides a six-figure annual income stream, generating about $5 for every $1 invested in equipment, cameras, and a video editor," McKee writes.

“It blows my mind how much they eat it up," Nick Welker told the Journal. "They just really like seeing us work.”

The group has amassed over a million social media followers, and their YouTube channel produces ad revenue, as does their equipment sponsorships. McKee adds, "Tractor brands like Case IH pay handsomely to have their machinery featured on the Welkers’ channel."

Zoe Kent is another successful aginfluencer. After she took over her family's farm in 2021, she began posting online about her life as an Ohio soy and corn farmer. McKee adds, "Last year, her social-media income was five times higher than her farm profits."

The Journal reports, "Eighty-six percent of family farms earned a majority of their household income from off-farm sources in 2024, according to the most recent U.S. Agriculture Department data."

What's so appealing about fake health information and how can people combat it?

Stopping to check the facts helps stem the spread of misinformation.
(World Health Organization adaptation via The Converation)

People from all walks of life can get sucked into believing and sharing fake health information from the internet. In his article for The Conversation, global health communication scholar Angshuman K. Kashyap explains why false health data can be so believable and how people can combat it.

Fake health information is written to appeal to human nature. Whether it's a sensationalized problem, more juicy details on a controversial issue, or a simple answer to a complicated problem, many people will keep reading. Kashyap writes, "Fake health information often appears to be true because it mixes a grain of truth with misleading claims."

False health information often looks professional. "In 2019, an article with the false headline 'Ginger is 10,000x more effective at killing cancer than chemo' was shared more than 800,000 times on Facebook," Kashyap explains. "The article contained several factors that make people feel an urgency to react and share without checking the facts: compelling visuals, emotional stories, misleading graphs. . ."

Not only will individuals read and not question data from a fake health story, they will share it, which "has real-world consequences," Kashyap adds. "For example, studies have found that Covid-19-related fake information reduces people’s trust in the government and in health care systems, making people less likely to use or seek out health services."

To detect false health information, researchers and public health organizations have developed three strategies to help health consumers verify health information:

• Double-check health claims with an additional search. Kashyap adds, "Never rely on a single source. Instead, enter the health claim into a reputable search engine like Google and see what trusted sources have to say. . . . Reliable fact-checking websites such as FactCheck.org and Snopes can also help root out fake information."
• Research your information source. Look at a site's "About Us" page, search for information about the author and check dates on cited research and the date of the information's publication. Kashyap writes, "Information on the internet keeps circulating for years and may not be the most accurate or relevant."
• Still don't know what's what? "Don’t share," Kashyap advises. "Forwarding unverified information can unintentionally contribute to the spread of misinformation and potentially cause harm, especially when it comes to health."

A small town saves its local newspaper with citizen-led fundraising and a 2-year search for a new owner

There's a new paper in town for La Conner, Wash.

When their small-town newspaper closed, the citizens of La Conner, Wash., didn't sit idly by and let their community become another "news desert." Instead, town activists "raised $70,000 and worked for two years to find someone to save it," reports Eric Wilkinson of KING-TV. Last week, the newly revived paper celebrated its "first day of delivery as the La Conner Community News, keeping a journalistic tradition that has connected townspeople for more than a century."

The newspaper's new owner, Kari Mar, said she bought the paper because she "saw an opportunity to make a difference at a time when facts and accuracy are critically important," Wilkinson writes. She told Wilkinson, "The pain of not having a local newspaper was pretty widely felt. There was no place to send an obituary. The town council didn't have a way to get the word out. Firefighters were having a fundraiser. They couldn't tell anybody about it. The need for the paper was palpable."

Small newspaper closures have become almost commonplace. Wilkinson reports, "Over the past 20 years, more than 3,200 newspapers have vanished, nationwide. Since 2004 Washington state has lost 20% of its local papers. . . . The situation is so dire, that a bill is being considered [in Washington] that would tax social media platforms and search engines to help fund the state's struggling newsrooms."

Meanwhile, folks in La Conner are celebrating a special win for local journalism. "The La Conner Community News already has more than 900 subscribers in a community of fewer than 1,000 people," Wilkinson writes. Mar told him, "We have almost everybody. . . .That's pretty good."

Opinion: Gleaning facts can be a 'slippery' business. Even when the truth is messy, 'good journalism offers a way.'

Adobe Stock photo

Getting the facts right may sound like Journalism 110 class, but gathering and verifying a story can be like walking on shifting sands, writes Fergus McIntosh of The New Yorker. "Journalists put more stress on accuracy than ever before. The problem is, accuracy is a slippery idea."

Like many professions, journalism has a before and after social media story. Before Americans became absorbed in Facebook, Twitch, TikTok and podcasts, they listened to and read mainstream media. But once social media siphoned huge audiences, "people stopped paying attention to the news, or decided that they didn’t believe it anymore," McIntosh adds. "This story is not unsupported. Trust in many institutions has fallen over the years, but in journalism, it has plummeted."

Examining how little journalists are trusted, makes "fake news"and the harm it does to the news-consumer trust equation that much more worrisome. "'Many Americans now register displeasure with inaccurate or unverified information on social media, and a majority now think that somebody . . .should do something about it," McIntosh explains. "Despite endemic skepticism and distraction, there is an enduring thirst for reliable information. The question is, where can it be found, and how can its purveyors make themselves heard amid the noise?"

CBS and BBC have branded themselves as singular "purveyors" of the facts using an "'only we can provide accuracy' model," McIntosh writes. "For the first Presidential debate of 2024, The New York Times tasked 29 staffers with combing through the candidates’ statements in real time." Even with aggressive fact-checking, "the provision of facts does not, in itself, engender trust. . . . What is more certain is that, from time to time, every journalist, no matter how well-meaning, gets something wrong, or misses the point."

"Because The New Yorker, like many publications, trades on its reputation for accuracy, readers can easily feel cheated, even betrayed, when an error slips in," McIntosh explains. "In such circumstances, it becomes difficult to know what is true, and, consequently, to make decisions. Good journalism offers a way through, but only if readers are willing to follow. . . . Gaining and holding that trust is hard. But failure is not inevitable. . . . Any solution must acknowledge the messiness of truth, the requirements of attention, the way we squint to see more clearly. It must tell you to say what you mean, and know that you mean it."

Quick hits: Elmo helps adults; schools sue social media; rural hearing loss; chatbot and climate deniers talk

Elmo told NBC Today reporters, "I'm really glad I asked."
(NBC News photo)

Feeling weary? You're not alone. "Thousands of people unloaded their life problems on Elmo last week after the red Muppet posed a casual question on X: 'How is everybody doing?' Not well, it seems," reports Angela Yang of NBC News. "The question opened the floodgates to a deluge of internet users eager to vent to the children's show character that had somehow signed himself up to be the internet's newest therapist." Sesame Street used Elmo's touching text to provide emotional health education for adults.

Last week, social media leaders took a grilling by a U.S. Senate committee for their role in helping sexual predators solicit and abuse children. But Congress isn't the only entity looking for social media accountability. "More than 200 school districts have now sued the major social media companies over the youth mental health crisis," reports Arianna Prothero for Education Weekly. "What started as a single lawsuit filed by the Seattle public schools one year ago has morphed into an all-out offensive against the social media platforms. . . . It is still the early stages of this legal saga, but experts say it could prove to be highly consequential for K-12 education — win, lose, or settle."

The world is learning to love cheese. (Canva photo)

Whether it's salty bites of chewy Mimolette or the stretchy delight of melted Gouda, cheese is among the few things many global citizens can agree on. "People can't get enough cheese, regardless of what continent they live on," reports Fran Howard of Dairy Herd. "Cheese has long been a staple in many countries' cuisine, and in those cultures where cheese has more recently been introduced, demand continues to rise." Sarina Sharp, an analyst with the Daily Dairy Report, told Howard: "Global cheese demand just keeps climbing."

Hearing loss is often more common in rural men.
(Photo by Jed Owens, Unsplash)

Along with stiff muscles and diminishing eyesight, aging often includes hearing loss, but rural men are more likely to experience it than others. "A new estimate shows hearing loss affects approximately 37.9 million Americans and is more common in rural areas than urban ones and in men than women," reports Devi Shastri of The Associated Press. "While the study could not explain the reason for the geographic divide, experts who treat hearing loss say there are two factors to consider: how loud noises are and how often people hear them."

Teacher by day and farmer by night, Marcia Ruff helped build her family's Circleville, Ohio, farm from the ground up. She teaches kindergarten during the week but spends most evenings and weekends working on the farm with her husband, Mark, and three children, reports Cheyenne Kramer of Farm Journal. Ruff told Kramer, "This is really the dream life I had envisioned. As a teacher, you educate children and prepare them for the world, but as a farmer, you feed the world." Kramer reports, "Ruff was the 2023 'Women in Ag' award winner. Read more about the Ruffs here.

Freepik photo

Some interesting things happen when humans discuss social issues with an AI chatbot. "In a study recently published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers at the University of Wisconsin asked people to strike up a climate conversation with a GPT-3," reports Kate Yoder of Grist. "The study analyzed the bot’s interactions with more than 3,000 people, mostly in the United States, from across the political spectrum. Roughly a quarter of them came into the study with doubts about established climate science, and they tended to come away from their chatbot conversations a little more supportive of the scientific consensus."

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."

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.”

Google and Facebook owe news publishers $12 billion a year for their content, according to a new study

Most of Meta’s profits come from its advertising
revenue, or 113.6 billion dollars in 2022.
(Image by Dima Soloman, Unsplash)

A recent State of Local News Report revealed that more than 100 newspapers are closing each year in the United States as the news industry struggles to remain profitable. But another recent study places a large share of the blame for those struggles on unfair business practices by Google and Facebook, which are blamed for making billions of dollars off of news content while sharing only a small percentage of that money with the companies producing the content.

“We’re not dying of old age, we’re dying of homicide,’” Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance trade group, told Brier Dudley of The Seattle Times.

Professors at the University of Houston and Columbia University conducted the research along with The Brattle Group, a consulting firm based in Boston. According to Dudley, the study “estimates that Google and Facebook owe U.S. news outlets at least $12 billion a year for the value news content adds to their platforms.”

Google's brand is valued at 251.75 billion dollars.
(Photo by Mitchell Lao, Unspash)

The study is just the latest in a long line of accusations that Google and Facebook are harming other business competitors, Dudley reported. "Investigations by state and federal antitrust enforcers found the platforms are unfairly exploiting their immense power. The U.S. Department of Justice’s latest case against Google alleges that publishers are getting shortchanged and have no choice but to use the monopolistic platform."

News content remains popular, but now that readers are consuming more news online, publishers find it difficult to make money that way, because Google and Facebook dominate much of the online advertising market.

“Correcting that imbalance, by giving outlets more bargaining power and a better chance to survive, is the motivation behind media-bargaining policies approved in Australia, Canada and France and under consideration in other countries,” Dudley reported. “A U.S. version, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act proposed by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, has bipartisan support and nearly passed last year.”

Coffey told Dudley: “It’s eye-opening how much revenue is generated off our content.”

New study shows what news Oklahoma residents trust and where they want to read it

Local news sources by type (OMC chart)

An academic study analyzing Oklahomans' media habits reveals that readers rely on social media for much of their news and information, and that they trust local news stories more when local residents are in charge of the news reporting.  

The study was recently released by the Oklahoma Media Center. It was "designed to fuel data-driven training from the nationally known Trusting News nonprofit to help collaborating newsrooms execute experiments aimed to increase trust and support of local news," reports OMC. 

"It's the first qualitative observational study of both news deserts and underserved metro communities statewide in Oklahoma," reports OMC. The  study was completed by Rosemary Avance, assistant professor at the School of Media and Strategic Communications at Oklahoma State University, and Allyson Shortle, associate professor of political science and co-founder of the University of Oklahoma's Community Engagement and Experiments Lab.

Some condensed study highlights:
State residents mainly rely on social media and community word of mouth for local news. "Most participants also use word of mouth to find out about local events, stay involved in community happenings, and engage with community processes," Avance and Shortle wrote. "This includes information exchanged through social media, text message, email, telephone, and in-person, face-to-face communication with people the participant actually knows."

According to the study, small-town residents express more trust in local news when a local person is in charge of it. "Respondents value free, accessible news and want to access it via social media," Avance and Shortle wrote. "For the most part, they will not pay for access, especially in the form of a subscription. As one participant explained, 'I don't want to pay for something I can get for free from the internet.'"

Based on study analysis, Avance and Shortle made five preliminary recommendations for news organizations to increase engagement with local news.

Commit to ongoing investments in local communities: Distrust of outsiders and news organizations' failure to understand a community's priorities and contextual dynamics can cause even well-funded news media ventures to fail, especially in tight-knit rural communities. News media organizations cannot simply report on a community from afar, nor can they rely on past knowledge of community dynamics.

Identify ways to continually communicate the importance of civic engagement, local politics and journalistic reporting to populations at risk of disengagement from local news: In many areas with low access to reliable news, participants reported that they did not need or want it. However, after conversing about the types of news and information that the community may be unable to access, most ultimately came to the idea that more news would benefit their communities.

Shift news communication models to prioritize social media: While it is apparent that general interest in print publications has declined, we also found that people are less enthusiastic about visiting websites to access information. Instead of clicking through a post on social media, they prefer to gather information from their social media feed itself.

Partner with area individuals and organizations: Each area we visited had one or more individuals or organizations who were considered reliable sources of information. These influencers already have social capital and can serve as vital entry points for community engagement.

Experiment with community-engaged journalism solutions: Many respondents talked about former town newspapers run by a trusted local citizen who cared enough and was embedded enough in the community to offer a reliable source of information. . . .The concept of a community paper is still relevant. Partner with local high schools, colleges, and universities to develop and deploy customized community journalism models.

When Americans no longer trust each other, the problem can be deadly. It hits rural areas the hardest, study shows

An unhealthy mistrust has spread across the U.S.
(ProMarket photo, University of Chicago)

Not being able to trust our neighbors or our country's leaders not only feels rotten, it can lead to physical illnesses. "People died in the pandemic because they didn't trust the government or their neighbors to do the right thing," reports Frank Morris of KCUR in Kansas City. "And it's not getting better. Today, distrust is making people sicker, especially where health care is fragile across giant swaths of rural America. . . . Tom Bollyky, director of the global health program at the Council on Foreign Relations, said while the worst of the pandemic has passed (for now), the United States' deadly epidemic of mistrust is raging unchecked."

Bollyky was the lead author of a large study published in The Lancet this year, "taking a fine-grain look at Covid death and infection rates across the United States and the many factors that contributed to the differences," Morris writes. Bollyky told him: "This pandemic has been less about the microbe spreading around and more about the people to which it's spreading. It's about us, and how we feel about each other, and how we hang together as a community."

Morris reports, "Covid death rates varied wildly between states. The government tracked these rates as deaths per million people. New Hampshire lost 218 residents per million to Covid during the research period. New Hampshire has the highest rate of interpersonal trust in the U.S., as measured by long-running surveys testing trust between individuals. . . . Covid-19 was almost twice as deadly in Missouri as it was in New Hampshire. Almost a dozen other states fared even worse, partly due to distrust."

The pandemic years didn't just erode interpersonal trust, it decreased Americans' faith in vaccines overall. Brock Slabach, chief operations officer at the National Rural Health Association, told Morris, "And then, to add insult to injury, we have lower rates, for example, of childhood immunization that directly comes out of the pandemic and mistrust in vaccines generally. And so we're going to see childhood diseases that we thought we'd eradicated returning."

During and continuing after the pandemic, patient-doctor trust plummeted, and that distrust could make the next pandemic worse. Slabach told Morris: "Through the pandemic, we've added this issue of mistrust in the very professionals that for centuries we've valued as an important source of information for health and healthcare. . . . If we have another health crisis, this will come right back because we've not addressed some of the underlying issues. And so we're still going to be facing higher rates of disease, higher spread of death because of this misinformation and the lack of trust that we have in those areas of our system that know what to do in response."

'We often stopped bad things from happening . . . not because we're so powerful. Information is powerful.'

Canadian Record Publisher Laurie Ezell Brown talked with Judy Woodruff of PBS. (PBS image)

By Al Cross

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

One of the best broadcast reports about the struggles of rural news media appeared Wednesday night on the PBS NewsHour, as senior correspondent Judy Woodruff used The Canadian Record of Texas as her object example. The 13½-minute story provided an update on Publisher Laurie Ezzell Brown's efforts to keep the paper alive after she stopped printing in March, but more importantly, it delivered some deep, often personal insights into the value of reliable local news.

On its website and Facebook, the Record "is a shell of what it was . . . something residents say had held them together through good times and bad," Woodruff reports. Brown told Woodruff, "We're sort of checking that pulse, I think, trying to decide what's the best way to communcate. That said, it's not a great revenue model, and I've got people working here who are not getting paychecks right now. I'm not getting a paycheck."

But as Brown keeps looking for a new owner, doing local journalism is no longer about making money, if it ever was: "Information is the key to our democracy: facts, truth, good information. And also just that conversation that we, I think, enable. It's essential. So I worry all the time about it. I want deeply to continue the life of The Canadian Record. I am just not sure how to do it."

The story doesn't mention the Record's investigative reporting that has won it awards, other than this quote from Brown: "We have sometimes helped good things happen and we often stopped bad things from happening. And it's not because we're so powerful. It's because information is powerful."

The testimonials of the newspaper's readers say, explicitly and implicitly, what has been lost. Rancher Steve Rader told Woodruff, "It's almost like a death in the family. We don't talk about it a lot. . . . They celebrated our successes and our tough times." Rader choked up as he said that, then told Woodruff that he didn't always agree with Brown's editorials, but "She always made me think. . . . We need to have other opinions. That's our strength of America. Thank God for that."

City Council Member Wendie Cook noted that Canadian, population 2,300, is about to have a referendum on a bond issue, and "I have a concern about who is telling the critical pieces of information. . . . Without The Canadian Record, I fear that our voter information is coming from our stuffed mailboxes, from candidates or from PACs, who by their very nature are providing biased material."

Water-well driller John Julian put the lie to the notion that in a county of 3,400 people, everyone knows everyone else: "If there's a name pops up on the ballot for one of the elections, and you don't know them, you really don't have a means of finding out. . . . I don't like to be in that position. If I make a vote, I want it to be an informed, educated vote." He said that Hemphill County, without the Record, "It's just got kind of a hole in it, kind of a vacancy right now."

Woodruff got national perspective from Johanna Dunaway, director of the Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship at Syracuse University, who told her, "Local news is sort of what reminds people what they have in common, both their challenges and their shared identities, their shared culture, their shared community."

Brown said at last month's National Summit on Journalism in Rural America that she doesn't really like Facebook, but "We've gotten more and more requests from businesses to advertise, to put ads on our web page and Facebook page, because they see the traffic it's getting," and the limited publication is filling a need: "Things happen. There have been storms here and tornadoes and events like that that you just can't ignore. They're happening. We need to cover them. People look to us for information."

The Record published its annual high-school graduation edition, with photos of graduates, as a PDF. But news comes in "shorter stories, less artfully written, with sparser detail," Brown said. "Our reach grows daily and kind of startlingly, but we turn out news with less substance and with far less satisfaction." She said residents are "getting the essential news. What they're not getting is the heart and soul of a newspaper, and they miss it, and I don't know how to fill that void right now." Brown said at the June 7 summit that she had written only one online-only editorial, soon after she stopped printing, and "I have some things to say. We also find that we're pretty busy just cobbling together the news right now." For more on the Record, click here.

Helping kids disconnect from social media means setting limits collaboratively; parents need to stick to a plan

Shutterstock image via Brookings Institution

When approaching your children about social-media limitations, the best place to plant your parental flag is to begin by asking for their own reduction ideas, advises Catherine Pearson of The New York Times. The American Academy of Pediatrics offers a free family media plan tool, which is a good conversation starter. Dr. Nina Vasan, founder of Brainstorm, Stanford University's lab for mental health innovation, "has collaborated on a social media safety plan with her colleagues. . . . The plan emphasizes the importance of making such decisions collaboratively."

Begin with discussing boundaries and ask your child what feels realistic. "Maybe your teen feels OK with paring down the number of platforms they use. Or perhaps your children are more open to the idea of establishing a maximum amount of time they're allowed to spend every day on social media platforms or screens altogether," Pearson writes."Installing apps that allow parents to block certain websites and set time limits on devices can help you enforce these boundaries, according to the Stanford social-media safety plan."

Suggesting a screen or social-media "vacation" can help a chiled deal with fear of missing out, especially if their tech time is starting to look obsessive. Pearson explains, "If your child is showing signs of problematic social media use, you may consider instituting a complete break to recalibrate your child's behavior. For some teens, that recalibration might take a few weeks; for others, it might take a few months, Dr. Vasan said." Taking a major break might mean collaborating with other parents and having a group of teens 'take a break' together. While to succeed, a family media plan needs input from teens; parents need to anticipate roadblocks and stick to their position. Dr. Vasan told Pearson: "Tell [your teen] they need to cut down, but they can choose how they will cut down."

Jean Twenge, a psychologist who has studied the effects of social media on teenagers' mental health, advised that parents "guard" sleeping time. Pearson writes, "Parents should explain to their children why smartphones cannot be in the bedroom, Dr. Twenge said. . . . She recommends sticking with a consistent strategy, like having a charging station where all family members — adults included — keep their phone overnight."

The Times article focuses on teenagers, but a 2021 survey by Common Sense Media found that nearly 40% of U.S. children aged 8 to 12  use social media," note Sophia Espinoza, Charlotte Wright and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek for the Brookings Institution. "Because the average child in the U.S. has a smartphone by age 10, it is not surprising that children in primary school are already experimenting with social media content. A survey carried out by the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital reports that even children as young as 7 are themselves in social media apps."

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently issued an extraordinary public warning about the risks that social media may pose to young people's mental health and well-being. Despite the warning, researchers and teenagers say that social media can be a "lifeline," providing a sense of identity and belonging for LGBTQ youth. The devil is in the data: Parents, scientists and the surgeon general are worried. But there is little research to prove that social media is harmful — or to indicate which apps or features are problematic. More research is needed, especially with pre-teens, the Brookings writers say.

New to the trade, Jeremy Gulban has more former Gannett papers than anyone; he says success is up to communities

By Al Cross

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

The owner of dozens of "ghost newspapers" bought from Gannett Co. says he is trying to revive them by returning editorial decision-making to local people while still taking advantage of the economies of scale that have led to consolidation of newspaper ownership. But he says his new chain's fate is not in its own hands.

"The success or failure of these rural newspapers is on the local people," CherryRoad Media CEO Jeremy Gulban said Friday at the National Summit on Journalism in Rural America, sponsored by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, publisher of The Rural Blog. His remark fit the Summit's research question: "How do rural communities sustain local journalism that supports democracy?"

One example of a community sustaining rural journalism was the first paper Gulban started, the Rainy Lake Gazette in International Falls, where the paper had closed, and he reached out to the local Chamber of Commerce because he had recently bought his first paper in Grand Marais, also in northern Minnesota. "They got a whole bunch of different stakeholders in town, and we all met, and it was really kind of an amazing meeting for me, because I had never seen that kind of enthusiasm, that kind of spirit, to solve a problem," Gulban said. Three weeks later, they had a paper. "People really embraced it," he said. "We quickly got to more subscribers than, you know, the old paper had."

CherryRoad Media map, adapted by The Rural Blog

That brought the information-technology entrepreneur to the attention of the nation's biggest newspaper company, which is trying to unload small papers that add little, if anything, to its bottom line. "Gannett was looking for an organization that was strong enough technically to be able to do these migrations that would have to happen, and probably blissfully ignorant enough to take on this challenge of selling their worst papers, basically. So we took the leap." Now his company, less than three years old, has 77 papers in 17 states, more than 50 of them former Gannett papers, and many of them "ghost newspapers," he said.

Making the papers substantial and sustainable began with returning control to local people. "When we took over, the editors would say, ‘We send in a few articles, and we don't see the paper until it winds up coming to the office after it's printed.’ . . . I think the biggest thing that that happened is they eliminated all the local publishers, so there is no one ... you can call to talk about the paper. There's literally no one. Everything flows up in these vertical silos, which leads to a lack of integration, a lack of working together. And, as you all know, you can't have your salespeople off doing one thing and editorial people doing another. There's got to be that collaboration which, you know, really doesn't exist. . . . If people want to place an ad. They'll call an 800 number, and they'll go online and do it. And we all know in small towns that won't happen."

The downward spiral of news, ads and circulation has left ghost papers with two kinds of subscribers and regular 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."

That caused most retail advertising to vanish, and "dependence on legal [ads] and obituaries," Gulban said. "When we looked at at these financials, the revenue from obits, legal and classified, was nearly double the display advertising in a lot of cases, you know, which is totally upside down. . . . 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, right? The the less relevant it is. So. This is kind of the cycle that we found most of these papers to be in."

In addition to returning editorial control, "We tried to take out all of the regional or national content that was being put in there primarily as filler," Gulban said. "We still have some national content in some of the more-than-once-a-week frequencies. But anything weekly really has nothing but local content in it. We invested more in editorial positions. . . . We've actually been able to find someone in every one of those markets which has not been easy."

Jeremy Gulban

On the business side, "We've really tried to make sure we have a local ad rep in every market, with some success," he said. "That's not an easy position to hire for, particularly if you've got a tough product that you're trying to sell into. So we've had a hard time getting people. . . . Our biggest source of talent, believe it or not, is just people who used to work at the paper, and see that it's improved and want to come back." As staffs are rebuilt, Gulban said, "some people are going to step up and be leaders in this. And some people aren't. And so there's a direct correlation between the leadership ability of the local usually editor, sometimes the salesperson."

But local has its limits. Local ad and page designers are "a luxury that we can't afford," Gulban said. "And we've built our own circulation platform. That's entirely web-based so that we can have people in different locations serve circulation needs across markets." All printing is outsourced, but he said the company might build a plant because so many are closing: "We do believe that a printed product has to be part of the long-term solution" to the problems of local papers.

One way to define a ghost newspaper is that it has no local office open to the public, or is open only a few hours a week: "That just leads to no community goodwill efforts, no sponsoring events, no joining the Rotary Club, none of that," Gulban said. "That's so essential in a small-town newspaper." But not so essential that he has offices in some small markets. In Stephenville, Texas, rent was too high, so "We're trying to pioneer like a shared office, you know, with a Chamber of Commerce, maybe even a local restaurant, you know, we're open for lunch. Three days a week we go in there, the editor's there, the circulation person's there, you can go meet with them. We're trying to be as creative as possible just to keep that physical real estate cost down." The Google listing for the Stephenville Empire-Tribune says it's "temporarily closed."

Sites of two of the Texas papers discussed (Google map)

Just east of Stephenville on US 67 south of Fort Worth, the Glen Rose Reporter serves a town of 900 people with 320 print subscribers, "which was under 200 when we took over, and 108 digital subscribers, which was zero because there was no paywall," Gulban said. "This paper was absolutely horrible. It had literally nothing in it. When we took over, two really dedicated freelancers stepped up and said, 'We will make this paper be successful, and so they produce all the content between the two of them. They take it upon themselves to go around town, try to get people to advertise, try to drive additional subscribers. . . . This is so much better of a paper than it was a year ago, and the results show. And while those numbers are small, in percentage-increase terms, they're really huge. . . . Truthfully, if we didn't take this paper over, it wouldn't be there anymore, because the markets, too small for anybody to really be interested in doing anything here."

Gulban's other example was the Hamburg Reporter, in Iowa's southeast corner. Fremont County "had a catastrophic flood in 2019 and basically half the town's population left, so the population is now 890. We have 132 print subscribers and two digital, but we just put the paywall up two weeks ago," Gulban said. But its ad revenue averages $9,200 a month, and "this is the best revenue per population of anything in our whole organization." The paper's mothership is the Nebraska City News-Press, across the Missouri River; the one person "who was basically doing everything" died last month, "so we have to figure out how to handle that. But the model here still holds. . . . We have one person who is about town, knows everybody, is able to do a lot of different things," Gulban said. Our vision, which is a little bit out there, is: If you want to advertise in Hamburg, Iowa, we're the place you should be doing it through, not through Facebook, not through any other technical solution. Because we know Hamburg, Iowa. . . . We want to leverage our local staffs and their credibility to drive revenue in this new digital world."

And America's newest newspaper-chain owner had one broad thing to say about consolidation of newspaper ownership: "I believe strongly in distributed ownership of the news, because I don't think the country is founded on the idea that three or four groups or people would control all the information. The vision was thousands of individual people controlling the flow of information."

Gulban was the concluding speaker at the Summit's morning session. The video is here.

This story has been edited to give the correct genesis of Gulban's paper in International Falls.

Taos News, N'West Iowa Review, Antelope County News of Nebraska are top winners in NNA news-editorial contest

Current print edition of the Taos News

The Taos News of New Mexico, the N'West Iowa Review of Sheldon and the Antelope County News of Nebraska were among winners of awards for general editorial excellence in the National Newspaper Association Foundation's annual Better Newspaper Contest, announced Monday.

The Taos News won among weeklies with circulations of 6,000 to 9,999. The Review won the 3,000-5,999 class, and the Antelope County News won among those with circulation under 3,000. The Park Cities People of Dallas won the 10,000-and-up class and the Sioux City Journal won the daily class. The Wyoming Tribune Eagle of Cheyenne won second place among dailies. Other second placers were the Idaho Mountain Express of Ketchum, 10,000 and up; the Jackson Hole News & Guide of Jackson, Wyo., 6,000-9,999; The Highlands Current of Cold Spring, N,Y. (a reader-funded nonprofit), 3,000-5,999; and the News Letter Journal of Newcastle, Wyo., under 3,000.

The Highlands Current won NNA''s Civic-Community Service Award for the second year in a row, for a five-part series on the history of African Americans in the Hudson Highlands; the Taos News was runner-up.

The Tribune Eagle won first place among dailies for best local-government reporting. Weekly winners were Preston Hollow People of Dallas, 15,000 and up; the News & Guide, 6,000-14,999; The Standard Banner of Jefferson City, Tenn., 4,000-5,999; The Ark of Tiburon, Calif., which won first, second and third places in the 2,000-3,999 class; and the Southwest Ledger of Elgin, Okla., under 2,000.

The Uvalde Leader-News of Texas won Best Editorial among 2,000-3,999-circulation weeklies, for "Delay may be darkest hour," about law-enforcement officers' delay in dealing with the shooter who killed 19 children at Robb Elementary School last May. Other weekly editorial first places were The Examiner of Beaumont, Texas, 10,000-14,999; the Taos News, 6,000-9,999; the Review, 4,000-5,999; and the Marietta Monitor of Oklahoma, under 2,000.

The Wyoming Truth of Laramie won among dailies for best investigative or in-depth story or series. Weekly winners were The Maine Monitor, 10,000 circ. and up; The Highlands Current, 3,000-9,999; and the Manchester Cricket of Massachusetts, under 3,000.

The Taos News was judged to have the best website. The News & Guide won first place in social-media journalism, and the Casa Grade Dispatch of Arizona was second. The Antelope County News won first prize for best use of social media for breaking news, and the Cedar County News of Hartington, Neb., was second.

The winners will be recognized at a ceremony Sept. 30 during NNA’s annual convention in Washington, D.C. Registration to to attend the awards is here. NNA said the contest received 1,312 entries.

DEA chief says U.S. needs laws to keep social-media platforms from being used to promote and sell fentanyl

CDC graph shows large increases in deaths from fentanyl; click on it to enlarge.

The U.S. needs laws to force social-media companies to keep their platforms from being used to promote and sell fentanyl, DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said on NBC's “Meet The Press” Sunday, in a program that was devoted entirely to the drug and the problems it is causing, such as overdoses.

“The border’s an important part of this conversation because most of the fentanyl that we see coming into the United States is coming in through the southwest border,” Milgram said, but “Social media is also a vital part of the conversation. It is what I call the last mile. Because what the cartels need – they’re selling the deadliest poison we’ve ever seen – they need that to … be able to expand and sell more, they need to be able to reach people at massive rates. And that’s what social media’s doing,” The Daily Wire reports.

Host Chuck Todd asked Milgram asked if social-media companies were cooperating with federal law enforcement in trying to fix the problem. She said, “We have not, until recently, gotten nearly as much cooperation as we need. . . . The deputy attorney general convened all of us in April of this year and made it very clear, number one, that the companies have to comply with their own terms of service, which say, ‘This is illegal. You cannot be selling fake pills. You cannot be selling drugs on social media websites’.”

Milgam also said law enforcement needs to be able to get information from social-media companies. Asked if there was something the DEA does not have that Congress could give them that would help them address the issue, she said, “So we talk a lot with Congress about social media. We talk a lot about the need for these platforms – essentially, one of the main ways we see Americans dying right now is through social media, the purchase of pills, fake pills on social media. So, again, if we’re after, how do we stop 110,000 Americans from dying?” She said Congress was “a place to start.”

News-media roundup: Canada passes tech-news bill; fact-checking levels off; young people forsake news websites . . .

The Parliament of Canada has passed a bill to "require Google and Meta to pay media outlets for news content that they share or otherwise repurpose on their platforms," The Associated Press reports. The Senate approved Bill C-18 "amid a standoff between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government and Silicon Valley tech giants," AP reports. "Meta confirmed Thursday that it plans to comply with the bill by ending news availability on Facebook and Instagram for its Canadian users, as it had previously suggested. Meta would not offer details about the timeline for that move, but said it will pull local news from its site before the Online News Act takes effect," six months after it is signed by the governor-general, Canada's head of state.

•

"Fact-checking’s growth seems to have leveled off," reports the Duke Reporters' Lab.  Mark Stencel, Erica Ryan and Joel Luther counted 417 fact-checking news outlets around the world, down from a peak of 424 in 2022.

•

Young people are abandoning news websites in favor of social media and Tik Tok, reports Nic Newman of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The institute's report has "evidence that users of TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat tend to pay more attention to celebrities and social media influencers than they do to journalists or media companies when it comes to news topics," Newman writes.

•

The Augusta Press, an online news outlet, has won the 2023 Freedom of Information Award from the Georgia Press Association for pressing its case against the Richmond County sheriff, who won't communicate with it because he dislikes its opinion writer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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