A look at how a local newspaper in Pennsylvania covered Trump's rally and the attempted assassination

When Donald Trump went to Butler to deliver his election message to the state's western supporters, journalists from the local newspaper, the Butler Eagle, were prepared to cover a political rally, but they ended up reporting on a shocking attempted assassination.

Covering a national event with a small newspaper's resources is a tall order for any newsgroup, and journalists at The Associated Press wondered how the Eagle would manage the reporting and scrutiny. To discover how it all went down at the Eagle, AP photographer Matt Slocum, media reporter David Bauder and video journalist Joe Frederick traveled to Butler to interview the paper's journalists, managers and staff. AP's perspective looks at a tragic event in a small town through the eyes of the local newspaper working to cover it. 

When AP explored the Eagle's newsroom responses, another story came to light. "It revealed not only the news organization’s professionalism but the emotional toll the story was taking on young staffers," AP reports. "One was moved to tears as she recounted how the crowd turned on her after the shooting. But, she said, the story taught her that in being a journalist, she had made the right choice."

AP's approach "enabled them to interlock strong human stories and look at the American local news industry as a whole. Particularly noteworthy was how this story managed the 'ladder of abstraction' and represented a strong crossover story that could appeal to multiple audiences — those looking for political news, local news, media news and simply a human story about the faces behind the journalism," AP reports. "The story offered a compelling on-the-ground tale that also linked it up with the struggles that newspapers and local news are having."

To dig into this coverage, watch the video here.

Tyler Childers and Silas House break new ground, telling an Appalachian LGBTQ+ love story with song and video

Tyler Childers performs at the Railbird Music
Festival in Lexington, Ky. (Photo by Silas Walker, Herald-Leader)

Appalachian LGBTQ+ love stories are just as real as other love stories, and Tyler Childers' "In Your Love" song and video, a collaboration with Silas House, tells that story, reports Monica Kast of the Lexington Herald-Leader. "Actors Colton Haynes and James Scully play two men in rural Appalachia who meet and fall in love while working as coal miners in the 1950s." Despite hostility from other miners and community members, the couple stays together, farming and loving one another. House posted on Instagram, "To our knowledge, it is the first-ever country music video with a gay storyline to be released by a major label."

Silas House (Berea College photo)

Childers and House, both Kentuckians, "wanted to tell a love story set in Appalachia. Childers pitched the idea for the music video to House and asked him to work on developing the story. Jason Kyle Howard, House's husband, wrote and provided creative direction for the video. He came up with the idea for the two main characters to be coal miners," Kast writes. "There are personal touches in the video, too. House, Howard and Childers used family photographs as inspiration for outfits in the video, making sure they were true to the period but also true to what people really wore. The cast is also made up of Appalachians and Kentuckians who represented the region."

House told Kast, "There are all kinds of different people in Appalachia and rural America, and they very rarely see themselves in the media, in film or TV, or especially in country music videos. . . . It's a gay love story, yes, but more than that, it's a love story. It's about gay people who love where they're from, and they don't want to leave it. Those men could have left not only the coal mines but they could have left the area. They chose to stay. A whole lot of people have done that, despite discrimination, because they love where they're from."

"At a time when Kentucky has seen an increase in anti-LGBTQ legislation and sentiments, House said he hopes the video will be 'a balm' for people who are hurting," Kast reports. House told Kast: "We just wanted to tell a human story that is rarely seen. Tyler Childers is one of the great storytellers of our time, especially in rural stories. This is another rural story that needs to be seen." Kast adds that Childers' album "Rustin' In the Rain" will be released Sept. 8."

Football documentary latest effort by 'This Place', a series of reports about what unites and divides a rural Va. county

Screenshot; for the 7:45 documentary, click here.

A video documentary about the local high school's football season is the latest installment in an innovative series of reports by one of Virginia's smallest rural newspapers, bolstered by a local foundation that raises and provides money for special reporting projects.

"How 8-man Football United Rappahannock County" tells how going to a smaller team and a smaller league "provided a giant lift to the school and helped unite the community around a single cause, the Rappahannock News reports. "The team went 6-5 in the Panthers’ best-ever football season, despite a disappointing ending last week with a 52-6 loss to Virginia Episcopal School in the first round playoffs. But the season’s Hollywood-movie highlight came Oct. 14 at RCHS’ Homecoming contest against Chincoteague — with a last-second, come-from-behind 36-33 win before a record crowd at Panther Stadium."

The 7-minute, 45-second documentary was financed by Foothills Forum, the foundation that raises as much as $200,000 for journalism in the county of about 7,400 people. It is part of “This Place,” a series that explores “”what divides us — and unites us — in Rappahannock County,” the News explains. “'This Place' is grounded in months of research by a team of Rappahannock News reporters and Foothills Forum volunteers who conducted interviews with dozens of county residents of diverse political, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, most of whom said there has been an increase in divisiveness and conflict in recent years.

“This documentary was made by the Rappahannock-based team of award-winning photographer Luke Christopher and editor-composer Roger Piantadosi, a former Rappahannock News editor. Other videos in the series include the Cancer Is Messy event at Eldon Farms benefiting families who endure childhood cancer, and the Amissville parade and carnival that returned in August after a two-year pandemic-pause.”

How a local radio station and newspaper, and The New York Times, enabled prosecution of the killers of Ahmaud Arbery

The convictions of three white men for last year's murder of Ahmad Arbery, a Black man in coastal Georgia, probably wouldn't have happened unless a lawyer for defendant Greg McMichael, trying to quash rumors about the killing, hadn't taken a cellphone video of it to local radio station WGIG.

"Instead, the video published online by the radio station surfaced questions nationwide about racial profiling and the lack of criminal charges," Meryl Kornfield reports for The Washington Post, recounting early reporting by the Brunswick News, Georgia Public Broadcasting and WSB-TV. 

University of Maryland sociology professor Rashawn Ray told Kornfield, "I think part of what the McMichaels were trying to leverage was what their defense attorneys were trying to allege: That the mere presence, the mere physical body of Ahmaud Arbery as a Black person just running through the street, should pose a big enough threat to justify their use of force."

Brunswick News reporter Larry Hobbs told Kornfield that he had doubts about the incident from the start, and "said police wouldn’t answer his questions or even tell him Arbery’s name, which he discovered by calling the coroner. He published four stories before he obtained the police report, based almost entirely on an interview with Greg McMichael, who said he told his son to grab his gun when he saw a Black man running. . . . Prosecutors were also not forthcoming."

"Jackie Johnson, the Brunswick district attorney who was later indicted over her handling of the investigation and was voted out of office," gave the case to Waycross DA George Barnhill, who justified the shooting as a lawful "citizen’s arrest" but told Hobbs he was still investigating, Kornfield reports.

“The main thing I did was just not let go of it,” Hobbs said. “I didn’t do any great writing. I didn’t do any investigative reporting. I’m a small-town newspaper. We don’t really have time to invest. I come in every day and there’s an empty newspaper I have to do my part to fill up.”

Kornfield writes, "The New York Times reported reported on the shooting, bringing national exposure and emerging details of the video that would later be released. Still, Hobbs has been credited for his dogged reporting, as he stayed on the case, covering the trial every day until he wrote Wednesday’s story of the conviction."

Hobbs told Kornfield, “In times of reckoning, we’ve come up wanting so many times, especially people from my demographic. The South got it right today.”

Quick hits: Farmer's 5-year-old YouTube channel nears 1 million subscribers; how to get landowner permission to hunt

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 heather.chapman@uky.edu.

Etiquette, common sense, and the Golden Rule all play a role in the neighborly art of requesting permission to hunt on someone else's land. Read more here.

In some rural communities, social workers join with law enforcement to provide support for crisis calls that aren't related to criminal activity. Read more here.

Some towns, counties and states have interesting, even unique, ways to decide tied elections. In Pennsylvania, which calls for casting lots, a rural town will decide the winner of its deadlocked mayoral race by drawing numbered marbles from an antique jug that's been there for decades. How does your local government deal with ties? Read more here.

A 37-year-old farmer from western Minnesota started up a YouTube channel five years ago to try to give Americans a glimpse into everyday rural life. Now he has more than 850,000 subscribers, and he says about half are non-farmers. Read more here.

Agriculture Department data from 2019 has some interesting food for thought, one columnist writes. Texas has the most farmers and farmland of any state, with 247,000 farms and ranches covering 126 million acres. But its $5.5 billion yield puts it in second place to California, which had $10.9 billion in net farm income from only 69,000 farms. Alaska's farms collectively netted a $5.5 million loss, the only state to end up in the red. And though Alaska is the largest state, it has the fewest farms: 1,050, even fewer than the smallest state, Rhode Island, which has 1,100. Read more here.

An opinion article discusses hillbilly stereotypes in pop culture, and why they're outdated and lazy. Read more here.

Quick hits: Tips for using drones in journalism; book shows how urban-based news leaves rural residents behind

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 heather.chapman@uky.edu.

Most journalists for nationwide publications work in large cities and produce news with similar audiences in mind. Media scholar Nikki Usher writes about how that alienates rural audiences in her new book News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism (Columbia University Press, $30). Read more here.

Why the South is the epicenter of anti-abortion sentiment. Read more here.

Housing was already scarce in the Lake Tahoe-area town of Truckee, California; the pandemic-driven remote worker boom made it worse. Read more here.

Here's some tips on using drones for multimedia journalism. Read more here.

Noted Appalachian author Gurney Norman sat down for a chat with Dee Davis of The Daily Yonder after learning that a Kentucky town is naming a new neighborhood after him. Read more here.

A "cookie cutter" nationwide plan to reach Democratic voters won't help rural Democrats, writes a rural political strategist. Read more here.

New Agriculture Department market reports could help cattle producers make more money. Read more here.

For the first time, the average pay for supermarket and restaurant workers nationwide tops $15 an hour, but not everywhere. As competition for workers heats up, large retailers and other major employers are boosting their starting wages. That could help rural employees, where wages tend to be lower, but could hurt smaller local competitors who will feel obliged to follow suit. Read more here.

A soon-to-be-released documentary tells the story of hunger in rural Wisconsin during the first year of the pandemic through the eyes and voices of five rural food pantry directors. Read more here.

News photographers' group will teach police, other first responders about journalists' right to record them at work

The National Press Photographers Association will instruct police, other first responders and journalists across the country about the right to record police and other officials carrying out their public duties. “At this moment in history it is crucial that the press be allowed to perform its obligation to better inform the public,” NPPA President Katie Schoolov said in a press release.

The program is funded by a three-year, $150,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and a one-year matching grant of $50,000 from the Press Freedom Defense Fund of First Look Media. It builds on an earlier grant from the Society of Professional Journalists.

   
Knight Foundation journalism director Paul Cheung said, “The laws that protect the rights of journalists and other citizens to record public police work are clear, but they aren’t universally known. The NPPA training will help visual journalists do their jobs safely and without interference, while protecting the public’s right to know.”

The annual grant will allow NPPA General Counsel Mickey Osterreicher to provide education and training about photographers’ rights to law-enforcement agencies and journalists. He said it  “will ensure the continuation of NPPA’s critical work that raises awareness of First Amendment rights, so that journalists can continue to provide essential information to their communities, enabling informed choices in support of our democracy.”