Eric Meyer and Marion County Record, Kansas paper raided by police chief it was investigating, win Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism

Eric Meyer with his weekly newspaper

Eric Meyer and the staff of the Marion County Record in Marion, Kansas, are the winners of the 2024 Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism, presented by the Institute for Rural Journalism at the University of Kentucky.

Meyer and his weekly newspaper have become a touchstone for freedom of the press since August 2023, when local police raided his office and his home and confiscated computers, reporters’ notes and cell phones, ostensibly investigating charges of identity theft and illegal use of a computer. It didn’t take long for some motives to be apparent: city officials’ desire to punish the newspaper for its investigation of the police chief’s questionable employment background and its reporting on the mayor’s alleged ethics violations and other activities. A few weeks later, the chief was suspended, and three days later, he resigned.

Five days after the raid, the county attorney withdrew the warrants signed by a local judge, saying they were “legally insufficient,” and the confiscated items were returned. But in the meantime, Meyer’s 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer, collapsed and died after telling journalists that she was upset and stressed by the raid of her home and the paper where she had worked for 50 years. She said, “These are Hitler tactics, and something has to be done.”

The raid, perhaps unprecedented, sparked international outrage at a time when local newspapers are struggling. Eric Meyer said soon after the raid, “If we don’t fight back, and we don’t win in fighting back, it’s going to silence everybody.” Since then, he and his staff have continued to show the courage, tenacity and integrity often required to deliver good journalism in rural areas. The Record “is uncommonly aggressive for its size,” The New York Times reported. “Meyer said that the newspaper, which has seven employees, has stoked the ire of some local leaders for its vigorous reporting on Marion County officials.”

That profile fits those of other Gish Award winners, including the first winners and the award’s namesakes: Tom and Pat Gish, who published The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Kentucky, for more than 50 years. Their son and successor, Ben Gish, is on the award selection committee. He said of Meyer, “Given today’s political climate, what happened to him in Kansas almost certainly will happen at some other small-town paper when another unfit person wins that county's sheriff’s race.”

Meyer’s family bought the Marion County Record in 1998 to keep it from being sold to a chain. His father, Editor Bill Meyer, had worked there since 1948, and won the Eugene Cervi Award of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors in 2002. Eric Meyer returned to his hometown to run the paper during the Covid-19 pandemic after working as a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal and teaching journalism at the University of Illinois.

"Eric Meyer and other journalists at the Marion County Record covered their community with courage, tenacity and integrity long before a shocking police raid brought them international attention,” said Benjy Hamm, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism. “But the raid and its aftermath revealed to a much larger audience that the Marion County Record could not be intimidated, denied or defeated in its pursuit of the truth."

Meyer will receive the Gish Award Oct. 10 in Lexington, Ky., at the annual Al Smith Awards Dinner of the Institute for Rural Journalism. The keynote speaker will be Campbell Robertson, who covers Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia for The New York Times and is based in its Washington Bureau. For updates see RuralJournalism.org.

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

Kansas paper publishes on schedule despite police seizure of computers etc., which attorney and judge get returned

Marion County Record Publisher Eric Meyer talked with journalists after his weekly newspaper hit the stands Wednesday. The subhead reads "but not silenced". (Kansas Reflector photo by Sherman Smith; for a larger version, click on it.)

Screenshot of MarionCountyRecord.com home page

The Marion County Record published its regular weekly edition today, after an all-nighter, and won another victory when the county attorney and a judge told local police who had seized the Kansas newspaper's computers and other materials last Friday to return them.

“I have come to the conclusion that insufficient evidence exists to establish a legally sufficient nexus between this alleged crime and the places searched and the items seized,” said County Attorney Joel Ensley, who had sought the search warrants. “I have submitted a proposed order asking the court to release the evidence seized. I have asked local law enforcement to return the material seized to the owners of the property.” District Judge Ben Sexton signed the order Wednesday morning, and the property was returned to the paper. Publisher Eric Meyer said it would undergo forensic examination "to find out whether law enforcement had accessed or reviewed any of their records."

Ensley said the Kansas Bureau of Investigation would make a report to him, after which he would decide if there was evidence “to support a charge for any offense.” The KBI said it would continue its work without examining any evidence seized last Friday, The Associated Press reports. Ensley also said he would ask the county District Court to release the affidavit that was the basis for the warrants signed by Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, reports Sherman Smith of the Kansas Reflector.

Viar signed the warrants "under the pretense that [Gideon] Cody, the police chief, had reason to believe a newspaper reporter committed identity theft and unlawful use of a computer," Smith reports. "It wasn’t clear what evidence would support such a search warrant, or if Cody and Viar understood the significance of raiding a newsroom." Katherine Jacobsen, program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said at the newspaper office that "She wasn’t aware of any other example of police raiding a newsroom in United States history," the Reflector reports.

The Record has been investigating Cody's employment history, but has not published a story. Meyer told Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket, a Substack newsletter, "The allegations—including the identities of who made the allegations—were on one of the computers that got seized. I may be paranoid that this has anything to do with it, but when people come and seize your computer, you tend to be a little paranoid."

Though his paper was investigating Cody, Meyer told his department about another then-unpublished investigation, of a local restaurateur, that was prompted by a tip Meyer deemed suspicious. When he told the police, they told the restaurateur, who then complained about the paper at a city council meeting, prompting the Record to publish a story. The warrant mentioned the restaurateur and possible identity theft and unlawful use of a computer. Meyer said the paper merely used a state website to get public information.

The day after police raided his office and the home he shared with his 98-year-old mother, she collapsed and died, and Meyer blamed her death on the raids. Joan Meyer had worked 50 years at the paper, where her husband was an award-winning editor for its previous owner and her son was her co-owner for 25 years. Her funeral will be held Saturday.

"Meyer said his mother would be pleased by the outpouring of support the newspaper has received in recent days," Smith reports. "That includes 2,000 new subscriptions for a newspaper that previously had a circulation of about 4,000." Navy veteran Dennis Calvert "drove from Wichita to purchase a six-month subscription" and told Smith, “What the P.D. did here, in my opinion, from what I know, they are ****ing out of line,” Calvert said. “They are totally off the ****ing board. They’ve lost their morals, man. . . . In my opinion, right now, the police chief should be sitting over here in the jail.”

Kansas case is an inflection point for rural newspapers

By Al Cross

Director emeritus, Institute for Rural Journalism, University of Kentucky  

After local police raided the office of the Marion County Record and the home of its owners, creating a national outcry that was entirely justified, the question was asked in newspaper offices around the country, and sometimes in their pages: “Could this happen here?”

It’s more likely in some places than others, depending on the nature of the paper, the town, its leaders and the police.

Publisher Eric Meyer talks with journalists after getting his weekly
newspaper out despite police confiscation of most of its computers.

In the Record’s case, the accountability journalism that Publisher Eric Meyer practiced and taught in Milwaukee and Illinois hasn’t gone down well with some powerful people in his hometown of Marion, Kansas, since he returned two years ago.

But eight years ago, such a raid would have been hard to imagine, even in towns where the newspaper’s relations with police and elected officials are poor.

What has happened in the last eight years? For one thing, social media have become the primary source of information for Americans, and a presidential candidate – who was president for four of those years – has used social and other media to cast all news media as “the enemy of the people.”

Social media are often more compelling and entertaining than the local news reported by community newspapers, so they have shifted Americans’ attention more in the direction of national events and issues. That, and the declining audiences of local news media, have reduced citizens’ familiarity with their local media and blurred the distinctions between local and national media.

All that gives comfort and perhaps license to the adversaries of local news media, like the Marion police chief whose past the Record was investigating but had not reported at the time of the raid. Using some trumped-up assertions and assumptions, he got a low-level magistrate from another county to sign search warrants.

The day after the raid, Meyer’s 98-year-old mother, who worked at the weekly for 50 years, collapsed and died, and her son blamed it on the police.

Surely no one wished ill, much less death, to Joan Meyer. But the Record’s case is not a one-off; in March some law-enforcement officials in next-door Oklahoma said they would like to kill the weekly McCurtain Gazette reporter who had been investigating them.

Again, it’s hard to imagine such a conversation happening eight years ago. The corrosion and division of our national public life has leached into our small towns, and it seems that in some of those places, the more a community newspaper tries to fulfill its role completely, the more it is seen as an enemy – if not of the people, of their leaders.

It’s a maxim of rural journalism that it’s more difficult to do hard-nosed accountability journalism in rural places. Resources are fewer, and the folks you try to hold accountable are your neighbors. If they have economic or political power, that can make accountability journalism more difficult, and editorial timidity is common in community papers.

That’s a matter of degree, to be sure. America has rural newspapers that cover courthouses and city halls like they were state or national capitols, and have strong editorial pages; at the other end of the spectrum it has those that barely cover the regular meetings of public agencies and serve as public-relations vehicles for elected officials.

That’s a wide spectrum, and I fear that its median point is moving in the latter direction, for several reasons.

The shrinkage of newspapers’ audiences and revenue have made them less independent, less willing to risk economic or other harm. The polarization of national politics has reached the local level, making some excellent rural editors think twice or pull their punches when looking beyond the county line, or stop publishing letters and commentaries about non-local issues because they are so divisive. (You can read about those trends in “The Trump Effect on Rural Communities and their Newspapers,” a chapter I wrote for The Future of the Presidency, Journalism and Democracy, published last year by Routledge.)

The raid on the Record is an inflection point on that spectrum. Will it mainly stiffen the backbones of rural newspapers, prompting rededication to accountability journalism? Or will more worry that making waves isn’t good for a business that needs no more risks?

Community journalism is more than a business; it is an essential public service, envisioned by our nation’s founders when they wrote the First Amendment. Many Americans still understand that, but not enough, partly because they’re no longer engaged with it. Rebuilding that audience requires, in part, engaging with them on the social-media platforms where they have gone – and explaining the difference in social media and news media.

Here’s my freshly revised elevator speech on that point: News media pay for journalism, which practices a discipline of verification: We emphasize facts, and we tell you how we got them. Social media emphasize opinion, and have no discipline or verification. Which should you trust?

And when we explain accountability journalism, news media need to make clear that they are accountable, too. And that watchdogs sometimes bark when they shouldn’t – but if a watchdog doesn’t sometimes engage in extraneous barking, it does not serve the purpose for which you got the watchdog.

Most Americans want watchdogs. Eric Meyer told Dan Kois of Slate, “If you read my email, they’re supporting us from the extreme left and the extreme right. This is one of the few issues that unites both sides.”

Meyer told me that many express their support privately but not publicly. That seems not to bother him. “We’re sticking to it,” he said. “We want to set an example that we won’t be intimidated.”

This is the latest "Sustaining Rural Journalism" column for Publishers' Auxiliary, the monthly newspaper of the National Newspaper Association.

Police raid of Kansas weekly was prompted by a tip that didn't result in a story until the target publicly complained

Wikipedia map, adapted

Local law-enforcement officers raided the office of a rural weekly newspaper in Kansas and the home of its publisher and his 98-year-old mother Friday, contributing to her death the next day, the Marion County Record reports, telling its own story.

"The raid is one of several recent cases of local authorities taking aggressive actions against news organizations — some of which are part of a dwindling cohort left in their area to hold governments to account," write Steve Lee Myers and Benjamin Mullin of The New York Times. "Raids of news organizations are exceedingly rare in the United States, with its long history of legal protections for journalists."

The Record, in a town of 1,900 in a county of 11,500, "is uncommonly aggressive for its size," 4,000 circulation, Myers and Mullin report. Publisher Eric Meyer told the Times that the weekly "has stoked the ire of some local leaders for its vigorous reporting on Marion County officials," including the employment history of Police Chief Gideon Cody.

Eric Meyer (Photo by Chase Castor for The New York Times)

The search warrant for the raid mentions restaurateur Kari Newell and cites "potential violations of laws involving identity theft and the illegal use of a computer," the Times reports. After Newell ejected Meyer and reporter Phyllis Zorn from an event with the area's congressman, the paper reported on it, prompting a tip to Zorn that Newell was trying to get her driver's license reinstated from a 2008 DUI charge so she could get a liquor license pending before the state and the Marion City Council. Zorn confirmed the charge via a state website. "Newell said that someone had unlawfully used her identity to obtain private information about her online," the Times reports.

"Meyer decided not to publish a story about the information, and he alerted police to the situation," report Sherman Smith and Sam Bailey of the Kansas Reflector, quoting him: “We thought we were being set up.” Police told Newell, "who then complained at a city council meeting that the newspaper had illegally obtained and disseminated sensitive documents, which isn’t true," the Reflector reports. "Her public comments prompted the newspaper to set the record straight in a story published Thursday." The raid came at 11 a.m. the next day.

"Newell framed the dispute as a straightforward violation of her privacy by the newspaper rather than a First Amendment battle," the Times reports, quoting her: “I firmly believe that this was a vindictive move, full of malice,” which she says was caused by her ejection of the Record from the meeting at her restaurant, John Hanna and Mergery Beck of The Associated Press report. In another story, they report widespread criticism of the raid. Editor & Publisher has a roundup.

Meyer is a former reporter for the old Milwaukee Journal and a retired professor at the University of Illinois, "whose father worked at the newspaper from 1948 until he retired." Meyer bought the paper in 1998 to keep it from being sold to a larger chain, the Reflector reports. He told the Times that much is at stake: “If we don’t fight back, and we don’t win in fighting back, it’s going to silence everybody.”

UPDATE, Aug. 15: Bill Ketter, senior vice president of news for Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., one of the larger chains, wrote a column for CNHI papers in which he says "Anti-press rhetoric has also whiplashed small town America at a time when local newspapers are more needed than ever. They are a cornerstone of rural democracy."

UPDATE: Police chief who led raid of Marion County Record resigns; questions raised about role of county attorney

Gideon Cody
(Photo by KSHB, Kansas City)

The police chief who led a raid on the Marion County Record newsroom has resigned just three days after being suspended, reports Eric Meyer of the Record.

The resignation by Marion (Kansas) Police Chief Gideon Cody was effective immediately. Mayor David Mayfield made the announcement at a meeting of the Marion City Council on Monday, according to Meyer.

Patrol officer Zach Hudson has been named as the interim chief, and "is the sole remaining member of the Marion police force fully certified as a law enforcement officer," Meyer reports.

Hudson told Meyer after the appointment that he would resume giving the newspaper "weekly reports about police activities. Cody had stopped a 50-year tradition of providing such reports after taking office four months ago," according to the report.

Hudson was present for the Aug. 11 raid on the newspaper, Meyer reports, and called Cody's attention to a confidential file that contained information the newspaper had obtained about Cody's alleged problems while working with another law enforcement agency. The fallout from the Marion County Record newsroom raid continues as the police chief who led the raid has been suspended from his job.

Mayfield suspended Cody last Thursday, reports Phyllis Zorn of the Record. Mayfield had previously resisted calls to suspend Cody until the Kansas Bureau of Investigation released its review. KBI's investigation is ongoing, and it is unclear what made Mayfield change his mind. The city's code allows the mayor to suspend a city official, but only the council has the authority to fire one.

Police body camera footage recorded this file during the raid.
(Marion County Record photo)

Previous reporting on the raid noted that Cody was being investigated by the Record, and he did not want their negative findings published. "Newly reviewed body camera video of the Aug. 11 raid reveals that police went out of their way to inspect confidential material a Record reporter had obtained about Cody's misdeeds with the Kansas City Police Department," Meyer reported. The video showed a file labeled "Capt. Gideon Cody," but there is no recording of to what extent Cody reviewed the file, if any.

The Record has also uncovered evidence that the county attorney, Joel Ensey, knew about the search three days prior to it occurring, according to the news site TheMessenger.com. Meyer reports, "Ensey eventually withdrew the warrants, which he admitted were 'legally insufficient,' but did not do so until five days after the raid. The Messenger.com reported that among more than 200 emails it received was a lengthy email. . . that Cody had sent to Ensey three days before Cody obtained the search warrants."

"When KBI eventually does release its report, it typically would go to the county prosecutor -- in this case, Ensey," Meyer adds. "The Record plans to ask for a special prosecutor to be appointed instead."

Kansas police chief expected to be charged for his role in controversial raid on community newspaper

A police chief who led the controversial raid on a Kansas community newspaper will face a charge of obstructing justice, according to a report by John Hanna of The Associated Press.

Two prosecutors had been investigating the raid at the request of the state attorney general, and they released a report Monday outlining the police chief’s alleged misconduct.

According to Hanna, “Prosecutors Marc Bennett and Barry Wilkerson concluded in their 124-page report that the staff at the Marion County Record committed no crimes before former Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody led a raid on its offices and the home of its publisher. They said police warrants signed by a judge to allow the searches contained inaccurate information from an ‘inadequate investigation’ and that the searches were not legally justified.”

The AP reported that, “Police body camera footage of the 2023 raid on Publisher Eric Meyer’s home shows his 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer, visibly upset and telling officers, ‘Get out of my house!’ She co-owned the paper, lived with her son and died of a heart attack the next afternoon.”

Hanna wrote, “Prosecutors . . . allege Cody obstructed an official judicial process in the weeks after the raid. He resigned as chief last October.”

Eric Meyer, who will be honored on Oct. 10 at the Institute for Rural Journalism’s Al Smith Awards Dinner in Lexington, Ky., told the AP that “he’s grateful prosecutors found that the newspaper’s staff committed no crimes, though he questioned why it took them a full year. He also expressed frustration that Cody is the only official expected to face criminal prosecution.

“The newspaper’s parent company, Meyer and three current or former staffers have filed federal lawsuits against the city of Marion and current and former local officials, including Cody,” Hanna reported.

Small-town feud led to a raid that sent a shock through U.S. journalism; weekly paper is 'perhaps a little emboldened'

The first post-raid issue of the Marion County Record
(Photo by Chase Castor, The Washington Post)

"A police raid without precedent on a weekly newspaper alarmed First Amendment advocates. The real story of how it happened, though, is rooted in the roiling tensions and complex history of a few key community members," The Washington Post says above the most comprehensive report of the episode at the Marion County Record, written from Marion, Kansas, by Jonathan O’Connell, with help from Paul Farhi and Sofia Andrade in Washington.

Many of the details have been reported; Kari Newell, a business owner and restaurateur, and a newly hired police chief, Gideon Cody, wanted to avoid having their pasts investigated and possibly exposed by the newspaper. Newell said the Record is "like Geraldo [Rivera] meets the National Enquirer," the Post reports, and when Record reporter Deb Gruver asked Cody "about the career change that had brought him to this prairie community of 1,900 people," he set an initial "print that and I'll sue you" tone and stopped releasing the daily police logs, Publisher Eric Meyer said. "Cody told The Post that his review led him to believe these disclosures could violate privacy laws," an assertion that appears to have no basis in fact since the logs had been published for decades.

"At an Aug. 7 city council meeting, the tension among Cody, Newell and the Record exploded into public view," the Post reports. "During a hearing about her liquor-license application, Newell furiously alleged to the room that the Record had illegally obtained her driving record." The Post explains: "A couple of Marion residents — including Newell’s estranged husband — had circulated a screenshot of a page from a state database showing that the restaurateur had 15 years ago lost her driver’s license following a drunken-driving conviction." A later police affidavit alleged that a City Council member "intended to use the document to challenge Newell’s attempt to renew a liquor license," and the screenshot also made it to Record reporter Phyllis Zorn. To confirm the information, Zorn "went to the website for the Kansas Revenue Department and searched Newell’s name, plugging in certain personal information gleaned from the screenshot — Newell’s date of birth and driver’s license number — so she could access Newell’s record."

At that time, before the council meeting, "The Record decided against publishing a story — just as it had taken a pass on the murky accusations about Cody last spring. Meyer said he was uneasy with how the newspaper’s original tipster had obtained Newell’s record. Instead, he said, he privately let the police chief know that he had received some information about Newell that the original sources may have accessed illicitly. He said he also volunteered to the chief his suspicion that Newell had been driving without a license." When the matter went public, the paper published a story quoting Newell as "saying after the meeting that people all around Marion were high-fiving her for 'finally standing up to the Record'," the Post notes. The next day came the raids on the newspaper, the council member's home and the home Meyer shared with his 98-year-old mother (who died the next day), based on Cody's affadavit saying that Zorn was “either impersonating [Newell] or lying about the reasons why the record was being sought,” which are limited under Kansas law. The alleged crimes were unlawful use of a computer and felony identity theft, but the Revenue Department said later that Zorn's use of its website was legal.

"By day’s end, the story of how police swarmed the Record’s brick storefront offices and Meyer’s nearby home — walking off with computers, servers and a backup hard drive . . . was major news in Kansas and drawing attention beyond the state," the Post reports. Gabe Rottman of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press told the Post, "I think everyone realized how much of an existential threat this was." Such groups have "raised concerns about an overt strain of antipathy toward the media increasingly displayed by some politicians and public officials since the dawn of the Trump era," the Post notes. "Yet an actual raid by police represented a kind of government intrusion on media operations that none could remember seeing in this country. Federal law generally protects journalists from search warrants or raids, requiring law enforcement investigating a crime that reporters may have information about to use subpoenas or voluntary cooperation instead."

In an interview with Brooklyn-based journalist Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket, a Substack newsletter, Meyer "revealed the until-then-secret fact that the Record had been investigating Cody’s career in Kansas City and implied a possible connection to the raid," the Post reports. Cody told the Post, "I have no vendetta against them" and said, “How am I supposed to look the other way when I have a victim who says, ‘Are you going to do anything about this?’” Cody "noted that he had no unilateral power to launch the raid, which he said was approved by a county attorney and a local judge," but five days later the county attorney withdrew the warrant and the police returned seized items to the paper, promising to destroy a copy they made of one hard drive, which Meyer fears may have contained confidential information about the newspsper;s investigations.

"The Record continued its work as usual — or perhaps a little emboldened," the Post reports. "Gruver finally began publishing the reporting she had gathered about Cody’s Kansas City tenure last spring, including blistering, subjective and highly personal criticism attributed to sources who remained anonymous. It was the kind of reporting that previously gave the Record ethical hesitations — but that it now was going ahead with because 'other news organizations have begun publishing similar accounts from unnamed sources,' she wrote."

When Meyer welcomed reporter O'Connell to the office last week, "another visitor walked in, using a wooden cane for support," he reports. "Sporting cowboy boots and a red Donald Trump ball cap, the man eagerly shook Meyer’s hand," and urged him, “Don’t stop! Keep going!”

O'Connell ends the story: "Out front, a spontaneous memorial had popped up, surrounded by flowers. In the middle sat a framed photo of Joan Meyer," whose death her son blamed on stress caused by the raids.

'These are Hitler tactics and something has to be done.'

Meyer pronounced her first name "Joann." 

“These are Hitler tactics and something has to be done.”

Those were some of the last words said by Joan Meyer, 98, a newspaperwoman for 70 years, after police in Marion County, Kansas, raided her son Eric's newspaper and their home Friday, acting on a warrant obtained by a local restaurateur who apparently feared that the Marion County Record was going to publish a story, based on public records, that would keep her from getting a liquor license. The next day, Meyer collapsed and died, after telling journalists that she was upset and stressed by the invasion of her home.

 

"The crux of the police investigation seems to be whether the paper and its reporters committed identity theft and/or unlawful acts concerning computers in confirming Newell’s driving records. An affidavit justifying the warrant is being withheld by County Attorney Joel Ensey, whose brother owns the hotel where Newell has her restaurant," the editorial boards of The Wichita Eagle and the Kansas City Star said in a joint editorial.

"There could very well be more sinister motives in play here, involving the police chief himself. [Gideon] Cody was hired by Marion in April, after taking an early retirement from the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department, where he was a captain. According to Eric Meyer, the Record has been actively investigating the circumstances surrounding Cody’s departure from the KCMO department. Friday’s raid gives Cody and his subordinates access to reporters’ notes and materials from confidential sources who were interviewed as part of the newspaper’s investigation." Cody told The New York Times, “I believe when the rest of the story is available to the public, the judicial system that is being questioned will be vindicated,” but declined to discuss details.

UPDATE, Aug. 15: The Associated Press reports, Cody referred questions Monday to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, saying it was leading the investigation. The state agency, in turn, refused to say it had taken over the investigation, referring instead to a statement saying it had “joined” the investigation and seemed to try to distance itself from the raids."

The Kansas City and Wichita newspapers say Magistrate Laura Viar, "or the presiding district judge, should immediately revoke the overly broad search warrant she signed and declare that any evidence seized under it be inadmissible in court. Viar or the district judge should order the immediate return of all equipment and materials seized." We agree. --Al Cross, professor and director, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, University of Kentucky

UPDATE, Aug. 15: Bill Ketter, senior vice president of news for Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., one of the larger chains, wrote a column for CNHI papers in which he says "Anti-press rhetoric has also whiplashed small town America at a time when local newspapers are more needed than ever. They are a cornerstone of rural democracy."

UPDATE, Aug, 16: The Times honors Joan Meyer with an obituary.

Nominations sought for the Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism by Aug. 11

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

Nominations for the Gish Award may be made at any time, but the deadline for new nominations to be considered for this year's award is Monday, Aug. 11. The winner will receive the award at an event in Lexington, KY, on Nov. 13. 

Eric Meyer and the Marion County Record in Kansas received the award in 2024. 

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

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

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

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

Opinion: Will the public be notified of water problems? EPA and states often let the information be obscured.

John Galer

The following is a column by John Galer, chair of the National Newspaper Association and publisher of The Journal-News in Hillsboro, Illinois.

If you are aware of the Marion County (Kansas) Record, it is probably because you winced at the dings and dents inflicted upon the First Amendment when the local police department conducted a raid on the Record’s offices in 2023. Publisher Eric Meyer stood up to the police with a civil liberties lawsuit, put his paper out in spite of the harassment from law enforcement and reminded audiences all over the country about the importance of community newspapers.

What you might not know is that the Record is at it again — this time exposing the damage to the public’s right to know when water quality public notices are entrusted to self-reporting on government websites.

Ironically, the Record is in the same state whose attorney general recently gave Wichita — the state’s largest city — the ability to eliminate its newspaper notices and instead publish on the city’s website.

How well does this self-reporting work? We need only to look to the EPA’s and state agencies’ reporting requirements for water quality.

EPA used to require a newspaper notice. Then it “modernized” its methodology and set up a three-tied communications system for alerting the public to drinking water problems. The new guidance now doesn’t even mention newspapers. For immediate risks to human health, the only requirement for use of news media is a mention to broadcast media (remember them—they are the ones who no longer have local reporters in a majority of their markets.) Presumably, this notification would be through a press release. Translation: free media. Presumably, the broadcast outlet would be free to ignore it or forget to read their email to pick it up in the first place.

The water agency also can post the notice in “conspicuous locations.” We are remembering a recent public health experience when most people didn’t go outside their homes. We wonder which “conspicuous locations” would have served then. Hand delivery of notices to persons served by the water system is also allowed. We are betting that is a rare occurrence.

How well does this new system work?

Not so well, according to EPA’s inspector general. Agencies responsible for issuing public notices failed to meet requirements about 6,000 times per year on average. As a result, citizens were not notified that the Safe Drinking Water Act passed by Congress in 1974 was not being followed. In short, people might have been drinking polluted water, unaware.

After the debacles in Flint, Michigan, where taxpayers had to foot millions of dollars in damages and legal fees for drinking water problems — per the existence of polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in water near key military bases in North Carolina and Georgia — a person might think water quality would be higher on enforcing agencies’ agendas.

Back to Marion, Kansas.

The notice used by the city water authorities was a copy of a compliance report included in water bills. But one month, the report didn’t show up. Meyer went on the hunt. He was met with defensiveness and accusations, according to his news story. Finally, he found a mention in one water bill of an internet address for a water quality report. And it turned out a link to the report was on the city website. But, lo, when Meyer followed the link, he got a “Forbidden” notice. He reported a series of deflections by city official: they couldn’t get testing supplies from a vendor, tests were not really required because it had stopped using one disinfectant after its injectors failed. On and on.

To Meyer’s credit, he doesn’t let the ire of city administrations stop him. We hope his readers love his temerity and that his readers find out what they need to know about their local water. Meanwhile, we hope the Kansas attorney general gets a wake-up call.

What’s wrong with this picture?

As with all of the wishful thinking that goes into removing newspaper public notices and requiring the public’s business to be posted on some obscure website, the ability of the public to educate itself gets washed away. If Marion County’s 11,000-some residents had at least been given a shot at real public notice, they might have found the water was bad. Or that it was safe. Either way, they could have found out. But EPA let the water authorities off the public notice hook. And now the state has allowed its attorney general to further the error in Wichita.

The problem is that lack of notice removes, in Marion’s case, some 11,000 private attorneys general who might have chosen to hold their government accountable. But none the wiser, they could not.

What will it take? As in all defenses of liberty, eternal vigilance. We can never give up on the right to know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cochran of Miss. replaces Roberts of Kansas as top R on Senate Ag; House panel's top D blisters R leaders

The Southern advantage that showed in this week's extension of the Farm Bill may be more likely to continue because Sen. Thad Cochran, left, has exercised his seniority to become ranking member of the Senate Agriculture Committee. "Pat Roberts of Kansas wanted to maintain the position but yielded," Bob Meyer of Brownfield Ag News reports.

The bill passed by the Democratic-controlled Senate last year "was centered on revenue-based crop insurance, which rice and peanut farmers found inadequate," Meyer notes. "The House version had some commodity programs and was more conducive to their interests."

Meanwhile, Meyer reports that the ranking Democrat and former chairman of the House Agriculture Committee has told Republican leaders that he won't work on a new Farm Bill unless they promise in writing to bring a bill to the floor -- which they didn't do last year because of divisions in the GOP between farm-district representatives and those who put a priority on reducing food-stamp spending, which was 80 percent of the Senate bill's budget.

Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota told Speaker John Boehner in a letter that he and other Republican leaders had disrespected the committee's work in writing a bill. He told Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a letter that the leaders' assertion that the bill didn't have the votes to pass was "patently false. The leadership team never conducted a whip count, never asking members whether they would vote for or against the committee package. I brought together members from both parties to conduct a count, and we found enough votes to pass it."

Also from Brownfield, here's a list of the members of the House committee for the 113th Congress. Two Democratic seats remain to be filled. 

Kansas reporter files federal lawsuit against police chief who confiscated her personal cell phone during raid

Marion County Record raid, reporter Deb Gruver’s desk appears bottom right.
(Record screen capture of surveillance video via Kansas Reflector)

A Kansas reporter says she is standing up for journalists across the country by filing a federal lawsuit against the police chief who confiscated her cellphone as part of a raid on the Marion County Record, reports Josh Funk of The Associated Press. The lawsuit was filed Wednesday. “Deb Gruver believes Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody violated her constitutional rights when he abruptly snatched her personal cellphone out of her hands during a search where officers also seized computers from the Marion County Record’s office, according to the lawsuit. That Aug. 11 search and two others conducted at the homes of the newspaper’s publisher and a City Council member have thrust the town into the center of a debate over the press protections in the First Amendment."

In previous statements, Cody said the search was prompted by a complaint from a local restaurant owner who claimed reporters used illegal means to access her driving record, which included DUI arrest. Gruver’s filing indicates the raid went well beyond the warrant’s scope. “The lawsuit says that the warrant expressly said that the search was supposed to focus only on equipment that was used to access those records, which was done by another reporter at the paper. But after Cody handed Gruver a copy of the warrant and she told him that she needed to call the publisher, he quickly grabbed her personal phone,” Funk writes. “One of the officers even read Gruver, another reporter and an office administrator their Miranda rights before forcing them outside in the heat to watch the three-hour search.”

According to Funk's report, "Legal experts believe the raid on the newspaper violated a federal privacy law or a state law shielding journalists from having to identify sources or turn over unpublished material to law enforcement." While authorities have returned the Record's computers and cellphones, Record Publisher Eric Meyer said it would use a forensic examination "to find out whether law enforcement had accessed or reviewed any of their records." 

Local papers give communities 'identity' by reporting local events and celebrations that would otherwise go unrecorded

Rita Sharp, owner of the Lucas-Sylvan News
(Photo by Lori Brack, Kansas Reflector)

When the Marion County Record reported a police raid on their newsroom last month, dozens of U.S. press organizations took notice, and suddenly, the Record and its doggedly honest reporting style received national and even international attention. But that attention didn't also showcase how many strong local newspapers Kansas can boast, reports Lori Brack of the Kansas Reflector. "It's our responsibility to champion publisher Eric Meyer's determination to cover cops, courts and city and county without fear or favor. I encourage us to remember, once the attention drifts from Marion, that many small and smaller newspapers in Kansas also deserve our support. . . . In July, the Lucas-Sylvan News–one of 188 weekly papers in Kansas today–celebrated 135 years in Lucas. "

Rita Sharp has owned the Lucas-Sylvan News weekly since 2012. "It covers the towns of Lucas in Russell County and Sylvan Grove, 12 miles away in Lincoln County," Brack writes. "Sharp's paper has weathered the coronavirus pandemic, the rise of social media as a source for news and advertising, and the aging and shrinking population in Lucas (pop. 337) and Sylvan Grove (pop. 285). Without missing an issue, even when the pandemic closed schools, city and county businesses, and events, Sharp continued publishing. She mails about 450 copies a week to local residents and readers across the country, a circulation that keeps dropping."

Brack reports: "And as it happens, Sharp is selling more papers each week—from $30 to $44 a year for online, in-state, or out-of-state subscriptions—than there are households in Lucas and Sylvan. This [circulation] indicates the importance of the news to residents and those who want to stay in touch with their hometowns. If ads and subscriptions stop supporting small newspapers, this community-building record of births, deaths, high school graduations, 4-H activities and library programs also goes away.

"Each issue is an entertaining reading experience from the front page to the advertisements and obituaries, almost always highlighting children's activities in sports, scholarship, arts, and service."

Sharp told Brack: "People ought to know having a newspaper is an identity for a town, just like having a school and a post office. The printed word is our richest resource there is."

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

Tom and Pat Gish

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

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

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

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

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

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

Utahan arrested for filming meat plant from public street; Tenn. governor undecided on 'ag-gag' bill

While Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam struggles to decide whether to sign or veto an "ag-gag" bill that would require recordings of animal cruelty be handed over to police within 48 hours, and perhaps interfere with journalism about agriculture, a Utah woman was arrested for filming a slaughterhouse from a public street.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam (AP photo by Eric Schelzig)

Haslam said, "At the end of the day it comes back to: Is it good policy? Is it constitutional, and do we think it’s something that will actually help the welfare of animals and livestock?" reports Andy Sher for the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Haslam could also allow the bill to become law without his signature, which is something he did with the controversial bill about teaching evolution in public schools, Sher notes. (Read more)

In an editorial, the Knoxville Daily News called for Haslam to veto the bill, saying it not only protects people who commit cruelty to animals by making it harder to gather enough information, but it goes against freedom of press. The law "would conflict with Tennessee’s Shield Law, which prevents authorities from requiring journalists to reveal any information or source of information used in news-gathering," states the editorial. "Tennessee authorities cannot compel anyone engaged in news-gathering to surrender photographs and video images." (Read more)

Amy Meyer and her dog. (Photo by
greenisthenewred.com)

In February in Draper, Utah, just outside Salt Lake City, Amy Meyer used her cell phone to record images of a cattle slaughterhouse from public property, reports Jim Dalyrmple for the Salt Lake Tribune. After slaughterhouse officials complained, Meyer was questioned by police and let go, but then was arrested under Utah's recently passed ag-gag law, on a charge of committing a Class B misdemeanor. The charge was dropped but she could have faced up to six months in jail, Examiner.com reports.

We also wrote about ag-gag bills here, here and here.

Bobbie Foust, still reporting at 90, wins Al Smith Award for public service through community journalism in Kentucky

Bobbie Foust

Bobbie Foust, for decades a fixture in West Kentucky journalism, is the winner of the 2024 Al Smith Award for public service through community journalism by a Kentuckian, presented by the Institute for Rural Journalism at the University of Kentucky and the Bluegrass Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Foust has edited three newspapers in the region and reported for others, and though she just turned 90, she is still covering city council meetings according to her decades-old approach: “Be honest, be accurate; be open with people, be kind when I can, but perform the journalistic function: report the facts and let the results fall where they may.”

In semi-retirement Foust is also writing historical articles about the region, and continuing her community service. In 2018, she served as the news-media liaison and adviser for a group of Marshall County High School students who sought gun-control measures after a mass shooting at the school in the pro-gun county. One of the parents, Gloria Hollifield, said in an award nomination, “She has the tenacity and the courage to stand for what is right, regardless of the backlash she undoubtedly faced.”

While Foust was not acting as a journalist in that role, she was using her journalism experience and skills to perform a public service, said Al Cross, director emeritus of the rural-journalism institute and secretary of the SPJ chapter. “In community journalism, journalists are by definition members of the community they serve, sometimes in ways other than journalism,” he said. “Bobbie has made clear since supposedly retiring eight years ago that she will continue to help her neighbors with journalism and other community service.”

Foust retired from the Herald-Ledger in Eddyville in January 2016, but has continued to write for The Paducah Sun and The Lake News in Calvert City, and cover the Calvert City council for the Benton Tribune-Courier, which she edited twice. She also edited the Marshall County Messenger and was editor of the Eddyville paper in her first stint there.

She has interviewed Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson and Billy Graham; covered executions at the Kentucky State Penitentiary; and has long followed the evolution and devolution of Land Between the Lakes, the recreation area created on 170,000 acres that the Tennessee Valley Authority took from people living between Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley. As TVA prepared to give up the LBL to the Forest Service, and Foust tried to hold officials’ feet to the fire, TVA Board Chair “Craven [Crowell] got to where he wouldn’t talk to me,” Foust recalled, adding that in her career, “That has been the continuing story that I feel like may have benefited the citizenry.”

Foust began her career at Calvert City’s first newspaper, the Valley Sun, in 1961. The newspaper closed the next year, but Foust said she freelanced as she dealt with “four little curtain-climbers” that she brought into the world from 1956 to 1959. In 1968 she joined The Calvert News and then its parent paper, the Benton Tribune-Democrat, and then its successor, the Tribune Courier. She joined the startup Marshall County Messenger as editor in 1977 and returned to the Tribune Courier in 1979, becoming editor in 1980.

Foust made the Tribune Courier a National Blue Ribbon Newspaper, an award given by the National Newspaper Foundation, and won many awards from the Kentucky Press Association, including Freedom of Information, Community Service, news and sports reporting, and photography. But she fell out with the paper’s owner, Walt Dear, and went to work with her friend Frances Baccus at the Eddyville paper, where she was editor. When it sold three and a half years later, she joined The Paducah Sun, the regional daily, and stayed seven years, until she turned 65.

She and her husband Ray Foust traveled widely, but she also helped with special projects at the Sun, and in 2001 Editor Jim Paxton made her editor of the Tribune Courier, which his family media company had purchased. She left 20 months later when her husband suffered a terminal illness, but after his death again she joined the Herald Ledger, by then also a Paxton paper, as a reporter. Even after she left the job in 2016, she kept doing journalism “because I love it,” she says. “I will probably write something the day that I die. . . . I’m curious about what’s going on; I love interaction with people.”

Institute for Rural Journalism Director Benjy Hamm said, “Few journalists in Kentucky history can match the longevity and level of service that Bobbie Foust has provided as a reporter and editor to numerous communities in the commonwealth since 1961. She exhibits many of the qualities of Al Smith – including a lifetime of service – and is a worthy recipient of the award named for him.”

Bluegrass SPJ President Casey Parker-Bell of KET, a fellow native of the Jackson Purchase, said, “Bobbie Foust’s story exemplifies the type of journalism that Kentucky needs. She has the tenacity and courage all journalists should strive for, and is deserving of this year’s Al Smith Award.”

The award is named for the late Albert P. Smith Jr., who was the driving force for creation of the Institute for Rural Journalism, headed its advisory board and was its chair emeritus until his death in 2021. He published newspapers in Western Kentucky and Middle Tennessee, was founding producer and host of KET’s “Comment on Kentucky,” and federal co-chair of the Appalachian Regional Commission. He was the first winner of the award, in 2011.

Foust will be honored at the Al Smith Awards Dinner Oct. 10 at the Embassy Suites Lexington on Newtown Pike, near Interstate 64/75. She will be joined by Eric Meyer, editor-publisher of the Marion County Record in Kansas, the 2024 winner of the Institute’s national Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, tenacity and integrity in rural journalism, along with winners of chapter scholarships. The guest speaker will be Campbell Robertson, who covers Kentucky and other states for The New York Times. For updates see www.RuralJournalism.org.

Besides Smith, previous winners of the Smith Award, and their affiliations at the time, are:
2012: Jennifer P. Brown, Kentucky New Era; and Max Heath, Landmark Community Newspapers
2013: John Nelson, Danville Advocate-Messenger
2014: Bill Bishop and Julie Ardery, The Daily Yonder
2015: Carl West, The State Journal, Frankfort
2016: Sharon Burton, Adair County Community Voice and The Farmer’s Pride
2017: Ryan Craig, Todd County Standard, and the late Larry Craig, Green River Republican
2018: Stevie Lowery, The Lebanon Enterprise
2019: David Thompson, Kentucky Press Association
2020: Becky Barnes, The Cynthiana Democrat
2021: WKMS News, Murray State University
2022: Chris and Allison Evans, The Crittenden Press, Marion
2023: Ben Gish and Sam Adams, The Mountain Eagle, Whitesburg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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