THE RURAL BLOG, INSTITUTE FOR RURAL JOURNALISM & COMMUNITY ISSUES (IRJCI)

THE RURAL BLOG: Events, trends, issues, ideas and journalism from rural America

This Web log is regular reading for journalists who cover rural issues and need story ideas, sources, comparisons and inspiration. Send stories, links and tips to al.cross@uky.edu. Use of items from The Rural Blog by news outlets is encouraged and hereby granted, as long as clear credit is given to the original source of the material. If the blog provides information for a story, let us know.

Wisconsin county rejects limit on confined animal feeding sites, but will consider zoning

The Board of Supervisors in Vernon County, Wisconsin, this week rejected a a six-month ban on confined animal feeding operations with between 500 and 1,000 animals. That means "a proposed 2,400-head hog operation . . . will start construction by end of the month," the Vernon County Broadcaster reports.

"The 23-6 vote was greeted by applause," Tim Hundt writes. "The board did vote to tighten some restrictions on farms by passing a 'livestock facility licensing ordinance.' The board also voted to form a comprehensive planning commission that will start to look at land-use planning. The board voted 15-14 in favor of the animal siting ordinance and 24-5 in favor of forming the comprehensive planning commission "

"The state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection had cautioned the moratorium faced legal issues with Wisconsin’s Livestock Facilities Siting Rule," reports Bob Meyer of Brownfield Network. The ordinance passed by the commission gives it limited auithority under state law. County Corporation Counsel Greg Lunde said the county "would not be the best test case to challenge some of the issues mainly because the county has no zoning," Hundt reports. (Read more)

Volunteer, online 'paper' in New Hampshire gets Knight-Batten Award for innovation

An all-volunteer online newspaper in Deerfield, N.H., that "has become the major source of news for three rural communities" won one of this year's Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism, J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism, announced yesterday.

The Forum is two years old, getting a start-up grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's New Voices program, which J-Lab also administers."In a readership area of 7,000 homes, it has more than 200 bylined contributors and averages 37 original articles per week, excluding obituaries, classifieds, letters to the editor and events listings," J-Lab said in its news release. To read it, click here.

The Forum was the only rural-related winner this year. Each of the six winners will get at least $1,000. A national panel of judges has chosen winners of a $10,000 grand prize and a $2,000 "first-place award." Four other entries among the total of 133 were given honorable mention. The top winners will be announced Sept. 17 at a symposium and luncheon, "Creativity Unleashed," at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Mountaintop-removal foes, rebuffed at state and local levels, look to Congress

Opponents of mountaintop-removal coal mining like Sam Gilbert, above, "have found some allies in their fight, but most come from outside the Appalachian coalfield – activists, authors and journalists who write stories for national and regional newspapers and magazines," Mary Jo Shafer writes for The Mountain Eagle and other newspapers. "Much the same has been said in the legislatures of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, where efforts to limit mountaintop removal have failed or never gotten off the ground. So now the debate is moving to the halls of Congress, where opponents think they have a better chance for change."

Shafer's story includes polling done by the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, showing that opinion about use and conservation of natural resources is deeply divided in southeastern Kentucky's Harlan and Letcher counties, part of the area where mountaintops are mined. The Eagle is published in Letcher County, where Gilbert lives. (The report does not name the two counties, but their inclusion was confirmed for the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues by Mil Duncan of Carsey.)

Shafer, now the assistant city editor at The Anniston (Ala.) Star, did the report for the Institute as part of an internship to earn a master's degree in community journalism from the University of Alabama, through the Knight Community Journalism Fellows program, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Shafer's report also includes stories about a Kentucky legislator who is trying to limit mountaintop removal and also interviewed coalfield residents and an industry official who see mountaintop mining as a source of jobs and land for development or tourism. Another story examines the state of the United Mine Workers of America in Eastern Kentucky -- no working miners, but members in other fields and a strong heritage.

Suzanne Perry of the Chronicle of Philanthropy reports from Missoula, Mont.: “Foundations could help alleviate many of the nation’s most pressing problems by focusing more on the challenges and opportunities of rural America, speakers at a conference on rural philanthropy here said. While they receive fewer philanthropic dollars than urban areas, rural regions have been hit hard by some of the issues that are at the top of the country’s policy agenda — access to health care, immigration of low-wage workers, the need for better schools, and the loss of industrial jobs, they said.”

The conference is sponsored by the Council on Foundations and Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont. Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, challenged foundations last year to do more for rural areas. Council President Steve Gunderson said that shouldn't mean less for urban areas, because rural areas should tap into “the huge transfer of wealth that is expected to take place over the next 50 years as people die and leave their estates to their heirs,” Perry writes. A good deal of that wealth is in rural land and other assets.

A recent National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy report, Rural Philanthropy: Building Dialogue From Within, "suggests that grant makers send their staff members on more site visits to rural areas and pay for events that bring urban foundations and rural nonprofit groups together,” Perry writes. “People fund people they know,” Dorfman said. “Relationships matter.” The conference ends Thursday. (Read more)

A survey of foundation staffs for the Center for Rural Strategies found “A perception that rural nonprofits lack the capacity to handle grants, a belief that rural funding falls outside many foundations’ interests and missions and sense that physical distance and cultural differences between urban-based philanthropies and rural organizations separate the foundation world and rural America,” the center's Tim Marema writes in the Daily Yonder, the center's new rural-news site. (Read more)

The Washington Bureau of the Los Angeles Times, long the domain of our friend and founder Rudy Abramson, gets back into his old coal beat today with the latest national story on "retreat mining," a method the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration authorized in June at the Crandall Canyon Mine of Murray Energy Corp. near Huntington, Utah, where six miners are trapped, their fate unknown.

"It's a delicate endeavor," writes Judy Pasternak of the Times. "Columns of coal are left in place to hold up the roof of the mine while the vein is tapped. Once the reserves have been extracted, the miners harvest the last of the coal on the way out, cutting carefully into the pillars and scrambling out of the way as the roof caves in. The final column to be slashed is known among miners as the 'suicide pillar'."

Tony Oppegard, a mine-safety lawyer and former federal mine-safety official, told the Times, "It's the most dangerous type of mining that there is." Pasternak writes that the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health considers "the last phase of room-and-pillar mining is disproportionately dangerous," accounting for 10 percent of U.S. coal production, but 27 percent of mining deaths in a 2003 study. Luke Popovich of the National Mining Association told Pasternak the sample of 100 fatalities was small.

Mine owner Robert Murray has denied that the six miners were doing retreat mining, and contends that the roof collapse was caused by an earthquake, an event never recorded in Utah. Outside experts say the seismic jolt registered at the time seems to have been caused by the collapse itself. Pasternak writes that retreat mining "dislodges such tremendous volume of earth with such force that it causes quake activity." (Read more)

Murray has been the coal industry's "best friend," The Washington Post reports, drawing on a long interview he gave reporter Alec MacGillis this summer. To read MacGillis's story, click here.

Weekly newspaper's coverage helps capture escapee, holds Okla. authorities accountable

John Wylie, left, publisher of Oklahoma's weekly Oologah Lake Leader, was reading the nearby Vinita Daily Journal on June 5, and knew something was wrong when he saw that his neighbor editor was replying to a reader's complaint about a mental patient who had "walked away from a picnic." Wylie was in an excellent position to have heard about such an incident, and had heard nothing.

He did some digging and learned that the patient had walked away from a picnic at Oologah Lake, in the adjoining county, and that the escapee "had a two-state felony record including aggravated assault and battery with a deadly weapon, and had repeatedly threatened to kill law enforcement officers, jailers and friends," Wylie told Stan Schwartz of the National Newspaper Association. Escapee Randy Thweatt "had an escape history and had tried to kill a McCurtain County woman with a rifle."

"The only call the hospital made after discovering Thweatt was missing was to the McCurtain County Sheriff's Office in Idabel so it could warn the woman. In Rogers County, where Thweatt had escaped, authorities were not notified," Schwartz writes in the latest edition of NNA's Publisher's Auxiliary. Wylie broke the news, alerted a TV reporter in nearby Tulsa, and "Thweatt was apprehended by two Oklahoma Highway Patrol officers within 48 hours of the Leader's story," Schwartz writes. (For a PDF of the story's jump, click here.) "Oklahoma Rep. Chuck Hoskin, D-Vinta, issued a statement praising Wylie: 'I believe had it not been for the vigilance of the press -- in this case John Wylie of the Oologah Lake Leader and Lori Fullbright of KOTV-Tulsa -- this dangerous criminal may have remained at large.'"

Wylie reported the capture (story and jump) but the story wasn't over. He learned that "At that same lake just a week later, while Thweatt was still at large, more than 100 Girl Scouts held a campout," Schwartz writes. "It was also the 30th anniversary of the Locust Grove Girl Scout murders. Three young girls had been raped and killed at that site. The community still remembers that time." Click here for Wylie's story. Finally, the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health apologized for the incident, and put a six-month suspension on all outings, but when Wylie asked for a copy of the order, he found that it it wasn't in writing.

Wylie wrote an editorial about dealing with the mentally ill, and related his own experience: When he was a big-city reporter, he covered a mentally ill veteran "who held police at bay for a day with volleys from high-powered weapons," then "got past security at The Kansas City Star, and pled his case with a .45-caliber handgun aimed straight and true at our heart through the pocket of his raincoat." (Read more)

"Skyrocketing farmland prices, particularly in states like Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska, giddy with the promise of corn-based ethanol, are stirring new optimism among established farmers," reports Monica Davey of The New York Times. "But for younger farmers, already rare in this graying profession, and for small farmers with dreams of expanding and grabbing a piece of the ethanol craze, the news is oddly grim. The higher prices feel out of reach."

Davey reports from DeKalb, Ill., citing an 80-acre tract "that sold for $10,000 an acre at auction this spring, a price that astonished even the auctioneer," Davey writes. "In central Illinois, prime farmland is selling for about $5,000 an acre on average, up from just over $3,000 an acre five years ago, a study showed. In Nebraska, meanwhile, land values rose 17 percent in the first quarter of this year over the same time last year, the swiftest such gain in more than a quarter century."

Davey also writes, "A federal-government analysis of farm real estate values released Friday showed record average-per-acre values across the country. The analysis said property prices averaged $2,160 an acre at the start of 2007, up 14 percent from a year earlier. . . . In Iowa, which produces more corn and is home to more ethanol plants than any other state, farm rental prices are mimicking purchase prices: they were up about 10 percent this spring over a year ago, according to a study by William Edwards, a professor at Iowa State University, who said it was the largest jump since he started tracking farm rents in 1994."

Some of the highest prices are near the nearly 200 existing or proposed ethanol plants, "where the cost of transporting the corn would be the cheapest," Davey reports. Jason Henderson, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, told the Times that that land close to such facilities, most of which are in the Midwest, had jumped by as much as 30 percent over a year ago. (Read more)

UPDATE: A Times editorial Aug. 10 says the ethanol boom "gives bigger, richer farmers and outside investors the ability to outcompete their smaller neighbors. It cuts young farmers hoping to get a start out of the equation entirely. It reduces diversity in crops and in farm size." (Read more)

The first Freedom of Information Act reform in 11 years passed the Senate without dissent Friday night after being held up for two months by Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. Among other reforms, the bill would create an obmudsman to resolve disputes about records requests, some of which have lingered for years because there is no penalty for failing to meet the law's deadlines for response.

The bill would also create a tracking system and hotline allowing requesters to follow their request through the system, and ensure that those who sue to get records will be get reimbursed for attorney fees when a federal agency hands over records right before a court order that might have included a fee award. It is called the Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National Government Act, or OPEN Government Act. It is promoted by the Sunshine in Government Initiative, a coalition of media groups.

The voice vote by unanimous consent came after a series of negotiations between Kyl’s staff and that of the sponsors, Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and John Cornyn, R-Tex., reports Pete Weitzel of the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government. Kyl and the Justice Department "objected to the definition of the media for fee waiver purposes, to a measure restoring the recovery of attorneys fees (changed by a 2001 court ruling), to the penalty provision if an agency fails to meet the 20-day response time, to the creation of an ombudsman, and to a section calling for reporting on Critical Infrastructure Information," Weitzel reports.

"The compromise made changes to the first three in ways we do not believe harmful," Weitzel writes. "The penalty provision was changed to match that in the House bill, which we thought more practical. The ombudsman provision, as negotiated, primarily adds language to the Leahy-Cornyn bill that puts into statute the requirement that each agency have a chief FOIA officer and a public liaison. Those were established by presidential executive order last year. The CII section is not really related to FOIA reform but is something Sen. Leahy felt strongly about. It is not in the House bill and we did not object to its being dropped."

Weitzel says the best scenario for supporters of freedom of information is for the House to accept the Senate version. If not, a House-Senate conference committee will be required. "Either way, we believe we’ll see the bill going to the president soon." For Weitzel's detailed analysis of the changes, click here.

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) will bring his rural "listening tour" to the Republican stronghold of Elko, Nev., tomorrow, but his rural emphasis remains on the first presidential-caucus state, Iowa (where this campaign photo was taken). He plans to have a "rural summit" in Iowa at mid-month, and all three members of his "rural advisory committee" are from Iowa, Bill Bishop noted this week in the Daily Yonder, calling it "policy-making on the fly."

"Farming is different, we presume, in Louisiana — and in Appalachia, the issues have nothing to do with farming at all. No matter. The election is in Iowa, so that’s where Obama will develop his rural platform," which is rapidly developing: "Obama is following Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin on the farm bill. . . . Obama says he agrees with Harkin that there should be more 'emphasis on nutrition.' Obama likes ethanol. Obama would put limits on farm subsidies. . . . supports expanding broadband Internet in rural areas . . . said community colleges don’t receive enough financial support."

Anjeanette Damon of the Reno Gazette-Journal advances Obama's visit to Elko, noting it has "about 4,500 active Democratic voters, 24 percent of the electorate in a county 56 percent Republican. (Read more) In an earlier story, she noted, "The caucus rules are written in a way to make ignoring any region of the state difficult. . . . Under state law, smaller counties are allotted more delegates per voter than larger counties. That means campaigns have to convince fewer people in rural counties for the same number of delegates they might win in more populous counties." (Read more)

Rural kids score between urban, suburban on tests; new report has lots more data

Rural students are doing better on national tests than their counterparts in cities, but not as well in reading and math as those in suburbs, according to a report from the National Center for Education Statistics, which has a wealth of other background information on education in rural America.

"A larger percentage of rural public school students in the fourth and eighth grades scored at or above the 'proficient' level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress [tests in] reading, mathematics, and science ... in 2005 than did public school students in cities at these grade levels," NCES said in a release. "However, smaller percentages of rural public school students than suburban public school students scored at or above the 'proficient' level in reading and mathematics."

The report says that in 2003-04, more than half of school districts and a third of all public schools in the U.S. were in rural areas, but those schools had only a fifth of the total public-school enrollment. Rural schools accounted for 28 and 25 percent of enrollment in the South and the Midwest, respectively, but only 16 percent in the Northeast and 13 percent in the West. The report uses a new classification system to address the chronic problem of defining "rural." It "distinguishes between rural areas that are on the fringe of an urban area, rural areas that are at some distance, and rural areas that are remote," the release said. (Read more)

The American Bar Association’s House of Delegates will vote Aug. 13 or 14 on whether to recommend that federal, state and local governments immediately limit access to records of closed criminal cases in which there has been no conviction. "The policy change would likely carry great weight with all levels of the court system and restrict access to valuable records that newspapers review every day at courthouses across the country," says the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

"The goal of these changes is to allow those who have gone through the criminal justice system without a conviction to be free of their past charges, especially when seeking future employment," ASNE reports. "It also suggests denying access to criminal records where a conviction has occurred, but the defendant has engaged in a 'specified period of law-abiding conduct.' One important result, however, is that critical information about the judicial system would be cut off from scrutiny by the public and the press. Information gleaned from cases resulting in acquittal is not only used to review possible misconduct within the court system, but also is aggregated to review trends in criminal justice over longer periods of time. The proposed recommendations, in fact, would not only apply to court records but also police records and records now accessible under FOIA and many similar state laws. This is despite considerable court precedent stating that access to all types of criminal records should be maintained to the greatest extent possible."

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press published an in-depth article in the Summer edition of its quarterly magazine The News Media and the Law. Other resources available from the committee include a press release urging defeat of the proposal and an earlier letter to the ABA protesting it. ASNE Legal Counsel Kevin M. Goldberg is available at 703-812-0462 to answer questions.

West Virginia publisher takes on other papers, local officials over public-notice ads

Scott Finn of West Virginia Public Radio reports, "There’s a fight going on for the hearts and minds of newspaper readers in Lincoln County – and that struggle could affect small newspapers all across West Virginia. Dan Butcher, a Lincoln County native who moved to Florida and made a fortune ... is challenging an established newspaper, the Lincoln Journal, with a start-up called the Lincoln Standard. He’s alleging that the Lincoln Journal and local politicians are in cahoots with each other – and taxpayers are footing the bill."

Newspapers are paid to print public-notice advertising for many legal matters, including a list of locals who haven't paid their taxes. The law calls for the list to be printed once; the Journal printed it more than once, and after the Standard pointed that out, the county got a refund. The law also "says you only have to print people’s names and what they owe," Finn reports. But Journal Publisher Tom Robinson "says it makes sense to print extra information -- like addresses -- especially in a county where more than 500 people are listed in the phonebook under the name 'Adkins'." A story by the Journal's Richard Tipton points out that the listings also included "property descriptions, rows of dots and ticket numbers."

Here's the larger issue: In West Virginia, rates for public-notice ads are set by law, according to a paper's circulation, at specific rates per word. Butcher's newspapers (he bought two more and started another in the area) recently noted that no one audits newspaper's certifications of their single-copy sales, and suggested that some papers are falsifying them in order to get higher rates for ads, because their percentage of household penetration -- 89 percent in one case -- is too high for counties with low income and education. Butcher was once a community newspaper executive for a subsidiary of The Washington Post Co. (Read the story.)

Gloria Flowers, executive director of the West Virginia Press Association, told Finn, "I do not feel there are any publishers in the state that fudge a tremendous amount on their circulation numbers." (Read more) Butcher says he was spurred to start his paper when the Journal wanted to charge a woman $59 to publish an article seeking sign-ups for the county's first youth soccer league. For his broader reflections on the how and why of his newspapers, which operate under the umbrella of West Virginia Standard, click here.

Reporter squeals on colleague to her police-chief husband, who has computer seized

A reporter for the New Castle (Pa.) News is married to the police chief. She heard that another reporter had recorded a telephone conversation with her husband, which in Pennsylvania requires the consent of both parties. After she told him, "Police made an unannounced visit to the newspaper and took a computer and some recording devices," reports Jim Romenesko in his digest of journalism news for The Poynter Institute.

The News reports today: "The New Castle News announced today it will file a court protest against the unannounced seizure by authorities of a newsroom computer that police say was used to illegally record phone conversations with two local public officials about a proposed police training facility. The News’ petition will ask that the city police department return the computer immediately, saying it is important to the daily production of the paper and could be subject to indiscriminate search of sensitive news files."

The reporters are Pat Litowitz and Debbie Wachter Morris, whose husband is Northwest Lawrence Regional Police Chief Jim Morris. "Chief Morris declined to say why he pursued the case against Litowitz and whether he considered their conversation to be off the record," the News reports. "His wife said that he previously had asked her to inform him if she ever learned that he had been recorded without his knowledge."

The story quotes Wachter Morris as saying she had no conflict of interest: " I felt if my husband was the victim of an alleged crime, and I was seeing it happen, I felt obligated to bring it to the attention of my employer and my husband as the victim." The story also explains why Litowitz tapes conversations: for accuracy.

The un-bylined story also reports, "Even if the phone conversation was taped, any public official speaking with a reporter has no reasonable expectation of privacy. Beyond that, we are confident that case law holds this particular statute to be so overly broad that it is unenforceable. . . . The seizure of the computer represents a dangerous intrusion by police to some very profoundly held First Amendment issues." Sounds to us like some journalism ethics and management issues are in play, too. Romenesko's headline is "What can happen when a cop's spouse works at a newspaper."

Foundations and others that make charitable grants need a better understanding of rural America to help it overcome its disadvantage in the grant-seeking world, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy says in its latest report, Rural Philanthropy: Building Dialogue from Within.

Grantmakers' perceptions of rural life, geographical isolation and capacity-building needs greatly reduce the ability for rural nonprofits to secure funding," NCRP said in a press release. "Many perceive rural America as a place where tight-knit communities work together to overcome adversity; others see the region as resistant to change," said Aaron Dorfman, executive director of NCRP. "But generalities have the effect of masking contemporary issues affecting rural America, making it harder for rural nonprofits to attract grant-money."

The isolation that defines "rural" greatly limits opportunities for rural groups to make contact with major grantmakers, "which are usually located in urban areas," the release said. "The report also finds that grant makers often require capacity-related benchmarks that are difficult to achieve without having sufficient funding for staff and technical assistance." The study was based on focus groups with nonprofit leaders who serve rural parts of California, Florida, Kentucky, Montana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas.

NCRP will present its findings, with recommendations on how to strengthen foundation giving in rural areas, at the Council of Foundations conference on rural philanthropy in Missoula, Mont., next week. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) inspired the council to hold the conference with a speech at its annual meeting last year.

Local governments have persuaded state legislators in North Carolina "to back off a proposal to limit the ability of municipalities to build and operate their own high-speed Internet networks," reports Michael Martinez of National Journal's Insider Update. About 15 states have such limits, passed at the behest of telecommunications firms, but few have passed lately because of growing concern about -- and news coverage of -- the lack of broadband access in rural areas and small towns.

In the House Finance Committee, a bill that would have restricted local-government broadband became one that merely ordered a two-year study of municipal broadband networks' performance. Rob Thompson, a policy advocate for the North Carolina Public Interest Research Group, said the original bill would have been tough for local governments to swallow, because the legislature last year "stripped localities of the authority to grant and receive revenue from video franchises," Martinez writes. "In North Carolina and more than a dozen other states, video service providers seeking to enter new markets can bypass local governments by applying for statewide franchises."

Thompson said he thought legislators were reluctant to limit municipal broadband "because they knew that companies had failed to provide the new competition they promised to get the statewide franchising law" for video. He remains wary of what may happen in 2009, because the main sponsor of the original broadband bill is slated to be one of the study panel's co-chairs. (Read more)

Rupert Murdoch will probably sell the Ottaway Newspapers subsidiary of Dow Jones & Co. because community newspapers are not his line of business, say industry analysts, most recently the editor-at-large of Editor and Publisher. "My guess is, prepare for a sale. It's really not the kind of paper he operates in the United States, or even the kind he operates in Australia or the U.K," Mark Fitzgerald told Sarah Shemkus of the Cape Cod Times, Ottaway's third-largest daily paper, with a circulation of 44,000.

Ottaway publishes eight dailies and 15 weeklies. The dailies are the 80,000-circ. Times Herald-Record of Middletown, N.Y., and The Record of Stockton, Calif., 59,000, both with substantial rural readerships; The Standard-Times of New Bedford, Mass, 32,000; the Mail Tribune of Medford, Ore, 31,000; the Pocono Record of Stroudsburg, Pa., 19,500; the Portsmouth (N.H.) Herald, 12,300; The Ashland (Ore.) Daily Tidings, 5,010; and The Danville (Pa.) News, 2,623. Click here for all Ottaway papers.

Ottaway was once a separate company. Its former chairman, James Ottaway Jr., controls about 7 percent of Dow Jones' stock and was an outspoken opponent of the sale to Murdoch's News Corp. Just as Dow Jones' Wall Street Journal reported forthrightly and comprehensively on the controversial sale, the Times added useful context to its coverage today, running a list of the 17 papers on and near Cape Cod and their owners.

Many industry observers have concluded "that News Corp. is likely to sell off the Ottaway newspapers quickly," Shemkus reports. "Possible suitors could include GateHouse Media, Colorado-based MediaNews Group Inc., and Alabama-based Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., according to Ken Doctor, who leads analysis of the news publishing industry for the California market research firm Outsell Inc." GateHouse, a fast-growing company, has four papers on Cape Cod, where Ottaway has three. CNHI's chief news executive, Bill Ketter, is based in Massachusetts, near most of the Ottaway papers.

One other rural angle, sort of: A top industry analyst "said the dismantling of newspaper dynasties was reminiscent of the disappearance of small farms," report Joseph Menn and Thomas Mulligan of the Los Angeles Times, quoting John Morton: "It's like the farmer who leaves the farm to the family and divides it evenly. A couple of generations go by and all of a sudden you're sitting on an acre."

Recent increases in food prices are not related to earlier increases in prices of grains used to make biofuels, such as corn-based ethanol and soy-based biodiesel, reported Phyllis J. Griekspoor of the Wichita Eagle.

"Yes, corn and grain prices have increased, in part because of the demand for corn to produce ethanol. But growing demand in Asia also has affected prices, as have adverse weather conditions in major corn growing areas," Griekspoor wrote. "Food prices, in reality, are edging up only 1.5 percent more than they did last year and the year before, an annual rate of increase between 3 and 4 percent, according to the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture." ERS economist Ephraim Leibtag told the Eagle reporter that grain prices have an impact on animal-feed costs, which that causes small increases in retail prices, "but feed is such a small part of the overall price that it really isn't a driver."

Only about 20 percent of the

U.S.

consumer's food dollar goes to pay for the raw materials received from the farmer," Griekspoor reported. "Labor used by manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers and eating establishments accounts for nearly 40 cents of every food dollar." Ed Maxiner, an editor with the Kiplinger Agricultural Letter, told the Eagle that the single greatest contributor to higher food prices is energy, because ""Fuel contributes costs to food at every step." Other factors include drought and a dramatic increase in worldwide demand for human food and livestock feed, driven by a rapidly expanding middle class in Asia.

A senior U.S. Department of Justice official tried to delay or derail a pending plea agreement with Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of the painkiller that became a scourge in Central Appalachia, according to the U.S. attorney handling the case -- and eight days later, the prosecutor's name showed up on a list of nine U.S. attorneys that the now-resigned aide recommended for dismissal.

John L. Brownlee, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. Brownlee said Michael Elston, then chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, called him on his cell phone at home Oct. 24. The Roanoke Times reports: "Elston said he had been talking to attorneys for Purdue about concerns that prosecutors were moving too quickly, Brownlee testified." Brownlee said he asked if Elston was calling on behalf of the deputy attorney general, and when Elston told him no, he told Elston that "he needed to back out of the case." The next day, Brownlee obtained a plea agreement from the company and three executives to pay $634.5 million in fines for over-promoting OxyContin.

Amy Goldstein and Carrie Johnson of The Washington Post report, "Justice Department officials said it was not unusual for senior members to weigh in on major criminal cases. . . . Brownlee and other former prosecutors said nighttime calls such as Elston's, coming just hours before the end of a long, complex case, are unorthodox, particularly when the department's criminal division already has signed off on a case. Brownlee said the head of the division had authorized him that afternoon to execute the plea agreement. . . . Brownlee ultimately kept his job. But as Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales confronts withering criticism over the dismissals, the episode in the OxyContin case provides fresh evidence of efforts by senior officials in the department's headquarters to sway the work of U.S. attorneys' offices." (Read more)

The committee's main focus yesterday was Brownlee's handling of the case. He has been criticized for not pushing for jail time for the three executives, and by "others who say the prosecution is a setback in the effort to provide relief to millions of Americans who suffer from chronic pain," Laurance Hammack of the Times reports, with help from The Associated Press. "Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., didn't buy Brownlee's explanation that the government had no evidence that top Purdue officials knew of a marketing campaign in which its sales representatives downplayed OxyContin's potential for abuse and addiction." (Read more)