Nov. 15, 2004
To: Friends of the Institute
for Rural Journalism and Community Issues
From: Al Cross, interim director
The Institute has been staffed for three and a half
months, and we have been busy. With elections behind us and the
holidays looming, this seems like a good time to give folks an
update.
The Rural Blog: With the help of
new staff assistant Bill Griffin, and our three graduate assistants
in communication, our Web log is now in its second month of Monday-through-Friday
publication. It developed a loyal following soon after its introduction
one week after your director began work, and our list-serv for
notices of blog postings continues to grow. Our graduate assistants
are Krista Kimmel, Alan Lowhorn and Josh Tucker.
Conferences: We have five in the
works, most with partners of some kind.
Late February or early March: Covering
Health in Mid-Appalachia, in cooperation with the UK Center for
Rural Health in Hazard. Appalachia has one of the least healthy
populations in America, and health care is one of our major issues.
Late March or early April: Conference
at Appalachian State University, following through on conference
that was canceled because of snow during the Institute’s
pilot period. Stuart Towns at ASU will advise us about subject
matter.
April or close to it: Full programming,
probably focusing on jobs and economic development, for the spring
meeting of the Western Kentucky Press Association. Location may
depend on sponsorship; meeting could be expanded to journalists
from other states.
June 12-17: National conference on covering
rural issues, Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, University
of Maryland. We are the programmers for this conference, for which
the Knight Center folks will select the participants, and want
to give experts from our partner schools an opportunity to be
among the presenters. More information will be forthcoming.
September: Covering the Capitals from
Your Hometown, at the Center for Rural Development in Somerset,
Ky. In partnership with the National Press Foundation and the
Kiplinger Fellows Program at The Ohio State University.
We also plan to make presentations at the conventions
of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications
in San Antonio in August, and at the Society of Professional Journalists
in Las Vegas in September
Tom and Pat Gish Award: Named for
the longtime publishers of The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, this
national award will be presented annually (we hope) to journalists
who demonstrate the courage and tenacity often needed among rural
journalists to defend the public interest and advance the public
agenda in rural communities. The first award will be given to
the Gishes themselves, probably at the Hazard conference.
Cooperative course work: One of
the options the Institute’s academic partners discussed
at our meeting in Whitesburg was a reporting project on the future
of tobacco farming and tobacco communities. With the tobacco buyout
a reality, the culture and economics of tobacco will undergo the
greatest change in more than 65 years, so your director has tentatively
decided to make this the subject of the Special Topics in Journalism
course that he will teach at UK during the spring semester. We
hope to attract newspapers and students on our partner campuses
to contribute to this project. More details will be shared with
the partners in a separate memo.
SNPA presentation: Our first major
presentation will be at the traveling campus of the Southern Newspaper
Publishers Association on Nov. 30 in Richmond, Va. Al Smith and
I have worked up an outline on editorial leadership – how
to lead your community through the news and editorial pages and
still get along with people and stay in business, using examples
from his career. We welcome your suggestions for points and examples.
Newspaper survey: The grant UK
received from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation calls
for the Institute to survey newspapers in Central Appalachia about
their training needs. We will also gather information about ownership,
management, circulation, staff experience and backgrounds, and
what sort of training journalists in the region want and need.
We also hope to study the nature of chain owners, such as how
many papers they own, whether they are publicly traded or not,
and whether chain papers share news content. We also want to look
at circulation trends, measuring them against population and noting
the out-of-county circulation. Many Appalachian expatriates still
get their hometown papers, which artificially inflates the papers’
local penetration rates. Results of the survey are to be presented
at the Appalachian Studies Conference at Radford ( Va.) University
on March 19, 2005. Academic partners have agreed to sign letters
to news executives in their respective states seeking participation
in the survey.
Radio survey: Following completion
of the newspaper survey, we plan to survey radio stations in our
five pilot-region states to measure the extent of local radio
news coverage. Our model for this may be a survey done by Appalachian
State in cooperation with the North Carolina Association of Broadcasters.
We may also draw on the work of Liz Hansen and Ferrell Wellman
of Eastern Kentucky University, who did an article for the forthcoming
Encyclopedia of Appalachia on broadcast news in the region, using
West Virginia as an example.
Syllabus exchange: Academic partners
agreed in Whitesburg to share course syllabi and perhaps student
work. Details on these topics will be addresses in the separate
memo to the partners.
National and state notice: When
James Dao of The New York Times wanted an expert to talk about
vote fraud in Appalachia and the impact of rural voters on the
election, he called your director, who was quoted in Dao’s
story in the Times on Nov. 4. Your director was interviewed before
the election by CNN, NPR (whose rural correspondent, Howard Berkes,
is on our listserv), USA Today, People magazine and the Philadelphia
Inquirer, and this week spoke by phone with a graduate journalism
class at the University of California-Berkeley. Your director
has made many broadcast and personal appearances, including several
“Comment on Kentucky” shows on KET and meetings of
interest groups.
Professional affiliations: The
Institute will present a breakout program at the Kentucky Press
Association convention in January, and will be represented at
the Tennessee Press Association convention in February. KPA editors
were sent an e-mail about the Institute, and we are a featured
link on KPA’s home page. The Institute joined the National
Newspaper Association; your director attended the NNA convention
in Denver, the Associated Press Managing Editors conference in
Louisville, and joined the International Society of Weekly Newspaper
Editors.
Special project: The Institute
did the initial research for journalistic, literary and other
written materials to be used in prototype, online assessments
of student reading skills, under a contract the University of
Kentucky has with the Kentucky Department of Education.
Fund-raising: Initial efforts have
begun, with trips to see potential contributors and fund-raisers.
Thanks to all of you for your support.
