Institute for Rural Journalism
and Community Issues seeks funds to continue pioneering work
Entering its second year with a strong track record, the Institute
for Rural Journalism and Community Issues has started
another groundbreaking series of programs while stepping up the
fund-raising needed to keep it going.
The institute, based in the University of Kentucky
School of Journalism and Telecommunications, had what amounted
to its national rollout in June, with a five-day national conference
on rural issues at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism
at the University of Maryland.
More than 30 journalists from all over the nation, from news
outlets of all sizes, gave rave reviews after hearing from experts
on rural issues. “Every session turned on a light in my
head,” Paul Hammel of the Omaha World-Herald
said at week’s end.
Returning to their newsrooms, reporters turned out stories as
direct results of the seminar. Leon Alligood of The (Nashville)
Tennessean wrote front-page stories about the
definition of “rural” and one of the Institute’s
favorite issues, rural access to high-speed Internet service.
The seminar, “Rural America, Community Issues,”
marked the first time that the 17-year-old Knight Center had turned
over an entire week of programming to an outside organization.
Like the Knight Center, the Institute is more of a public-policy
institute for journalists -- one that offers reliable information
and ideas about issues -- than a program about reporting, writing,
editing, presentation, production or management.
Its first seminar, in February at the UK Center for
Rural Health in Hazard, was on covering health and health
care in Central Appalachia, the Institute’s initial focus
region. A similar, smaller-scale workshop is planned for London,
Ky., in January.
The National Rural Health Association picked
up on the conference by inviting the directors of the Institute
and the Center, one of the reporters who attended, and a former
NRHA president who attended to make a presentation at the national
NRHA convention next spring on how journalism can help improve
rural health.
In September, at Somerset, the Institute co-sponsored “Carrying
the Capitals to Your Community,” a two-day conference
on how news organizations can cover state and federal governments
and officeholders without having bureau reporters in the capitals.
The seminar attracted 22 journalists from seven states, including
three broadcasters, one from Nevada. Half of those who attended
were from weekly newspapers in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and
West Virginia. That indicated support for the Institute’s
position that smaller newspapers are obliged to tackle such government
and political coverage because most Americans do not read a daily
newspaper, and many metropolitan papers have reduced their regional
and state-capital coverage.
The conference was co-sponsored by the National Press
Foundation, which provided a day of programming on using
the Internet to cover the federal government. The Institute programmed
a day on state coverage. The event was coordinated by the Kiplinger
Program in Public Affairs Journalism at The Ohio State
University, headed by Somerset native Debra Jasper.
Soon after her appointment last year, Jasper told Institute
Director Al Cross, “I always said if I got a job like this,
I’d like to do something for Appalachian journalists.”
Cross replied, “You’re talking to the right person.”
Central Appalachia’s greatest asset and greatest liability
has been its vast coal deposits and the mining of them, but many
smaller news organizations are reluctant to cover the industry
because it can be controversial.
To help such organizations, and even larger ones, report and
comment on the industry, the Institute will hold a “Covering
Coal” seminar at the South Charleston, W.Va., campus
of Marshall University on Nov. 18. Marshall is
one of the Institute’s academic partners; another, West
Virginia University, will help with the event.
On April 7, the Institute will offer a one-day program on covering
and guiding economic development, as part of the spring meeting
of the Western Kentucky Press Association at
Murray State University. Organizers hope to make
the conference a regional event, with attendance from Tennessee,
Arkansas, Missouri and Illinois.
The Institute’s most public face is The Rural Blog, a
digest of events, trends, issues and journalism in rural America,
published Monday through Friday at www.ruraljournalism.org. The
list-serve for blog notices has more than 385 members from all
over the nation, and countless others have bookmarked it. The
Web site’s name indicates that no one else in the world
is doing what the Institute is doing.
The Institute is operating on a two-year, $250,000 grant from
the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which
expires next summer, and a $50,000 grant from the Ford
Foundation, which expires next spring. The Institute
is raising money for an endowment to give it a permanent home
at UK, and the Knight Foundation has invited it to apply for a
challenge grant that would match private fund-raising for the
endowment. With matching of those monies by the state Research
Challenge Trust Fund, known as “Bucks for Brains,”
the Institute’s fund-raising goal of $750,000, if achieved,
would create a $3 million endowment – enough to hire more
full-time, professional staff and make it a truly national program.
While the Institute was created mainly to serve professionals,
it is linked to the academic program through the director’s
teaching of one class each semester. Last spring, students did
a reporting project on the future of tobacco and tobacco-dependent
communities and the spending of tobacco-settlement money. Stories
have been published in several Kentucky newspapers and on the
Institute Web site; pending completion of work by the Institute’s
partner at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill,
stories will be published about the use of tobacco-settlement
money in Kentucky and North Carolina, the two leading tobacco
states.
Next spring’s special-topics course will be on rural politics,
tied to the elections that will fill every partisan and judicial
office at the local level in Kentucky in 2006.
The Institute continues to present a three-hour seminar,
“Editorial Leadership in Community Newspapers,”
at traveling campuses of the Southern Newspaper Publishers
Association.
The SNPA presenters have been Cross, a former rural editor and
Courier-Journal political writer who became Institute director
in May after nine months as interim director; and former rural
publisher Al Smith, chairman of the Institute’s steering
committee. The chairman of the Institute’s national advisory
board is Rudy Abramson, former Washington correspondent for the
Los Angeles Times.
The Institute recently added academic partners at Indiana University
of Pennsylvania, Ohio University, Southeast Missouri State University
and the Knight Community Journalism Fellows at the University
of Alabama. Original partners were Appalachian State University,
East Tennessee State University, Eastern Kentucky University,
Marshall University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Washington and
Lee University and West Virginia University. We welcome more.
