Coverage
of public-policy issues at newspapers in Eastern Kentucky and
Central Appalachia is lacking
March 2006
Presentation to Appalachian Studies Conference of the Appalachian
Studies Association, March 2006
By Al Cross, director, Institute
for Rural Journalism and Community Issues
The Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues was founded
to help non-metropolitan media define the public agenda in their
communities, through strong reporting and commentary – including
journalism about regional and national issues that have local
impact, such as mountaintop-removal mining, education, health
care and economic development in Appalachia. We also try to help
all journalists cover issues that affect rural America.
The Institute does that through a Web site, www.ruraljournalism.org,
which includes The Rural Blog, a daily digest of issues, trends,
events, trends and journalism from rural America; a Reporting
Resources section that helps journalists find information about
rural issues; and a Reports section with student reporting projects,
and research about rural journalism, such as this finding that
America’s biggest media company recently became America’s
biggest weekly newspaper company.
The institute was created in 2001 with seed money from the Appalachian
Regional Commission and the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation of the
Society of Professional Journalists. It hired its first staff
in 2004, with a major grant from the John S. and James L. Knight
Foundation and additional assistance from the Ford Foundation.
Funds are being raised for an endowment to give the institute
a permanent home at the University of Kentucky, its initial sponsor.
The institute has a national scope and, as a research project
of UK, a statewide mission. Its initial focus area, however, is
Central Appalachia – a region where its founders first saw
a need for such an institute because they detected a decline in
the editorial leadership of local newspapers in the region and
news coverage by local radio stations, partly a result of chain
ownership and absentee management.
One of the founding ideas of the Institute is that every community
is in the service area of an institution of higher education,
where faculty members should be available to provide story ideas,
information and quotes for stories, or write stories and commentaries
themselves. To that end, the Institute is a multi-disciplinary,
multi-institutional organization, with academic partners at 14
institutions, 10 of them in Appalachia.
The Institute has a long name because its emphasis is on issues.
At our conferences, we touch on the craft of journalism -- reporting,
writing, editing and presentation -- but mainly we try to encourage,
inspire and inform coverage and commentary on issues. The issues
we focus on are education, economic development, environment and
health.
Notice the screen says “health care and health.”
That’s to emphasize that the poor health status of some
rural areas is not only caused by lack of access to affordable
health care, but also by the failure of the people to take care
of themselves -- with proper nutrition, exercise and the initiative
to seek medical attention when they need it.
For example, in Central Appalachia, the incidence of most cancers
is about the same as in the rest of the country, but the mortality
rate – the rate at which people die from cancer –
is noticeably higher. In large measure, that stems from the lack
of screening for cancers of what some folks call the private parts
– the breast, the colon, the genito-urinary tract. So, at
our first conference, on health care and health, we urged journalists
like these to do stories about local people who survived cancer
because they got screened. Now we are working on a project that
would use advertising and circulation sponsored by health-care
providers to underwrite special sections about health that would
be mailed to every household in a county, not just those that
subscribe to the paper.
Following the health conference, we programmed a week-long national
seminar on rural issues; co-sponsored a two-day seminar on how
rural news outlets can cover state and federal policymakers without
basing reporters in the capitals; and held a one-day seminar on
covering the coal industry in Central Appalachia. Next month,
we’ll have a conference in West Kentucky on covering and
guiding rural economic development.
The coal conference came at a good time – amid increasing
controversy about mountaintop-removal mining and about six weeks
before the worst mine disaster in many years. Even before the
disaster, one of the conference attendees, Kyle Lovern of West
Virginia’s Williamson Daily News, did a three-part series
on the coal industry in the region, followed by a two-parter on
coal-waste impoundments. Soon after the mine disasters in the
state, he did enterprise stories about mine safety.
This sort of coverage is rare for this newspaper, which has
a circulation of 8,000 and is owned by Heartland Publications,
a company that was formed from the sale of 24 papers by Community
Newspaper Holdings Inc. and quickly ran into trouble after its
chief executive fleeced the company for $1.7 million.
Marty Backus, who sat next to Kyle on the front row, is the publisher
of the Appalachian News-Express in Pikeville, Ky. It’s a
three-times-per-week paper, also chain-owned, and its circulation
area overlaps that of the Williamson Daily News. Marty has stepped
up his editorial criticism of the coal industry, and told me that
he wished people from the coal industry and the region’s
news media could have a roundtable discussion to discuss the issues
they have with each other. So I rounded up support for the meeting
from the coal and press associations in the region, and the roundtable
has been scheduled for April 17.
That, unfortunately, is most of the good news I have for you
about the coverage of public-policy issues in Central Appalachia
-- or, as we will focus on from here, in Eastern Kentucky.
Research projects
While those of us who started the Institute think we have read
enough Appalachian newspapers to reach some pretty safe conclusions
about their strengths and weaknesses, we saw the need for some
academic research to support our belief and validate the mission
of the Institute.
County budgets: Our first effort examined the
coverage of county budgets by newspapers in Eastern Kentucky.
We chose budget coverage because the budget is the basic policy
document of any government, and county budgets in Kentucky are
adopted in a certain time period, which facilitated research.
In Kentucky, counties operate on a July-to-June fiscal year,
and must adopt a budget by June 30. Debate on the budget typically
takes place in April and May, but often extends into June, and
sometimes the deadline is missed, so the survey examined daily
and weekly newspapers dated between April 1 and July 31, 2005.
The East Kentucky Coalfield was selected as the study area because
it is a major focus of the Institute. The survey included the
field’s major coal-producing counties, but also ranged north
to Ashland, to include an additional daily newspaper, in addition
to the dailies in Middlesboro and Harlan.
Our survey of 15 papers found that most of them published only
one or two articles about their county’s budget during the
budget-adoption period in 2005, and some published no stories
at all on the subject. We found not one single comprehensive story
about a county budget and how the policy decisions being made
might impact citizens of the county.
While the quality of news coverage is not necessarily a function
of quantity, and budget situations differ widely among counties,
as a whole the survey shows the need for closer media attention
to issues that are affected by the budget.
It also suggests a need for instruction, guidance and background
information for rural newspaper staffs, on which there is often
a shortage of professional journalistic training, and for fresh
inspiration for editors, who have seen dozens of budgets come
and go. These stories do not have to be dull, as some we found
proved.
First, though, the hall of shame: The Middlesboro Daily News’
only budget article included a bullet-point item about the county
budget on an inside page and the headline did not mention anything
related to it. But that was still better than the other paper
in Bell County, The Pineville Sun, which is published in the county
seat. It reported nothing about the county budget. Neither did
the Troublesome Creek Times of Hindman, even though Knott County
was in financial difficulty, and was being managed at the time
by a judge-executive who had been imprisoned for vote fraud.
The Mountain Eagle of Whitesburg ran two budget stories, both
at the top of its front page -- one 23-column-inch story with
the headline “County must cut $1.1 million in coal-tax projects”
and a 22-inch story with the headline “Fiscal court OK’s
budget, list priorities.”
The latter headline and story are worth noting, because they
reminded the citizens of Letcher County that a budget is a priority
list – what the Fiscal Court thinks is important and how
much the judge-executive and magistrates are willing to spend
on it.
The Manchester Enterprise of Clay County, the Mountain Citizen
of Inez in Martin County and the Salyersville Independent in Magoffin
County each ran three budget articles, but they seemed to be caused
mainly by conflicts between countywide elected officials and the
county Fiscal Court, the local legislature that approves the budget
and spends the money.
Editorial pages: A survey of 19 newspapers
in Appalachian Kentucky during January 2006 found that only five
published local editorials during the month, and only two published
editorials with a clear stand on an issue. Six of the 19 newspapers
had no editorial page at all.
While local editorials are not the only way to judge the quality
of an editorial page, or a newspaper as a whole, they are one
measurement of a paper’s willingness to influence public
policy in a community, and an indication of its attitude about
the role it plays in the community.
The absence of any editorial page in six of the newspapers surveyed
suggests that many rural publications are simply opting to stay
away from any kind of opinionated content. Those six were all
weeklies. The other six weeklies surveyed published editorial
pages, but none ran local editorials.
While absentee chain ownership has been suspected of discouraging
strong news coverage by community newspapers, papers in the study
that are owned by multi-state chains, such as Community Newspaper
Holdings Inc. and Heartland Publications Inc., all had editorial
pages. However, four of those six papers did not publish local
editorials, and none of those that did took clear stands on issues.
The strongest editorial page of all was in the Appalachian News-Express,
which is owned by a multi-state chain, Lancaster Management Inc.
of Gadsden, Ala.
One reason for this phenomenon could be that chains are attracted
to larger markets, which provide the advertising and circulation
base to support stronger newspapers. Two in-state chains, whose
newspapers are generally smaller than the other chain-owned papers
in the study, did not have editorial pages – except at the
home paper of one of the chains.
Generally, the larger the paper’s circulation, the more
likely it was to have an editorial page. The two papers that took
clear issue stands are the largest in circulation in the study
group.
Jail study: On Feb. 21, 2006, the state auditor
of Kentucky, Crit Luallen, issued the first comprehensive analysis
ever conducted of county jail costs, which have become a great
burden to many counties. Twelve of the 120 counties are spending
30 to 45 percent of their General Fund on their jail, a regional
facility or transporting prisoners to another county.
This was a perfect story for newspapers to localize, because
the report on the auditor’s Web site included many maps,
charts and tables analyzing the data in many ways, in each case
with alphabetic and numerical rankings of the 120 counties.
However, most Kentucky newspapers, and most of them in Appalachian
Kentucky, ignored the story, according to the clips the auditor’s
office received from the Kentucky Press Clipping Service, a commercial
service that subscribes to all newspapers in the state. The office
received clips from only 26 of the 150 newspapers, and of the
33 news stories, only 18 contained information about the local
jail. The auditor’s office provided copies of the clips
to the Institute, at our request.
Two newspapers added local information to the Associated Press
story about the report, but the 10 others that used AP did not.
Three simply ran the auditor’s news release and added no
local information. One of those was the Hazard Herald, in Perry
County, which spends 45 percent of its General Fund budget on
its jail, the most of any county in the state. The newspaper,
owned by Heartland Publications Inc., ran the release with the
credit line “Special to the Herald.”
The best coverage was in the Big Sandy News, a twice-weekly
paper that covers five counties, including those that have collaborated
on a regional jail. The newspaper’s editor wrote a front-page
story, with a dateline from the state capital of Frankfort, and
followed up two days later with an editorial and a story about
local officials’ objections to the report and the response
from the auditor’s office.
The clips illustrated one encouraging development among chain-owned
rural newspapers in Kentucky, the work of the new Frankfort correspondent
of Community Newspaper Holdings. However, not all the daily papers
are making full use of the correspondent’s work, and none
of the weeklies are, according to the clips received by the auditor’s
office.
Four of the five daily CNHI papers ran stories by the correspondent,
who localized it for three of them. The fourth, the Times-Tribune
of Corbin, ran the story without localizing it but ran a chart
showing jail costs in its area. No clip was received from the
daily Commonwealth-Journal of Somerset or any of the CNHI weeklies
in Kentucky.
CNHI, based in Birmingham, Ala., was formed in 1998 and is mainly
owned by the Alabama teachers’ retirement system. The company
owns 19 paid-circulation newspapers in Central Appalachia, perhaps
the largest number of any company, even though it sold several
of its publications in the region in the last three years.
