Rural Computer-Assisted Reporting workshop gives reporters key investigative skills

Twelve journalists from five states and Washington, D.C., learned computer-assisted reporting or honed their basic CAR skills May 18-20 at a workshop at the University of Kentucky, sponsored by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues and Investigative Reporters and Editors. This was the second Rural Computer-Assisted Reporting Investigate Mini-Boot Camp funded by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation; the first was last October at East Tennessee State University. For a short video about the current workshop, produced by UK journalism professor Buck Ryan on his iPhone with ReelDirector, click here.

Daniel Gilbert, left, with Herald-Courier's Mike Owens at ETSU

The R-CAR program was started with a gift to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues from Daniel Gilbert, a Wall Street Journal energy reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for the Bristol Herald Courier in 2010 with his reporting on state and energy-company mismanagement of pooled natural-gas royalties in Southwest Virginia. He donated his $10,000 prize from another contest, the Scripps Howard Awards, to the Institute's endowment to create a fund that sends journalists to IRE's six-day CAR boot camp, at which he learned the skills that enabled him to do the series. The Scripps Howard Foundation matched his gift, and the state of Kentucky matched both, creating a $40,000 fund that generates enough earnings to sponsor two journalists each year. (Read more)

Kate Martin of the Skagit Valley Herald, in Mt. Vernon, Wash., was the inaugral IRE boot camp fellow. She says thanks to the CAR boot camp "I am no longer at the mercy of my sources to look up a figure or fact for me. I can have them send me the source file and work with it on my own." (Read more)

If you are a rural journalist interested in applying for a fellowship to a full, six-day IRE CAR boot camp, click here to download an application and details. The next boot camp will be held Aug. 5-10 in Columbia, Mo. Applications are due June 22.

Louisiana editor and weekly paper win Gish Award for courage, integrity, tenacity in rural journalism

Stanley Nelson and the weekly newspaper he edits, the Concordia Sentinel of Ferriday, La., are the winners of the 2011 Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism.

Nelson and the Sentinel showed courage and unusual tenacity in investigating an unsolved murder from the era of conflict over civil rights, and in January 2011 named a living suspect in the 1964 killing of African American businessman Frank Morris. A grand jury was convened and continues to investigate.

One of the prosecutors handling the case, David Oppeman, told the Los Angeles Times, “I told Stanley the other day he is the hub in this and everybody else is just a spoke. He did the work that needed to be done.”

The newspaper showed integrity and courage in the face of reader resistance to its dogged, detailed reporting in more than 150 stories. “The owners of the Concordia Sentinel never hesitated in following the story,” Nelson wrote in the fall edition of Nieman Reports, of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

"While most readers read the stories with interest and outrage over what happened so many years ago, many of the most vocal were those who detested the coverage and who questioned our motives," Nelson told the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.

“We knew some would be angered to read about the parish's ugly racial past,” he wrote for Nieman Reports. “Some canceled subscriptions. We were threatened. Our office was burglarized. One irate reader called to find out my ultimate goal. ‘To solve a murder,’ I said. ‘You can't do that,’ she snapped. ‘You're just a reporter!’ She hung up. We pressed on.” (Read more)

Institute co-founder publishes memoir and is honored for remarkable life in journalism

Albert P. Smith Jr., who turned his life around as a rural journalist and co-founded the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, has published a long-awaited autobiography to highly favorable reviews. (H-L photo by Charles Bertram)

"Al Smith and his contemporaries had to constantly balance muckraking reporter and crusading editor with a publisher’s mandates to grow his business and promote the community it served," former big-city editor Jim Squires writes for the Lexington Herald-Leader. "Smith eagerly grasped the role of 'engaged journalist,' which to him entailed doing whatever it took to make good things happen." To read more reviews, click here.

To order the book, go here; to donate $10 of the cost to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, enter this coupon code: SmithIRJ.

In 2011, Smith was recognized for his service to community and rural journalism as the namesake and inaugural recipient of the Al Smith Award presented by the Institute and the Bluegrass Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. To read about the Al Smith Award for public service through community journalism in Kentucky, or anywhere by a current or former Kentuckian, click here.

Smith was awarded the 2011 James Madison Award for service to the First Amendment by the Scripps Howard First Amendment Center in the University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Telecommunications in November 2011. To read an excerpt from Smith's acceptance speech, click here. To read KyForward's coverage of the event, click here.

Institute hosts Business Reporting Workshop

What, exactly, do we cover that isn't business? Linda Austin, executive director of the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University, was explaining to a classroom full of journalists how business coverage has tremendous community impact and builds audience. Austin asked the journalists gathered from Illinois, Ohio, Mississippi, Tennessee, West Virginia and Kentucky how much space, time and resources are devoted by their newspapers to business coverage. The room seemed to universally recognize the gap. That's why they were there. With an assist from Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, the Reynolds' Center and its associates took a day at the University of Kentucky to change that.

The star of the day was Chris Roush, the Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Scholar in business journalism at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and the director of the Carolina Business News Initiative. Roush pointed out that the U.S. has 22.9 million small businesses, which create 75 percent of the net new jobs to the economy and account for 99.7 percent of its employers. (Read more)

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The Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues is supported by the University of Kentucky and donors to an endowment that is matched by state funds. To make a tax-deductible donation to the Institute, via a secure Web site, click here. To make a pledge, via the same site, click here.