Va. not getting full story about coal's influence on presidential race in the state, media critic writes

Coal is at the center of this year's presidential election, with both camps touting their love of the industry and the central Appalachian region where the Obama administration's co-called "war on coal" seems to rage the fiercest. However, news outlets haven't kept up with coverage of just how big a role coal is playing in the race, Tharon Giddens of the Columbia Journalism Review reports from Virginia, like Ohio a swing state where coal can swing votes.

Both candidates have used messages about coal. Mitt Romney ran two ads criticizing President Obama's alleged over-regulation of the industry the day after Alpha Natural Resources announced mine closures and layoffs. He also made a stop in Abingdon in southwestern Virginia, near the coalfield, last week. Obama continuously touts his advocacy for "clean coal" as part of his energy strategy.

"Coal has recently moved to the center of the message war in this swing state," Giddens reports. "The political story around coal in Virginia is rich -- but most of the coverage to date has been less so, and not only because ... most news outlets here aren't doing enough to fact check the ads on the airwaves." Giddens writes that they have largely failed to recognize that while Obama's didn't do well in coal country in 2008, in a tight race, every vote counts. "Coal miners are an eye-catching stand-in for the white working class," and both campaigns are trying to target that demographic, he writes. There's been very little push-back by reporters against "the narrative about regulations forcing layoffs at Alpha," when industry experts say the industry's layoffs are stem mainly from low demand, caused by cheap natural gas and a warm winter, which left big stockpiles of coal.

"The problem is that the context, perspective and expertise on display in some of the stronger opinion pieces has been mostly lacking in the political reporting on coal, whether it’s being done in southwestern Virginia or the state’s metropolitan centers," Giddens reports. "Even setting aside environmental concerns, as the candidates have mostly done while they present themselves as friends to coal, the news coverage hasn’t done enough to dig into the campaigns’ messages, explore coal’s influence on the race, or use this opportunity to explore the story of a changing industry and region." (Read more)

National Science Foundation funds U. of Montana's rural environmental reporting initiative

University of Montana (Brooke Andrus)

The National Science Foundation has awarded the University of Montana’s School of Journalism $250,000 to improve the quality and quantity of environmental science news as it affects Montana's most rural communities. Martin Kidston of The Missoulian reports that this type of reporting is needed at a time when access to local news has decreased and when "the debates surrounding key environmental issues facing the West often take place in a vacuum, where choices are shaped by one’s political orientation and the opinions generated by the local rumor mill."

Alison Perkins, adjunct journalism instructor at UM, told Kidston that "the grant will help develop a model for reporting environmental science news, using student reporters who are studying environmental science and natural resource journalism at the graduate level as writers. 'I think there’s a climate that’s not really open to environmental stories because there’s the fear that they come from an advocacy position,' said Perkins."

The new program, dubbed Science Source, will be modeled after The Associated Press, working with editors in print, radio, online and television to identify and produce stories that fit the media’s specific needs and that reach the largest audience possible. (Read more)

Seminar will train journalists to analyze teacher readiness, registration ends Oct. 11

The National Education Writers Association is hosting an intensive day-long seminar to teach journalists how to analyze career readiness of teachers. The pressures of accountability increases the scrutiny faced by education colleges, and the seminar, "Ready to Teach: Rethinking Routes to the Classroom," will guide journalists through examination of "the growing efforts to revamp how aspiring educators are prepared for the classroom and how teacher-preparation programs are held accountable for results," NEWA says on its website.

The seminar will offer lessons on how to analyze federal education-school and teacher certification data, information about how schools are trying to reform and alternative programs designed to replace them, insights into the debate over new ways to evaluate teacher prep programs, perspectives from teachers about how ready they were for the classroom and tips from reporters who have successfully covered the topic.

The seminar will be Oct. 27 from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the University of Minnesota's McNamara Alumni Center, and registration ends Oct.11. A tentative agenda can be found here. To RSVP, click here.

Watertown Daily Times sets the Atlantic straight

When the Watertown Daily Times in northern New York saw that Malcolm Burnley of the Atlantic had been horribly off base on a story about large-scale agriculture, the Amish and land prices in rural St. Lawrence County, it set out to set the record straight, and did so Sunday in a 3,300-word story by Christopher Robbins. (Screenshot including Reuters photo)

"It is a model of good reporting and the importance of having reporters living, breathing and writing in rural communities," Daily Yonder co-editor Bill Bishop writes as he retells the story. "This is a great story, and tells so much about journalism, the relationship between city and country and how important it is to listen."

Times Managing Editor Robert D. Gorman says in the story, “The writer didn’t know the difference between bail and bale, teats and udders, DePeyster and Canton, and wrote that huge agribusinesses have moved into St. Lawrence County, which is simply not true. Despite acknowledging Mr. Burnley’s factual errors, his editors are still convinced he methodically unraveled an incredibly complex socioeconomic trend in regional farming. I have told them Mr. Burnley got that wrong, too, but to no avail.” The Atlantic has corrected six errors but the story remains posted.

Scientists' survey of last year concludes that Fox, Wall Street Journal misled on climate change

A new study contends that Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, both owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., have greatly misled their audiences about climate change. The Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that 93 percent of Fox broadcasts and "Wall Street Journal Editorial Report" TV programs about climate change from February through July, and 81 percent of Journal editorial pages from August 2011 through July 2012, were misleading.

The survey defined inaccurate information about climate change as citations that "questioned either the reality of climate change or the fact that recent climate change is largely due to human activities, or they advanced other arguments that dismissed established climate science."  Tim McDonnell of Mother Jones writes, "The climate change debate in America is still mired in bickering over whether the problem even exists or not." (Read more)

Des Moines' KCCI-TV takes top small-market photography award again; Bakersfield is runner-up

The National Press Photographers Association announced late last week that KCCI-TV in Des Moines was its the small-market Station of the Year in TV news photography. The station also won in 2007 and 2009. The judges remarked that its work showed a willingness "to travel to far away places to get great stories" and "demonstrated an understanding of storytelling."

The runner up was KBAK-TV in Bakersfield, Calif. NPPA says it gives the award is given for consistency in providing outstanding news photography coverage for and about the audience it serves. It is an award aimed at raising the standards of the industry. To see a video compilation of KCCI's submitted work and the judge's full comments, go here.

New market hours may cost reporters their privileged peeks at USDA's crop forecasts

The world's largest agricultural trading company, Cargill, is urging the U.S. Department of Agriculture to change a decades-old practice of giving news services, including Bloomberg and Reuters, advanced access to market crop reports and forecasts. The process, known as "lock-up," involves sequestering reporters in a room to prepare detailed stories as soon as crop reports are released by USDA.

Cargill provides market information and grain bids to farmers, and has proposed a "radical change" to this process, Gregory Meyer of The Financial Times reports. "As we understand it, the current lock-up and release process allows some members of the news media to access the reports early," Cargill said in the filing to USDA. "That has never been an issue in the past because markets were closed at release time. But in an environment in which markets are actively trading while critical reports are being released, anyone with early access will have an unfair advantage."

"Wait a minute," says Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues. "Cargill seems to think that reporters will trade on this information, or share it prematurely with people who might. These journalists agree not to do that, and they should be taken at their word. There has never been an issue wiht their behavior in this regard."

The filing is a response to U.S. futures exchanges extended hours that allow trading during USDA reports, something that was previously avoided when markets took a break around the time of releases. Some say the new system prevents them from digesting facts before trading on them, Meyer reports. USDA is considering changing release times and has been accepting public comment on the matter. It may announce a decision this week. (Read more)

Virginia publisher, Alabama editor and writer are finalists for Southern newspapers' commentary prize

Staffers of The Tidewater News of Franklin, Va., and the TimesDaily of Florence, Ala., are finalists in the small-paper category for the Carmage Walls Commentary Prize awarded by the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association. The winner will be announced Oct. 1 at SNPA's News Industry Summit in Naples, Fla.

Tidewater News Publisher Steve Stewart editorialized against a Franklin School Board policy that required teachers to give students a grade of 60 when they had scored lower, even much lower. The board reversed itself, and Stewart complimented it in an editorial. For his other editorials, click here.

Executive Editor Scott Morris and staff writer Robert Palmer editorialized during and after passage of the controversial Alabama law that allows police officers to detain motorists they suspect are illegal immigrants and makes it illegal to knowingly give a ride to an illegal immigrant. To read their work, click here.

The finalists among newspapers with circulation of more than 50,000 are Linda Campbell, editorial writer and columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and John Railey, editorial-page editor of teh Winston-Salem Journal. For details, click here.

'Pink slime' maker suing ABC News for defamation

The beef company most affected by the "pink slime" controversy earlier this year is taking legal action against ABC and its news division for defamation of character. Beef Products Inc. claims the news organization cost the company $400 million. Anchor Diane Sawyer and reporters Jim Avila and David Kerley are also named as defendants.

“ABC ran for about 30 days a vicious disinformation campaign that consists of almost 200 false and misleading defamatory statements,” BPI attorney Dan Webb told Tim Carman of The Washington Post. The South Dakota-based company is asking for $1.2 billion because the state's Agricultural Food Products Disparagement Act allows plaintiffs to triple the amount of damages. ABC News senior vice president Jeffrey Schneider said the lawsuit "is without merit," and that the organization will "contest it vigorously."

Several media outlets reported on lean, finely textured beef, that was once widely used in fast-food burgers, school lunch programs and sold in grocery stores. But reporters discovered a reference to LFTB as "pink slime" in 2002 by former U.S. Department of Agriculture microbiologist Gerald Zirnstein, and it was revealed that ammonia was combined with meat during the process of making LFTB.

Beef Products is singling out ABC because it says that since March 7 the network reported about LFTB in 11 broadcasts, 14 online reports and in social-media statements that allegedly contained 200 false statements about the product. But media libel defense lawyer Laura Handman told Schneider that Beef Products could have a difficult time winning the suit because it will be hard to determine whether ABC knew what it reported was false. (Read more)

The poor and near-poor are more numerous now, and deserve coverage; here are thoughts and tips

With the national poverty rate at 15 percent, higher than at any time since 1993, and millions more Americans near the poverty line, you'd think there would be more coverage of them and the problems they face each day. For whatever reason, there is not, and a group of journalists with some experience in covering the subject got together over the weekend to talk about improving coverage of it.

The conference at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., was called "The New American Poverty: Reporting the Recession's Impact," but it included a lots of basics and history on the subject -- and some useful comments at the start, from poverty researchers and some folks who run programs for the poor and disadvantaged in Lexington and Rockbridge County.

Jeri Schaff, services director for the Valley Program for Aging Services, said she couldn't recall ever seeing a news story addressing the daily struggle faced by many old people (hers don't like the "seniors" label, she said), especially in rural areas. The coverage of poverty tends to focus on cities, she said.

"Rural poverty is very different than urban poverty," said Suzanne Sheridan, director of the Rockbridge Area Free Clinic. The big difference, she said in an interview, is lack of resources: supermarkets, public transportation, health care, even a reliable water supply.

Paul Overberg of USA Today gave an excellent presentation on using Census Bureau data to cover poverty. For his handout on using the bureau's American Community Survey data, click here. For other help in covering rural poverty, go to www.onpoverty.org, a recently revised Washington and Lee site for journalists; www.CoveringPovery.org, with tutorials from the University of Georgia; and www.EconomicHardship.org, whose owners include author Barbara Ehrenreich, who has written best-selling books about the poor and near-poor. For more details on the conference, click here.

Seminar on covering oil and gas drilling, with a field trip, set Sept. 27 in Youngstown, Ohio

Many rural areas are seeing a boom in drilling for oil and natural gas, which are more complex and perhaps more risky enterprises than ever before. To make sure journalists know enough to cover the subject, a half-day seminar will be held Sept. 27 at Youngstown State University in Ohio to "explain everything there is to know about the subject," say the sponsors: the Ohio Newspaper Association and the local newspaper, The Vindicator.

The program will include how horizontal hydraulic fracturing works, the economic impact of drilling, the environmental debate over drilling, and much more. After the program there will be an optional tour of drilling facilities. We recommend you do the whole day, including the field trip. You won't learn everything there is to know, but you don't have to. The cost to attend is a very reasonable $30, which includes lunch. For more information and registration, click here.

Tool allows detailed examination of inspection reports from nursing homes all over the U.S.

Journalists now have a tool at their fingertips that will allow them to find out about problems in their local long-term care facilities. (iStock photo)

The application is operated by ProPublica, a nonprofit, investigative news group, and allows "anyone to easily search and analyze the details of recent nursing home inspections, most completed since January 2011," report Charles Ornstein and Lena Groeger.

The tool has features that the federal government's Nursing Home Compare tool lacks, including the ability to search using any keyword. Results can also be sorted according to the severity of the violation, and by state. It has already resulted in several significant news stories, Ornstein reports, giving examples and tips on how to use the application.

About 1.5 million people still live in nursing homes nationwide, though more seniors are living at home or in assisted-living facilities. The reports show there were almost 118,000 deficiencies cited against 14,565 homes. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the average number of deficiencies for a nursing home inspected in the U.S. is eight. ProPublica's analysis shows Texas had the most deficiencies in the country by far, with 183. 

While ProPublica ranks the states, nursing-home industry officials say "inspectors in different regions of the country have different thresholds for issuing a citation, and that could unfairly make one state's homes appear worse than another's," Ornstein and Groeger report. (Read more)

Experts say digitally nervous rural newspapers ignore online opportunities at their peril

Rural newspapers that ignore online opportunities may be risking their relevancy, and losing opportunities, in their communities. And what's worse, Washington State University's Benjamin Shors writes for PBS MediaShift, a recent survey suggests rural citizens are going online to look for news but struggling to find local content. That, he writes, leaves rural papers at a crossroads: To leap or not to leap to the Internet. And if they do, what content do they take with them?

"It's a 24-7 world and they come out 52 times a year," Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, publisher of The Rural Blog, told Shors. "The worst day to die in a rural area is on a Thursday; your obit won't be printed for a week." Digitally savvy rural journalists, the University of Kentucky professor said, could quickly publish breaking community news. "They rightly have been wary of putting information online for free because that cannibalizes their print content," he said. "But I think there is a way to go online ... You put things online that you can't put in print," such as official documents, videos, audio recordings, extra photographs and so on, to maintain the local-news franchise that is the newspaper's reason for being.

Cross said some rural papers could even jump directly to mobile platforms, as phone technology rapidly evolves and cellular networks continue to spread. The Federal Communications Commission reported Tuesday that about 14.5 million rural Americans — or nearly one-fourth of the 61 million people living in rural areas -- had no fast Internet service, or broadband, available at home. In contrast, only 1.8 percent of  Americans living in non-rural areas had no broadband access.

Bill Will, executive director of the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association, which represents about 130 community newspapers in the state, told Shors that community newspapers are struggling with the same digitally driven economic challenges that have decimated larger publications. At a spring roundtable in Washington state, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Knight Foundation, several initiatives were discussed to increase digital literacy among rural journalists and their readers. (Read more)

Nominations due Oct. 1 for Gish Award for courage, tenacity and integrity in rural journalism

The Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues seeks nominations by Oct. 1 for the Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, tenacity and integrity in rural journalism. Last year's winners were Stanley Nelson (right) and the weekly Concordia Sentinel of Ferriday, La., for investigating an unsolved murder from the civil-rights era, naming and interviewing a living suspect. (Read more)

The award is named for Tom and Pat Gish, who published The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Ky., for more than 51 years. Tom died in 2008; Pat has health issues but remains publisher, and their son Ben is editor. The Gishes have withstood advertiser boycotts, business competition, declining population, personal attacks, and even the burning of their office to give their readers the kind of journalism often lacking in rural areas. The family won the 2010 Eugene Cervi Award from the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, and Tom and Pat Gish were the first winners of the award named for them.

Other winners of the Gish award have been the Ezzell family of The Canadian (Tex.) Record, in 2007; Jim Prince and Stanley Dearman, current and former publishers of The Neshoba Democrat of  Philadelphia, Miss., in 2008; Samantha Swindler, editor-publisher of the Headlight Herald in Tillamook, Ore., in 2010 for work as editor of the Corbin, Ky., Times-Tribune and managing editor of the Jacksonville (Tex.) Daily Progress.

The Institute seeks nominations that measure up, in major respects, to the previous winners. Nominatons should explaining how the nominees show the kind of exemplary courage, tenacity and integrity that the Gishes demonstrated. Documentation does not have to accompany the nomination, but is helpful in choosing finalists, and additional documentation may be neded.

Nomination letters should be postmarked by Oct. 1 and mailed to: Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, 122 Grehan Building, University of Kentucky, Lexington KY 40506-0042. Questions may be directed to Institute Director Al Cross at 859-257-3744 or al.cross@uky.edu.

Postal Service deal with mass mailer could cut into newspapers' already bleeding revenue

The U.S. Postal Service is proposing a rate cut for one of the country's largest direct marketing companies, which could have a direct impact on the weekend advertising bundles in newspapers, the industry's biggest source of revenue. The USPS says it would make $15 million over three years by cutting what it charges Valassis Communications, because the company has promised to send even more under the proposal, Ryan Nakashima of The Associated Press reports.

The deficit-laden USPS would give Valassis a discount of up to 34 percent, and the company has agreed to pay a penalty if it doesn't boost its number of mailings. Valassis reaches 100 million homes every week and would be able to cut prices for advertisers, including Home Depot, Lowe's and JC Penney, which could pull business from Sunday newspaper inserts and into its midweek bundles, known as RedPlum.

The move could take $1 billion of annual revenue from the newspaper industry, which gets about $24 billion a year from ads, much in weekend inserts and advertising fliers sent weekly to non-subscribers. That's down from $49 billion in 2005, and "The outlook isn't promising for newspapers," Nakashima writes. "The commission has never in its 42-year history denied an application for a so-called 'negotiated service agreement' related to its mail delivery monopoly," according to a Postal Regulatory Commission spokeswoman. "Critics say the discounts don't always produce the intended boost in mail volume and profits. . . . The eight negotiated service agreements in effect from 2007 to 2011 have lost money instead of generating new income."

PRC Chair Ruth Goldway said the commission is "reviewing the proposal with a critical eye," because the USPS hasn't been "very good at predicting the negative consequences of its actions," Nakashima reports. But the newspaper industry is worried about another quote from Goldway: "Even if we only make $15 million, but we increase the amount of volume in the mail and we get various businesses to think positively about using the mail in the future, then this is something good to do." (Read more) If newspapers lose the case, they could appeal to the courts and Congress.

Michigan county's papers among many winners in National Newspaper Association's annual contest

Not only does Allegan County, Michigan (Wikipedia map), have more than one newspaper, it has two of the best, according to the judges in the National Newspaper Association's 2012 Better Newspaper Contest. And they think Jack "Miles" Ventimiglia of Warrensburg, Mo., is both a fine editorial and feature writer (and maybe a headline writer, too). Here are the winners in selected categories and circulation classes:

Best Local News Coverage
Circulation less than 3,000: Delano (Minn.) Herald Journal; second, The Commercial Record, Allegan, Mich.
Circ. 3,000‐5,999: Allegan County News, Allegan, Mich.; second, The Barrow Journal, Winder, Ga.
Circ. 6,000 or more: Washington (Mo.) Missourian; second, The N'West Iowa Review, Sheldon.

Best Investigative or In‐Depth Story or Series
Daily: Wyoming Tribune Eagle, Cheyenne, stories on Niobrara oil boom by Shauna Stephenson, Michael Smith and Angela St. Clair. The Grass Valley Union of Northern California won second place for a series on a bank that federal officials closed.
Non-daily, circ. 10,000 or more: Bill Rodgers, Rio Grande Sun, Espanola, N.M., for "Loopholes Plague State Sex Offender Registry."
Non‐daily, circ. 3,000‐9,999: Steve Ranson, Lahontan Valley News and Fallon Eagle Standard, Fallon, Nev., for "Destination Southwest Asia," about local troops in Afghanistan. Michael Higdon designed the pages.
Non‐daily, circ. under 3,000: Luige del Puerto, Arizona Capitol Times, Phoenix, for a series on birthright-citizenship legislation.

Best Editorial
Circ. 3,000‐5,999: Jack "Miles" Ventimiglia, Daily Star‐Journal, Warrensburg, Mo., for "State's obese House offers gobs of fat to cut."
Circ. under 3,000: Steve Haynes, Oberlin (Kan.) Herald, for "A whole lot of good ideas can threaten our freedom."

Best Editorial Page(s): Circ. 6,000 or more: Ellsworth (Me.) American; under 6,000: The Hinsdalean, Hinsdale, Ill.

Community Service: The Las Cruces (N.M.) Bulletin, "Las Cruces: A Photographic Journey;" second, The Barrow Journal, Winder, Ga., coverage of Barrow County budget crisis; third, The Blackshear (Ga.) Times, "The New War / Just One Pill / Bad medicine is big business / Drug net nabs ten / Twelve arrested in drug roundup." (The Times has a great motto: "Liked by many, cussed by some, read by them all.")

Best Agricultural Story under 6,000 circ.: Jack "Miles" Ventimiglia, Daily Star-Journal, Warrensburg, Mo., for "The Grape Depression; Raisin Hell: Heat destroys grape crop." Maybe the best headline, too? No, that's an overall award, and it went to the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. (There are no circulation or frequency divisions for headlines.) Second place went to the N'West Iowa Review, a weekly.

Awards for general excellence will be announced at the NNA convention in Charleston, S.C., in early October. But you might be able to calculate them from a list of all the winners, available here.

ProPublica publishes a guide to voter-ID laws; booklet shows possible difficulty of getting IDs

The nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news service ProPublica has published a guide to voter-identification laws, which have been passed in more than 30 states and could have an impact on this year's elections for offices from president to school board. To read it, click here.

UPDATE, July 24: The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University law school has just published a booklet, The Challenge of Obtaining Voter Identification, which has maps illustrating how difficult it might be for many rural residents without a government-issued photo ID to obtain one.

This map of Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia (click on image for larger version) shows that in most areas with the greatest concentrations of rural black voters, no state driver’s license offices are open more than two days per week. The figure also shows that many of these states’ part-time offices are located in the areas with the highest concentrations of black voters. The crosshatched areas outline the 13 contiguous Black Belt counties in Mississippi, the 11 contiguous counties in Alabama, and the 21 in Georgia where all state driver’s license offices are open two days per week or less.

Death of community newspaper reporter found dead in Va. home after fire being probed as homicide

The death of a community newspaper reporter in Virginia is being investigating by local authorities and the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a homicide, reports Melissa Boughton of the Winchester Star. The paper's Sarah Greenhalgh, right, was found dead in a bedroom after her rented home in Upperville was burned, according to a press release from the Fauquier County Sheriff's Office.

Authorities on the scene called the fire "suspicious," Boughton reports, but Lt. James Hartman would not reveal what evidence led to this conclusion. He also would not say whether Greenhalgh was killed from injuries sustained in the fire. Authorities have preliminary autopsy results, but won't release them because they fear it will jeopardize the case.

Greenhalgh had worked on an investigative story that Hartman told the paper included several "persons of interest," with whom police are speaking. Authorities have seized her cell phone, personal computer, work computer and several work files. But the motive could be personal, not professional.

The FBI and local authorities have searched the home of a Gainesville, Va. man, who has not been identified, in connection to the case, Boughton reports. He was allowed to return to his home after the search. Neighbors of the man told authorities they saw him and Greenhalgh arguing in the parking lot of his apartment complex Sunday night. The last post on Greenhalgh's Facebook mentions that she would be sleeping with the windows open and is believed to have referenced the Gainesville man as "batsh-- crazy boy (expletive deleted)." Greenhalgh had told several co-workers she had met numerous people through online dating sites and talked about the Gainsville man several times. (Read more)

Newspapers in the Virginias and Ohio were hit hard by derecho storm but kept publishing

By Ivy Brashear
Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues

When residents of Ohio, West Virginia and northwestern Virginia woke up last Saturday, June 30, they did not expect to see as much damage as they did. The storm that moved through the region the night before knocked out power, but they assumed it would be back on by the next day. What they didn't know was that the storm wreaked havoc for more than 400 miles from Indiana to the middle of Virginia, knocking out power and phone lines, toppling cell phone towers, demolishing trees and killing Internet service. It was a derecho, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's term for "a widespread, long-lived wind storm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms." The Pocahontas Times of Marlinton, W.Va., ran this time-lapse radar image, ending just as the storm hit Marlinton:

In times of natural disaster, it is often local journalists who first put boots to the ground to get information out to their community in spite of what may seem like insurmountable odds. In the areas of Ohio, West Virginia and northwestern Virginia most affected by the derecho, journalists were without power, Internet, phone service and sometimes even their normal printing presses, but they still found a way to provide their communities with local news. For a report from Jason Sanford of the Ohio Newspaper Association, click here.

"This was one of the worst storms we've ever had," West Virginia Press Association Executive Director Don Smith said. "It was sort of a perfect storm in a bad way." Several papers hadn't finished designing pages for their Saturday editions when the power went out, and several others lost the ability to print as a result. They had to shift printing of their papers to other locations, and some had to find places that still had power where they could finish designing pages.

Smith said he sat on the porch of a Bob Evans restaurant in Charleston, plugged up his laptop and used the restaurant's free wireless Internet to send updates to and communicate with newspapers across the state. Some editors, like Anne Adams of The Recorder in Monterey, Va., were making updates on their newspaper's Facebook pages with their iPhones.

"Then, we lost cell phone service and could do nothing," Adams said. On Sunday, she was able uploaded the first full-length post-storm story on the newspaper's website. Public access to the site was limited by a paywall, which she said has since been removed so the community could have full access to storm stories and updates.

Adams said the local telephone cooperative gave her staff access to its board room. She and her reporters took four computers there and worked our of the board room until power was restored to their office.

Linda Skidmore, editor of The Inter-Mountain in Elkins, W.Va., said she and her staff were unable to print at their location, so they loaded up their computers and traveled to Fairmont to finish designing and writing the Saturday edition. The paper is normally published late Friday night and sent out to readers early Saturday morning, but readers endured a slight delay. Most got their papers late Saturday or early Sunday.

The Pocahontas Times had to move operations to the county library, which still had Internet access and electricity. Editor Pam Pritt said they stayed there until they uploaded their pages and sent them to the printing press. The paper's IT specialist was able to write a complete story explaining the derecho on his iPhone and uploaded it to the paper's website, she said.

Navigating through towns to gather stories wasn't easy. Adams said traveling 10 miles in Highland County took about three hours. Several gas stations were unable to pump gas and grocery stores had to throw away dumpsters full of perishable foods because of lack of electricity. On average, Smith said, it took about 45 minutes of waiting in Charleston to fill up a car. Several thousand people are still without power and water in both states, and Smith said it's estimated that neither will be restored in some places until Sunday. But, reporters kept doing what they do best, he said: reporting the news.

"We were sort of like Superman: we jumped in the phone booth and put on the uniform," Smith said. "This is just our job. We do it all the time." Mostly reporters were frustrated by their lack of ability to get the news out because of power being out, he said, adding that readers don't often realize what reporters go through in a situation like this to get the news out to them. He said to his knowledge, not a single paper in West Virginia missed a publication date, even though some were late.

Skidmore said there was no other way for residents of her community to find information about the storm than through The Inter-Mountain. There was no TV, no radio and no Internet, and the paper was "really the only source to know what was going on." There was no question the paper would be published on schedule, she said.

"We have a long tradition of never missing an issue," she said. "We're like the mailmen: through rain, sleet, snow and shine." The newspaper office burned in the early 1970s, and the staff still published the next day. She said she and the staff kept that in mind, and decided that if the paper could come through a fire and still be published, it could surely be published after a storm. "You just go and you keep doing this," she said. "Our staff is very dedicated and just jumped in to do whatever, even if it was out of their normal realm."

Adams gives a lot of credit to her "unbelievably outstanding staff," who all live in the community and who were "all in this together." She said for her and the communities her paper serves, they rely on the weekly paper, which also serves Bath County. "I couldn't afford to lose even one issue," she said. "I can't go one week without a paper."

She also said the small, mountain communities came together to help their neighbors get through the aftermath of the storm. "If you have to have a catastrophe of this sort, there's no better place to have it than in a mountain community," she said.

Pritt said the Times is vitally important to the community. She had heard reports of a people sitting on their porch reading it by flashlight, and that shows the importance of the paper to citizens of the county. "When there is nothing else for them," she said, "they have their newspaper."

Pittsburgh paper profiles hometown boy, Agriculture Secretary Vilsack, saying he steers a middle road

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, 61, right, has come a long way from his "tumultuous adoptive household" in the rural Pennsylvania town of Squirrel Hill, reports Tracie Mauriello of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He rose to governor of Iowa, briefly ran for president in 2007 and was co-chairman of Hillary Clinton's primary campaign in 2008. He never thought he'd ever be chosen to be secretary because of his general opposition to President Obama politically.

Mauriello chronicles Vilsack's life and political career, summing up the latter with this: "Vilsack's faced his share of criticism from the Minnesota-based Organic Consumers Association, which says he's too lenient on factory farmers and producers of genetically modified crops. The conservative American Farm Bureau, meanwhile, has criticized him for attempts to increase regulations without scientific proof that genetic modification is harmful. 'I would say [Vilsack] has done a pretty good job going down that line,' said Dale Moore, chief of staff to three agriculture secretaries under the Bush administration and now is American Farm Bureau executive director of public policy. 'If you've got both sides equally nervous and irritated with you, then you're probably doing a good job.' " (Read more)