Most of big electric co-op's board quits, amid threat to CEO's job and strong community reaction

In a highly unusual move, most directors of Kentucky's largest rural electric cooperative have resigned after friction between board members and the co-op manager generated a public controversy.

Four of the seven directors of the South Kentucky Rural Electric Cooperative Corp. quit at the close of yesterday's board meeting. Last month, rumors that veteran CEO Allen Anderson would be terminated caused some in the Somerset area to rise up in protest. Anderson confirmed to The Commonwealth Journal's Jeff Neal last month that the rumors were based in fact. (CJ photo: Anderson hugs co-op member)

Anderson told Neal last month that he raised the issue of his employment with the board. "If they're actively trying to replace me, I think after 34 years I deserved for them to talk directly to me," he told Neal. "I think we all understand now that the [co-op] members will be watching and taking stock of what's happening." He said there had been a "rift" between him and some board members when the co-op's 50,000 member-customers didn't re-elect some incumbents. Some co-op employees were reportedly involved in the insurgents' campaigns, something that Anderson said he discouraged.

Yesterday, Board Chairman Richard "Rick" Stephens, left, board members John Pruitt Jr., William Shearer and Charles Gore resigned, along with board attorney Darrell Saunders. Stephens, who was on the board for 36 years, chairing it for the last 12, had been the target of a campaign to remove him from the board, reports Ken Shmidheiser of The Commonwealth Journal. The campaign was led by three local businessmen, who launched a website, Save SKRECC, that listed allegations against Stephens, including sweetheart land deals and possible conflicts of interest.

The co-op paid "just over $1 million, almost double what a company called Speculative Ventures had paid for the land just months earlier," for an 84-acre site for its new headquarters in 2003, reports Bill Estep of the Lexington Herald-Leader. "The Kentucky Public Service Commission denied South Kentucky's request to build an $18 million office at the site in 2009, saying the price was too high."

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/09/13/2336167/four-longtime-directors-of-south.html#storylink=cpy"

Stephens defended himself by saying everything was voted on by the entire board and supported by the management. "I am just one of seven individuals on the board, and do not have the authority to act alone," he wrote in The McCreary County Voice, a weekly newspaper that is owned by his family and competes with the McCreary County Record, which like The Commonwealth Journal is owned by Community Newspaper Holdings. (Read more)

The state of the weekly newspaper industry: healthy, more rural, not as digital as it could be

Between 1997 and 2009, the community weekly newspaper industry became dramatically more rural and more dominated by group ownership, according to a research paper, "The State of the Weekly Newspaper Industry," presented today at journalism educators' annual convention in Chicago. (Because of an error in the conclusions section, an earlier version of this item said it had become less rural.)

Fifteen years ago, 45 percent of weeklies were defined as rural, being in a city or town with fewer than 10,000 people; in 2009, the rural share was 67 percent. The suburban share fell to 21 percent, from 46 percent. Average circulation declined for weeklies based in metropolitan central cities, but grew for those in rural and suburban or "micropolitan" areas, with cities of populations between 10,000 and 50,000.

The study found that the share of weeklies that were group owned increased by about half, to 62 percent, since 1997. Research presented in 2004, using different methodology by different researchers, showed group ownership at 58 percent.

Roughly two-thirds of weeklies had websites in 2009, but only about 6 percent allowed visitors to directly upload articles, and about 6 percent had paywalls, the latest study found. That number appears to have increased greatly in the past year or two, but the research only went through 2009.

The study was presented by Stephen Lacy of Michigan State University at the convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. His co-authors were Daniel Riffe of the University of North Carolina, David Coulson of Jackson State University and Robin Blom of Michigan State. For a PDF of the paper, click here.

Award winner says failing to do good rural journalism tells rural people that they are 'not that important'

All that is, can or should be great about community journalism was on display July 20 as two rural newspaper journalists with very different but equally distinctive careers received the Al Smith Award for public service through community journalism.

Jennifer P. Brown, opinion editor and former editor of the Kentucky New Era in Hopkinsville, and Max Heath, retired vice president and executive editor of Landmark Community Newspapers Inc. received the award from the Bluegrass Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.

The award is named for the rural newspaper publisher who is a national SPJ Fellow and co-founder of the Institute, based in the School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky. Last year Smith was the first recipient of the award, which is presented for a career of public service through community journalism in Kentucky, or anywhere by a current or former Kentuckian, with preference given to those outside metropolitan areas.

In her remarks to the awards dinner crowd at Eastern Kentucky University's Center for the Arts, Brown, left, gave a clear picture of the fortitude and high goals often required be a good community journalist.

"You have to be careful with friendships, and you have to tell the truth. And then you see the subjects of your stories in the toilet paper aisle at Kroger," she said. "Often, I learn that we don’t expect enough from people. I mean we don’t expect enough from our own journalists and from the people we cover. Setting the bar high usually works. I hate to see people at smaller papers accepting crumbs. If you don’t do good journalism at small papers —and doing good journalism includes filing open records requests and complaining when the open meetings law is violated —then you are telling people who live in rural areas that their place in life, in the world, is not that important."

Heath established the editorial principles that have earned Landmark national recognition. He told the crowd that his work on journalism ethics and freedom of information was guided by the values of SPJ.

For more from Brown and Heath, and more about the award, click here.

Society of Environmental Journalists awards honor work on fracking, agriculture issues, many others

Reporting on hydraulic fracturing of deep shale for natural gas earned several reporters recognition in the 2012 Environmental Journalism Awards competition of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Other rural-oriented winners reported on other extractive industries, pesticide drift and patented seeds.

Photo: Barron Ludlum, Record-Chronicle

Ten reporters at the Denton Record-Chronicle in Texas won the Kevin Carmody Award for in-depth reporting in a small market  for “Citizens of the Shale,” a series that helped prompt the Texas legislature to requiring public disclosure of fracking chemicals and water use.

Mike Soraghan of Energy & Environment News won third place in outstanding beat reporting in a large market for his stories in Greenwire and The New York Times on the shale drilling boom. The entries were "Baffled About Fracking? You’re Not Alone;" "Big Mac Is King in N.D. Energy Boom, but Other Businesses Struggle to Keep Up;" In Fish-Kill Mystery, EPA Scientist Points at Shale Drilling;" "Earthquakes Erode Support for Drilling, but They're Nothing New;" and What EPA Really Said About Wyo. Fracking Pollution."

Second place in the small-market category went to Shauna Stephenson of the Wyoming Tribune Eagle for reporting on the Niobrara oil play; third place went to Clare Howard of 100 Reporters for "Downwind: Big ag at your door," about pesticide drift.

First prize for outstanding beat reporting in a small market went to Matthew S. Frank of the Missoula Independent and High Country News; second place went to Sandra Hausman of WVTF, the public radio station at Virginia Tech, for a wide range of stories, including one on fracking. The Columbia Journalism Review's Curtis Brainard won third place for a series titled "Environmental Journalism Under Fire." For links to those entries, click here.

In feature reporting, Paul Salopek won third place for “Closed-Source Crops” in Conservation magazine, which the judges called "a frightening and thought-provoking story that explores how multinational corporations have become the equivalent of the 'new seed oligarchy' in the agricultural world and how their practices and controls threaten biodiversity and food security." This category was won by Meera Subramanian for “India’s Vanishing Vultures” in the Virginia Quarterly Review. It "tells the story of an important but little-known ecological event, the sudden and rapid collapse of vulture populations in India in recent years." The story is here.

Editor makes sure her readers know that she was charged with DUI in another county

Terri Likens of the Roane County News in Tennessee is not the first newspaper editor to publish a prominent story about being charged with driving under the influence, but she is the first editor we know of (there are surely others) who did that about her arrest by a deputy sheriff in an adjoining county, where word of it might have been contained.

"I regularly talk to people who have ended up on the wrong side of the law and want to keep the incident out of the newspaper," Likens began her front-page column on May 2. "My answer is invariably a polite no-can-do. If the situation is a matter of our usual public record, it all goes in the paper. We make no exceptions."

Likens wrote that she couldn't give all the details, but "My blood-alcohol test was below the legal limit, and I respectfully and fully cooperated with everyone involved." She said the story was on Page One because "I can be considered a public figure," and "As someone whose newspaper has to publish the troubles of others, it is only fair that I have to publish my own, when circumstances warrant it."

Likens said she would plead not guilty and tell readers how the case turned out. She told us today what she will report in Friday's paper: "After the Cumberland County prosecutors reviewed the field test video, looked at the report and talked to the sheriff's deputy, the charge was dismissed on Thursday, June 7, cost to the state. It still cost me $1,200 in lawyers fees and bond, though." And she wanted us to tell you that she won the annual Max Heath Gold Star award for editors last month from Landmark Community Newspapers Inc. for day-to-day excellence in journalism: "The decision was made well before the DUI. But they did hold that up as an example of integrity during the presentation." A good punctuation mark, we think. (You can quote me in your column, Terri.)