New feature at Tenn. weekly answers question newcomers get: Why did you come here?

"I'm just so proud to be here" was
the opening line of Hickman County
native Minnie Pearl, whose statue will
soon be placed at the courthouse

They packed everything they had into a U-Haul, threw the dogs and cats into the truck and came to Hickman County, Tennessee, without jobs, friends, family or, frankly, anything but a deed to a piece of pretty property. Mark and Nicole Lewis came to the county seat of Centerville because they'd seen Nashville, 50 miles east, and were tired of New Hampshire winters. Six years later, the Lewises are so delighted by their decision they decided to tell the local weekly newspaper about it. Thus began the feature, "Why Did You Come Here?," a once-a-month installment that is now part of the Hickman County Times. 

Nicole Lewis' piece supports a recent trend "because that's the focus: newcomers who are creative types," Editor Brad Martin wrote. " Lewis fits that bill, having come to town and finding herself the founder of the county's Arts and Ag Tour straight-away. But why wouldn't she? In her 10-point list of things she loves about her county, she includes, along with a long growing season, Goo-Goo clusters, okra, strangers who wave and beautiful vistas, "I have met some of the most interesting, friendly, genuine, funny, smart, talented and caring people here in Tennessee." The Times is not online, but you can read Lewis's essay here.

A second "Why Did You Come Here" piece, offered up by the long-time member service adviser for the local electric cooperative, Jim Griffin, isn't as poetic, but it rings with heartfelt love of a town he came to in 1958 and has never seen reason to leave. We look forward to more.

Ex-ABC reporter gets that 'too close for comfort' feeling in writing about journalism in her community

By Al Cross

Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues

CHARLESTON, S.C. – A former network correspondent who wrote an admiring book about small-town newspapers, told their main national meeting this weekend that she has faith in the future of community journalism and had experienced its fundamental challenge – in writing about a Colorado community where she has a home.

Judy Muller spoke to the annual convention of the National Newspaper Association because she is the author of Emus Loose in Egnar: Big Stories from Small Towns. She started her career at a weekly paper in New Jersey, but writing the book after leaving ABC News and joining the journalism faculty at the University of Southern California gave her a much greater appreciation of “that too-close-for-comfort feeling” that her audience knows well.

But not as great as the appreciation she gained when she wrote about how local media in and around Norwood, Colo., where she has a home, handled a sensational bullying case at a high school where “the average graduating class is about 12,” and which had “torn the town apart,” she told the editors and publishers, who mainly run weeklies.

"I have been aware the whole time of how concerned I am about how the local editor there will react -- the article is somewhat critical of her coverage -- but she is a friend,” Muller said. "And the piece is not a flattering picture of the local school, and yet I hope more young families will move to the community -- after all, I have a home there, and property values are important."

But in reporting the story, which she has sold to The Atlantic magazine, being local worked to Muller’s advantage.  Parents of two boys charged in the case gave her exclusive interviews because, as they said, “You live up there on Deer Mesa and you gave the commencement address last year.”

And, for first time in her career, Muller sent interviewees their quotes in context, to show them how they would appear in the story. Asked what she would have done if the people decided they didn't want to be quoted at all, Muller simply said she would have talked them into it.         

The trust required in such situations takes time to develop, and that’s why Patch.com, the national network of online local news sites, “won’t get much cooperation,” Muller said.

Some weeklies are reluctant to embrace the digital world, but some noted for their good journalism are using social media to make sure they maintain the local-news franchise that is the secret to their status as the healthiest part of the newspaper business.

Muller said her friend Laurie Ezzell Brown of The Canadian Record in the Texas Panhandle is using all sorts of social media, which appeals to younger people. She quoted Brown: "Those who may have viewed the paper as too staid or serious are finding that it is much more friendly and approachable."

Meanwhile, though, the paper has also expanded its efforts in a more traditional way, cultivating two non-staff columnists whom Laurie says have developed their own followings.

Muller sees a good future for printed community papers, because they provide local news, often of deep personal interest worth clipping, that is unavailable anywhere else. "They have a captive audience,” she said. “As long as there are refrigerator magnets there will be weekly newspapers."

But Muller concluded with exhortations about the most important reason for community newspapers: covering local officials and holding them accountable. "Try to remember why you got into it in the first place,” she said. “It's more important now than ever."

National Newspaper Week deserves attention

Oct. 7-13 is National Newspaper Week, an opportunity for newspapers to remind their readers of the important roles they play in their communities, especially rural places where the newspaper is the only reliable medium for local news and information.

In recent years, there has been another reason to share the observance with readers: the mistaken notion that newspapers are a dying industry. That is certainly not the case with community newspapers, and "In the interest of balance and fairness, how about we tell the other side of the story," asks Tom Larimer, executive director of the Arkansas Press Association, in his column in this week's Arkansas Publisher.

Tom and his fellow Newspaper Association Managers (the name of their group) coordinate the observance each year and make a promotional kit available for newspapers to use. "You could add to these an historical timeline of your local newspaper, when it was founded, who founded it and historical high points for the newspaper," Tom writes. "Run some old photos that involve the newspaper in your NNW observance. Some local newspapers once sponsored the local community band. I’ve seen some great photos of these bands posed up in front of the newspaper office. This is great stuff because it helps drive home the theme, that the local newspaper is the cornerstone of any community. In so many cases the newspaper is the oldest continually operating business in town. If that’s the case, say so in a feature. You could decorate your office with some old copies of the newspaper and invite the community to stop by and have a look. Keep the coffee pot on and put out a tray of cookies. Everybody likes that, and these types of events further connect the newspaper to the community." For the promotional kit, click here.

Rural residents depend on papers for local news, but urbanites are more interested in local topics

Metropolitan, suburban, smaller town or rural, all types of places are big consumers of news -- be it local, national or international. But how and where we get that news and how much we "participate" in it differs between community types. And that may be more of a function of the digital and social media available to us than our desire to weigh in on the topics. Or so a recent study of local news and community types strongly indicates.

A just-released national survey conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that rural residents did indeed still rely on newspapers for most of their local news. Researchers speculated that is because most rural areas get little coverage from other media, and many "micropolitan" towns of fewer than 50,000 people have no television station.

However, they noted that "the choices about information acquisition are not necessarily the same in all communities. For instance, it might be the case in rural areas that the local newspaper and broadcast outlets are not online or have a very limited online presence and that is a determinant in whether residents get local information online or not."

And, perhaps surprisingly, researchers found that those who live in rural communities are "less interested in almost all local topics than those in other communities. The one exception is taxes. They are also are less likely . . . to say it is easier now to keep up with local information."

Interestingly, rural people were more likely than most to say they are willing to pay for local news content through a paid subscription to a local paper; 37 percent said so, a larger share than any but suburbanites, at 40 percent.

The study, co-authored by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and Internet & American Life Project, in partnership with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, also reported these findings:

• Urban and suburban residents on average use more sources of local news than their small town and rural counterparts and are more likely to consume local news on mobile devices.
• The most active “local news participators” also tend to reside in suburban and urban communities where they email local stories to others, post material on sites, comment, post or e-report.
• Suburbanites are most likely to use radio as a news source -- researchers postulated this might be a consequence of longer commutes. They are the most likely of the four distinct community types to use the Internet for information about local restaurants, businesses and jobs.

To read the full report, go 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)

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.

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)

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.

After officials berate reporter, publisher calls them out face to face, and in paper, for violating bid law

After the commissioners of Crawford County, Missouri, "verbally attacked" a Cuba Free Press reporter who had asked questions about road projects and spending, according to the Missouri Press Association Bulletin, Publisher Rob Viehman confronted the commissioners and asked why they hadn't given the weekly newspaper two records it had requested: a list of bids for road materials and planning records for this year's road work. (Wikipedia map)

His questions, and the commissioners' answers, revealed that the county had been disobeying state law by not seeking bids for the materials. "I'm not saying you didn't get a fair price, but we don't know if you did," Viehman told them. "We just want you guys to follow the rules."

Viehman wrote in an editorial: "Not only does the bidding process give the taxpayers the best deal, it provides the elected officials with cover and accountability. It’s to our commissioners’ benefit to take bids on everything they can so they can tell the voters, their neighbors, 'We asked for bids and we accepted the bid that we felt was best for us because ... ' By not taking bids, our commissioners can’t say that. Taking bids could also get the taxpayers a better price on items that may only be available locally from one vendor. If the only asphalt supplier in Crawford County has to submit a bid for their product, isn’t it more likely they will reduce their price out of concern a nearby competitor might underbid them? If bids aren’t taken, however, that can never happen. By not taking bids, our commissioners don’t know if the taxpayers got the best price for asphalt, rock and culverts. That’s the problem!" (Read more)

Budget cuts strangle Forest Service's ability to fight 'catastrophic' forest fires, Idaho paper says

The U.S. Forest Service hasn't been exempt from budget cuts in recent years, and the editorial staff of The Idaho Statesman outlines some reasons why taking money from the agency is leaving it with little resources to fight massive forest fires that have been devastating the West in recent years.

"Congress raided $200 million from a Forest Service’s firefighting fund in 2011, and grabbed another $240 million this year," the staff writes. "That leaves the Forest Service looking for ways to reduce firefighting costs — before they eat into the rest of the agency’s budget." The Service decided to aggressively fight fires "from the outset" this year in the hope it can save money by ending fires early. That approach "is the Forest Service's equivalent of kicking the can down the road," they write.

Stopping small fires could stop larger fires in the short run, but they write, it leaves forests with lots of undergrowth that increases the risk of "catastrophic fire" later. "And so, in a delicious little government irony, the Forest Service is making decisions that might compromise the health of the forest -- in order to preserve its budget for initiatives such as 'forest health,' the use of logging and prescribed burns to thin out fire-prone lands." (Read more)

Community newspaper's lip-dub video shows a staff that has fun and cares about the community

One of America's best non-daily newspapers, The Pilot of Southern Pines, N.C., has done th usual fine job as it joined the bandwagon of lib-dubs of Carly Rae Jepsen's hit song "Call Me Maybe." Producers Hannah Sharpe and Cassie Butler, right, describe the process. (Pilot photo by Glenn Sides)

John Nagy, editor of the thrice-weekly, told John Robinson of the Poynter Institute, “We just wanted to practice one of our core corporate values: have fun. It was a great way to break up the long summer and show everyone we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”

Robinson writes, “They’ve succeeded. This is a place that has fun and clearly cares about its community. To me, this feels as if you could walk on in and be invited to sit and have a cup of coffee. Sadly, that’s exactly what many newspapers don’t feel like.” (Read more) Here's the video:

Postal discount to direct mailer OKd; newspapers going to court, say watchdog role threatened

UPDATE, Sept. 2: For a PDF of frequently asked questions about the deal, with answers from NNA, click here.

The Postal Regulatory Commission has voted 4 to 1 to support to a U.S. Postal Service plan to give a discount to a prominent direct mailer, a move that struggling newspapers say will probably reduce an important income stream for them. For background, click here.

Under the service's three-year deal with Valassis, the company will get a discount on additional pieces sent. Ruth Goldway, the commission’s chairwoman, acknowledged that newspapers were upset with the proposed deal, but said that the discount given to Valassis would not give the company an unfair advantage. “The Commission understands that both newspapers and the Postal Service are experiencing declining revenues as new technologies based on the Internet grow in popularity," she said. "Today’s decision affirms that fair competition between these two important institutions is consistent with the law.”

The Newspaper Association of America, representing most dailies, said it was “stunned” by the decision and would take it to court. (Read more)  National Newspaper Association President Reed Anfinson, publisher of the Swift County Monitor-News in Benson, Minn., said the association of weeklies and small dailies was "deeply disappointed" in the commission’s analysis.

"The commission begins with the presumption that having a federal enterprise competing head-on with the newspaper industry is a good thing, but it does not explain how any business can be on a level playing field when competing with its own government," Anfinson said. "The mailing contract with Valassis is an unfair deal in which the principal result is to drive down the advertiser’s prices and not necessarily to bring any new mail volume to the Postal Service. What the commission does not explain is why this goal is in the best interest of either newspapers or the Postal Service. Nor does it take seriously the arguments raised by many that this deal will force more newspapers out of the mail and create a net loss for the Postal Service after the deal kicks in."

Anfinson took issue with the commission's view, as he described it, that there is no "problem with the Postal Service’s draining revenues from news-gathering organizations. Somehow it seems to believe the centuries-old mailing category for periodicals created by Congress is able to equal out the harm from contracts like this one. . . . We know that in thousands of communities around this nation that newspapers remain the most vigorous watchdog of government as well as the primary source of community news."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Penn State not covered by state open-records law

If Pennsylvania's open-records law applied to Penn State, the Jerry Sandusky scandal might have been uncovered much earlier, saving some children from abuse, Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute writes after hearing from Sara Ganim, the Harrisburg Patriot-News reporter who broke the story and won a Pulitzer Prize.

Ganim (CNN image) "told a group of reporters and editors at Poynter that the open record exemption made it much more difficult to investigate the sex abuse story," Tompkins reports, and explains why the law doesn't apply to The Pennsylvania State University and three other "state-related institutions." He says they must file less information than publicly traded companies have to file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That is less than politicians have to file when running for state or federal office." Penn State lobbied to keep the exemption when the law was strengthened in 2008.

Tompkins says forner FBI director Louis Freeh, who investigated the university's handling of teh Sandusky matter, should have included making Penn State subject to the open-records law in his recommendations: "The abuse at Penn State is a lesson to us all about what happens when powerful people and public institutions are allowed to operate in the shadows created by what Freeh called a 'closed culture.' It is a culture that protected abusers, failed to protect victims and survived by closing its records to journalists who might have exposed it." (Read more