Note: School of Journalism communications reporter Ben Weller attended the conference as a reporter and as a participant.


For all the talk in journalism circles about the imminent demise of newspapers, they remain the primary source of local news in plenty of places in America. These papers cover weddings and parades, but they also report on meatier issues like the environment, local schools and government, healthcare and rural poverty.

Last weekend, reporters, editors, academics, students and community organizers from across the country attended the National Summit on Journalism in Rural America. They came to Shaker Village, a restored historical community built among rolling pastures near Lexington, Ky., to share their ideas about the challenges journalists in rural areas face. They brought with them strategies for success and an enthusiasm for journalism that serves communities.

Professor Carol Polsgrove and this Web reporter represented the IU School of Journalism at the conference, which was sponsored by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues. The institute is housed at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

Polsgrove is an institutional collaborator for IRJCI. She said she came to the conference after teaching a class last semester in which students reported on election campaigns, labor and health and environmental issues in southern Indiana.

"There were issues coming up for communities in southern Indiana that needed more in-depth coverage," she said. She thought the conference might be a source of ideas for ways journalists can provide that coverage.

Part of her concern, and one echoed by others at the conference, is that local news is so local that it misses the connections between events at the local, regional, national and international levels.

"I'm interested in how to create systems that will allow individual communities in a region to see the issues they're facing as apart of a larger system," she said.

IRJCI director Al Cross said small communities and the media that cover them "suffer from the isolation that defines rurality," and added that a goal of the conference was to "help rural reporters and editors grasp the issues that come at them from afar."

Speakers identified economic downturns, lack of infrastructure and changing media markets as challenges to community journalism.

Some offered strategies to deal with challenges. School of Journalism Dean Brad Hamm's twin brother, Benjy Hamm, who is editorial director of Landmark Community Newspapers, spoke at the conference on the ways in which newspaper chains like his can provide community papers with resources such as training, legal advice and assistance on finding quality staff.

Some issues are entirely local. The uniquely personal quality of the news in small communities can stifle debate and discourage investigative reporting. It can sometimes lead to outright hostility between newspapers and community members, presenters said.

That aspect of community news coverage was highlighted at an awards dinner for conference-goers on Friday night in Lexington. Laurie Ezzell Brown and her mother, Nancy Ezzell, accepted the Tom and Pat Gish Award from IRJCI.

The Ezzell family runs the Canadian Record in Canadian, Tex., where for years they've been a thorn in the side of powerful people and corporations in their area and have suffered in the form of attacks on their home and their business, they said.

The award was named for the publishers of the Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Ky. Tom and Pat Gish, like the Ezzells, are legends of hard-hitting community reporting. They were also in attendance at the awards dinner.

Charli Wyatt, a young journalist who publishes a monthly called "The Voice" in Dunlap, Tenn., said she felt inspired meeting and listening to people who have struggled so hard to serve their communities through journalism.

"This is the first time I've ever had access to people who face some of the same challenges that we do," she said. "It's given me all kinds of ideas for how we might tackle some of those challenges."

Wyatt began publishing her paper last year in what she called a "crusade" to promote open government. She felt that her local paper had abdicated its watchdog role and was no longer serving the community.

Wyatt plans to attend the IU School of Journalism in the fall to pursue her master's degree.

"I want to pick up the technical skills that I lack and to build on those that I have," she said. "I also want to get a better sense of the role journalism plays in communities."


For more information, check out the IRJCI Web site.