Remarks of Al Cross at concurrent session at joint convention of Kentucky Press Association and Tennessee Press Association, Sheraton Park Vista, Gatlinburg, Tenn., June 21, 2002

It’s a real treat for me to attend this joint convention, because I’m a Kentuckian through and through, but also a Tennessean. I was born in Knoxville and spent the first two weeks of my life here.

Now, that was mainly because the hospital in my hometown in Southern Kentucky wasn’t quite finished yet, but I grew up watching Tennessee television – Jud Collins and Eddie Hill on the Nashville stations that were all we could get at home; and Cas Walker and Dolly Parton on the Knoxville stations we watched when we visited my mother’s family, which back then stretched from Dunlap to Johnson City and, yes, even to Gatlinburg. That’s my Aunt Wilma’s Gatlinburg Inn down on the Parkway next to the Sky Lift. There is where I most often read the Knoxville Journal, the News-Sentinel, the Tennessean, the Banner -- and the Mountain Press, when it came out just once a week.

All that Tennessee media meant that I knew about as much about Frank Clement, Buford Ellington, Howard Baker JUNIOR and Albert Gore SENIOR as I did about Happy Chandler, Bert Combs and Ned Breathitt, the Democratic governors of Kentucky when I was growing up.

Now, I grew up in a Republican family, so we did know plenty about Louie Nunn and John Sherman Cooper, whose home bases were 50 miles on either side of us. Politics was a frequent topic of conversation at the dinner table and my father’s car dealership, and he served a term in the legislature, so I guess it’s only natural that I became a political writer, the job I’ve held at The Courier-Journal for more than 13 years.

But that’s not what I had in mind at first. What I wanted to be was one of you. I wanted to be the editor or publisher of a local newspaper. My first paying job was writing sports for the Clinton County News, and I can still hear the linotype that was used to set my copy -- and smell the ink, and feel the heavy roller, that I used to pull my proofs. I was editing a twice-a-week paper when The Courier-Journal called with an offer that I couldn’t refuse.

But even though I have worked for the Louisville paper for 24 years, I’ve never lived in that city, or in any city larger than 40,000 people – Bowling Green, when I was in journalism school. At heart, I am still a rural person. And that is why I want to give you a report today about the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Affairs.

That’s a pretty long name for something that doesn’t really exist yet. The institute exists in the minds of a few of us who conceived it and found some money for some preliminary studies that we hope will get us a lot more money from a major foundation, such as Ford or Kellogg. I think the prospects for that are pretty good.

I am here to tell you some of the things we have in mind for the Institute, and to get some ideas from you.

But first, let me tell you how this idea developed.

It began with a couple of refugees from Middle Tennessee, Rudy Abramson and Al Smith.

Rudy is a retired senior staffer in the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times, a former reporter for the Tennessean, biographer of Averell Harriman, and the manager of a group of historians who kept the Disney Company’s from turning the Manassas Battlefield in Virginia into a theme park. He is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Appalachia, soon to be published by East Tennessee State University, and has been working on articles on coal in Appalachia as a senior fellow of the Patterson Center for Investigative Journalism.

Rudy’s work in the mountains gave him the idea for trying to come up with a way to help the community newspapers in Central Appalachia do a better job of covering the big issues that face it, such as the coal industry, non-coal economic development, water problems, social conditions, public corruption and so on ----

Rudy brought that idea to his old friend, and my friend, Al Smith -- former president of KPA, former publisher in several Kentucky towns, including London and Russellville, where he lived; former chairman of the Appalachian Regional Commission; and for the last 28 years the host of “Comment on Kentucky,” the weekly journalists’ roundtable on Kentucky Educational Television.

Al and Rudy brought the idea to me, and we quickly concluded that it could apply to all of rural America, not just Central Appalachia. But we agreed that we needed to start with a well-defined region and do some basic research that could help us make the case for some big-time grant money that could establish the institute and work toward a nationwide mission.

Central Appalachia – defined as all of West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, western Virginia, East Tennessee and western North Carolina -- was a natural starting point for us. That’s because many members of the committee we formed are deeply experienced in the problems of the region, and because it is a territory clearly understood as largely rural -- but maybe not so well understood as largely industrial rural (rather than agricultural rural).

And let’s be frank about it, folks: What region needs it more? Much of it is a beautiful blessing to this country, but much if it is also a chronic, festering pool of ignorance, disease, apathy, and despair. Where else do community newspapers need more help in taking on the bad guys, the court house creeps and vote buyers, and the sell-outs who run the sorry school systems? There may be another region in America that needs our help more, but I’ve yet to see it.

So, Smith took our idea to Lee Todd, the new president of the University of Kentucky, who immediately adopted it. That enabled UK to be the applicant for grants to get the project started, grants that nobody was going to make to an ad hoc group of meddling journalists but would make to an academic institution. The university has received two grants -- $30,000 from the Appalachian Regional Commission and $25,000 from SPJ’s Sigma Delta Chi Foundation.

Al and Rudy brought their idea to me last summer because they knew that I was about to become president of the Society of Professional Journalists and still had a great interest in the health of community newspapers – not just because I had worked in that field, but also because of my own experience as a bureau reporter for a metropolitan daily.

Like many dailies, The Courier-Journal’s circulation area has shrunk in recent years. Our staff won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of strip mining in Eastern Kentucky in 1967, but you can’t buy the paper in Eastern Kentucky anymore, just like you can’t buy the Tennessean in much of Tennessee or the Raleigh News and Observer in western North Carolina. These shrinking circulation areas have left a void that smaller newspapers need to fill.

There are other trends that have inspired us to take up this cause. Perhaps the largest is chain ownership. In many towns, we have seen chains improve newspapers they have bought, and I know that the biggest weekly operator in this region, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., is very interested in improving the quality of its news staffs. But I must tell you something I think you already know: In too many towns, chain ownership has not produced better journalism. We suspect that the obligations of new owners to pay off their lenders had compromised the ability of many newspapers to help set the public agenda for their communities through searching news coverage and pointed commentary.

But there were poor newspapers before the chains came, and there would be poor ones if all the chains broke up tomorrow. No matter what the ownership, the economics of community journalism have always made it difficult to balance our ideal role as public servants with our practical roles as managers and proprietors. I know that from personal experience; you’re listening to a fellow who co-signed a note to keep afloat a paper he didn’t have a nickel in before that, and had to close it down a few weeks later.

But I also know from personal experience that good public-service journalism can be good for the bottom line. When I worked for Al Smith, we covered the courthouse in much the same way that I cover the state Capitol today, and that kind of journalism helped Smith build his own little chain.

We know that’s the kind of journalism readers of community papers want. A decade of research conducted by community journalism students at Eastern Kentucky University has found that readers are hungry for accurate, unbiased information – particularly about local government. They also want to know how government actions affect ordinary citizens. And they want leadership from the newspaper in the form of local editorials.

That’s the kind of reporting and commentary that we want the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Affairs to foster. We don’t envision the institute as a training program in the fundamentals of journalism, but as a catalyst for better understanding of policy problems and cooperative efforts so that community papers can make the most of their limited resources.

We would reach out to encourage reporters, editors and managers to take advantage of short seminars geared to giving them background on regional problems. We’re already experimenting with such meetings; more about that later.

We would provide assistance from retired senior journalists who might guide or even edit regional coverage of educational, economic, and environmental issues.

We would seek to establish endowed chairs or visiting professorships or lecture series so that leaders in the news media, business, education and civic affairs could share their perspectives on issues with journalists who cover them.

We want the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Affairs to serve as a focal point and coordinator, mobilizing resources, fostering collaboration in investigation and reportage of regional issues, and promoting professionalism among journalists.

One of our committee members, Bill Bishop of the Austin American-Statesman, who started out as a community journalist in Appalachia and owned a weekly in Texas, says we can create a network of intelligence for rural journalists. Bill says: “The only way rural people will ever communicate with each other, or about each other, is to do it themselves. The only way they will understand the regional issues that are affecting them -- and they are all regional now: energy, welfare, the economy, government, etc -- is to create their own network of intelligence.”

We’re including “Community Affairs” in the title of the institute because we want it to be a broker of research that contributes not only to journalism, but to the work of elected officials and civic leaders — and ultimately to the public agenda of the states in the region.

Our principalconcern is to help the citizens in these communities have a betterunderstanding of their problems by improving the quality of journalism that serves them. We seek a better understanding of evolving and growing problems threatening small town and rural journalism, and we want to strengthen the role of local newspapers and broadcast outlets in the civic infrastructure.

To accomplish that, we are focusing on two ideas: First, learn as much as possible about what journalists in the region think about present working conditions and what they would like to have in way of help from our institute or any other program. Second, stay focused on the goal of getting issue-oriented coverage into the newspapers and other media, to help communities better understand their problems, face up to them, and deal with them.

In the case of the Appalachian states, the most pressing and enduring public issues are regional as well as local in nature. For example: from Pennsylvania to Alabama, county commissions, city councils, state legislatures, the courts, and a host of other state and local public institutions continuously confront economic and environmental issues arising from the coal and timber industries.

We’re already starting to build that “network of intelligence” that Bill Bishop talked about, with four regional conferences that are collecting and sharing information on rural issues and the press.

The first conference, at UK on April 5, featured a dozen journalists from five states discussing their personal challenges in producing newspaper work in small communities and the major recurring socio-economic issues they confront.

In May, in Charleston, W.Va, several academics involved with teaching journalism and communications met with the heads of the West Virginia and Kentucky press associations.

Next week in Knoxville, we will hear from representatives of a broad range of community groups, including both civic activists in the militant range and conventional advocates for business and education.

The fourth conference, next month in Charleston, will feature a forum on water quality and the coal industry, to demonstrate how the proposed IRJ would effectively pull together rural journalists and experts on a given issue of regional importance to share information in a brief time.

Generally, this meeting is to discuss water issues in central Appalachia and inform journalists that there are resources available on college and university campuses for backgrounding a variety ofpublic policy stories. To a certain extent the meeting will also demonstrate how an IRJ seminar might operate in a brief period of time.

Unless community newspapers engage such regional issues, make use of regional resources, and develop collaborative relationships with media organizations in other communities with similar socioeconomic challenges, we believe they will continue to languish.

That would be a shame, because we believe that few icons of the American community have more potential relevance to the 21st century. We believe that increasingly enlightened communities, now under-served by both print and broadcast news media, will embrace and support community newspapers and broadcasters that reclaim their role as components of the civic infrastructure.