Doctoral student Louisa Lincoln’s delves into her research on rural, small-town and community journalism in America.
When asked in an interview to describe the community of Marion, Kansas, Eric Meyer said, “If you’ve heard of any place in Kansas, it’s 60 miles from there” (Kabas, 2023).
Yet, in August 2023, the small rural town — population 1,922 — was thrust into the national spotlight when police officers raided the offices of the region’s weekly local newspaper, theMarion County Record. Meyer, the paper’s editor and publisher, was also confronted by law enforcement officers at his home, where police collected personal phones, computers and other electronic devices. The incident, which was the culmination of a long-simmering dispute between the county’s recently-instated police chief and the Record, attracted international news coverage and widespread outrage from press freedom groups, news media organizations and First Amendment scholars. Tragically, the raid also contributed to the sudden death of Meyer’s 98-year-old mother and Record co-owner, Joan Meyer, who collapsed and died the following day.
While the case of the Record is an extreme example, it is one in a series of incidents in recent years in which journalists working in rural and small-town communities across the United States have faced opposition from law enforcement, elected officials and other community members in the course of doing their work. But according to rural journalism scholars and practitioners, these threats aren’t new — nor are these headline-grabbing incidents among the most pressing challenges facing rural journalists today. In many cases, the risks rural journalists face on the job are far more mundane, but no less threatening to their livelihoods and professional responsibilities.
Building on a growing body of scholarship on rural, small-town and community journalism, and informed by interviews with both researchers and rural journalists themselves, this report calls attention to the myriad challenges faced by journalists living in, working in and covering rural America.
Doing Rural Journalism: “It’s Personal”
As the editor of Lancaster News earlier in his career, Benjy Hamm was frequently stopped by neighbors while out and about in the small town of Lancaster, South Carolina.
“I represented the paper everywhere I went,” he recalled. “I couldn’t go to Walmart or a restaurant or anywhere and not be recognized and not have people want to talk about the newspaper” (B. Hamm, personal interview, May 21, 2024).
Experiences like Hamm’s are not uncommon among rural journalists. In fact, experts and practitioners agreed that rural journalism is defined by its highly personal nature, in which community members regularly interface with the reporters and editors covering their region.
Hamm, who is now the director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky and an associate professor in the school’s College of Communication and Information, sees these interactions as the key differentiator between rural journalism and its more metropolitan counterparts.
“You are identified in the community, you’re represented in the community, you’re held accountable in the community. And that’s a good thing,” he said. “But it also puts you in a position of writing about people that you might be friends with. In larger communities and in bigger cities, that’s much less likely. And it means you can go in and out of the community and never run into the people again. Or if you do, they’re not central to your life” (personal interview, May 21, 2024).
Other practitioners agreed that the personal nature of rural journalism is ultimately a positive. Laurie Ezzell Brown, publisher of The Canadian Record in Canadian, Texas, values the two-way conversation with her readers.
“They can walk in my front door and my desk is at the front of the office,” she said. “They don’t have to come looking for me — if they have a problem, if they have a concern, if they want to tell me what a crappy editorial I wrote, I’m right here so we can talk about it” (L. E. Brown, personal interview, May 8, 2024).
That’s not to say that the close relationships between small-town journalists and their readers are without complication, Brown clarified. “Everything is personal. You know the people you’re writing about, you know who you’re criticizing. We’re the ones who hold public officials accountable. And sometimes that’s not a very popular thing to do” (personal interview, May 8, 2024).
Rural journalism is also defined by its physical distance from centers of power, resources and infrastructure, according to Dr. Gregory Perreault, an associate professor at the Zimmerman School of Advertising & Mass Communications at the University of South Florida.
“When you’re in a rural news organization, it’s not just your distance infrastructure-wise, but physically getting that kind of social support is far more difficult,” he said. Rural journalists are “physically distanced in ways that are perhaps easy to understate” (G. Perreault, personal interview, June 4, 2024).
The combination of heightened personal visibility and separation from essential social and professional support networks puts rural journalists at greater risk when they make coverage decisions that are perceived as unpopular, as Brown alluded. And increasingly, these circumstances make rural journalists particularly vulnerable to the seismic economic changes sweeping the media industry writ large.
Rural Journalism in 2024: “We’ve Got an Old Model in a New Economy”
Rural news outlets have been hit hard in recent decades by declining print advertising revenues, increasing consolidation and the subsequent layoffs, buyouts and closures that often follow. The 2023 State of Local News report from the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University found that the United States has lost nearly a third of its newspapers — nearly 3,000 publications — since 2005. Nearly 900 of these permanently-shuttered outlets were located in rural communities (Cross, 2023).
According to Bill Reader, a professor at the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University who studies community journalism, these closures occurred despite the fact that rural and small-town community newspapers historically brought in more revenue than their metropolitan counterparts.
“In the 90s, community journalism was profitable. Those were the big days of newspaper profitability,” Reader said in an interview. “Knight-Ridder, Gannett, McClatchy, all the big guys were making most of their money from the community papers. The big papers were either breaking even or losing money, so the community paper profits were subsidizing the high-profile and award-worthy stuff” (B. Reader, personal interview, April 16, 2024).
These community newspapers — often published weekly, thus earning the moniker “weeklies” — also historically served as the only source of news and information in small towns and rural regions. As Al Cross, director emeritus of the University of Kentucky’s Institute for Rural Journalism wrote in a recent report, rural weeklies are “a record of the births and deaths, the comings and goings of residents, the openings and closings of local businesses and the decisions of the school board and local governments” (Cross, 2023).
Despite their importance, as the market started to shift and as the newspaper industry began its descent into market failure, small community newspapers were among some of the first casualties. The same national publishing chains that had profited from the local papers began to reduce staff, consolidate newsrooms and otherwise cut back their operations.
Hamm said that many rural newsrooms were unable to move online as audiences and advertisers’ attention shifted away from print in the mid-2000s.
“They don’t have an economic model market that will support an online model — not easily. When people are saying that publishers just need to give up the print costs and go online, well, they can give up print costs and go online and go out of business,” he said. “There’s very little online that works for a place that has 1,500 circulation” (personal interview, May 21, 2024).
For that reason, many rural newspapers continue to publish primarily — if not exclusively — in print. And while their numbers have diminished considerably in recent decades, weeklies and non-daily publications still constitute the vast majority of the remaining newspapers in the United States. According to data from the Medill Local News Initiative, of the 6,000 newspapers still publishing as of 2023, nearly 4,800 are weeklies or non-dailies (Cross, 2023). Conversely, the same report found that 85% of all papers published in rural counties are weeklies.
Growing News Deserts, Declining Trust, Shifting Attention
The rampant closure of rural newspapers across the country have contributed to the emergence of news deserts, or communities that lack access to credible, comprehensive, local news and information. The latest Medill report identified 204 American counties that are presently considered to be news deserts — counties that are “predominantly rural and sparsely populated” (Abernathy & Stonbely, 2023), according to the study’s authors. Additionally, repeated cycles of layoffs, cutbacks and consolidation have led to the emergence of “ghost newspapers,” or publications that are “mere shells of their former selves, with greatly diminished newsrooms and readership” (Abernathy, 2020).
Tim Marema has experienced these changes firsthand. In his role as vice president of the Center for Rural Strategies and editor of The Daily Yonder, a national nonprofit newsroom dedicated to telling stories for and about rural communities, Marema has seen previously-thriving community newsrooms reduced to a staff of one or fewer.
“There’s been a lot of closures, there’s been a lot of buyouts. There are a lot of one person shops where they’re doing everything,” he noted. “There are even some where there’s not somebody there, but they’re publishing under the masthead of that property from another location. And one editor is doing several papers, by phone, primarily, and email” (T. Marema, personal interview, March 27, 2024).
Reader explained that reductions in the presence of journalists in rural regions — what he calls “boots on the ground” or “contact journalism” — contribute to declining levels of trust in the media (Brenan, 2023). A 2019 study from the Pew Research Center found that 42% of rural residents said it was “very important” for journalists to be personally engaged in the region they cover (Grieco, 2019). Of course, recent events including a global pandemic also drastically affected rural journalists’ ability to be physically present in their communities and to interact with readers on a consistent basis (Moon et al., 2024).
“If you have less contact in the community, the community is going to have less respect for the journalism that’s done there,” Reader said. “That jives with the Pew Research Center’s data about, you know, ‘I will trust a journalist if I know who they are. I trust journalists if they seem to understand the local culture and the local history.’ You can’t really do that unless you’re there and you’re in the community” (personal interview, April 16, 2024).
According to Perreault, this declining trust is “a huge disadvantage” for rural news outlets that were once defined by close connections to their readership (personal interview, June 4, 2024). When communities no longer trust their local newspapers — and, in a growing number of cases, when communities no longer have a local newspaper — residents turn to alternative sources for information.
“There’s no information desert in rural America,” Marema said. “If you don’t get it from one place, you get it from another,” such as talk radio and partisan national outlets (personal interview, March 27, 2024). The recent State of Local News report from Medill supported this assertion. “Cut off from state and regional news networks,” the authors wrote, rural residents “rely on their cell phones, which offer a diet heavy on national news, as well as misinformation and disinformation” (Abernathy & Stonbely, 2023).
So what do reduced newsrooms, declining levels of trust and shifting audience attention mean for the rural journalists who continue to cover their communities?
Threats to Rural Journalists Aren’t New — But They Are Changing
While the economic conditions of rural journalism have changed substantially and public attitudes towards the media have become more contentious, experts and practitioners are split on whether hostility towards rural journalists in the U.S. has tangibly increased in recent years.
Dr. Teri Finneman is an associate professor in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas. As a journalism historian, she said, hostility and physical threats to rural journalists are “nothing new.”
“You have always had small town officials that think they are above transparency and above the law. That’s why journalism plays the watchdog role that it has,” she said. While the raid of the Marion County Record is an extreme example, “when you’re the only one in the town, you’re dealing with these kinds of internal battles almost every week” (T. Finneman, personal interview, January 23, 2024).
Reader concurred with Finneman, citing the existence of “old boys’ networks” that operate in many small town and rural communities with little oversight.
“If a journalist catches wind of something pretty serious — some serious misconduct or malfeasance — and they start reporting on it, the old boys’ network can kind of come after them,” he said. “And that’s been true for centuries, there’s nothing new about that” (personal interview, April 16, 2024).
Numerous scholars and practitioners cited The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Kentucky, as an example of the longstanding threats faced by journalists covering rural America. In 1974, the newspaper’s office was firebombed by a disgruntled former police officer who was angry about the paper’s coverage.
A New York Times article following the incident noted that “at least one man, a policeman, had threatened to kill” The Mountain Eagle’s legendary publisher, Tom Gish. “Another, a trucker, stoop up at an open meeting and suggested burning down his newspaper. Others counseled that a mild-mannered Mr. Gish would benefit from a thorough beating” (Sherrill, 1974).
Nonetheless, Tom Gish and his wife Pat continued publishing — with a new tagline. According to Reader, “their motto before the fire was ‘It Screams.’ After the fire, it’s ‘It STILL Screams’” (personal interview, April 16, 2024).
As the daughter of The Canadian Record’s longtime publishers, Ben and Nancy Ezzell, Brown experienced threats of physical violence growing up as a result of her parents’ work.
“When I was a kid, my dad wrote something that made somebody mad enough that they put a small bomb under one of our bedroom windows,” she remembered (personal interview, May 8, 2024). Luckily, no one was hurt in that incident.
More recently, when covering a particularly contentious trial, Brown said rocks were thrown at The Canadian Record’s office windows and she received a “nasty letter” from an individual involved in the case. At one point, the windows of her car were shot out.
“I don’t often feel that threat,” she said. “But when you feel it, it’s pretty real” (personal interview, May 8, 2024).
Since 2017, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker has been logging those threats. A collaboration between the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Committee to Protect Journalists and other press freedom organizations, the tracker has recorded thousands of instances of press freedom violations across the country, including arrests, assaults and killings of journalists, along with death threats and newsroom raids like the one last summer in Marion.
The incidents documented by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker are by no means limited to small towns, but experts say the effects of these events on rural journalists are intensified because they tend to operate in isolation and away from social support networks.
“If you’re a small-town journalist, you’re more likely to be there alone. There are fewer people around to witness what happens. And maybe there’s threats, there’s intimidation perhaps, but I don’t know that it’s any worse” than in urban areas, Marema said. “I think these days that happens everywhere, and you can feel a little more alone when you’re in a small town” (personal interview, March 27, 2024).
These events are further heightened, according to scholars, by incendiary political rhetoric that portrays journalists as “the enemy of the people,” as Finneman put it. According to her, that discourse “has just made it harder for rural journalists to separate what they do from what the national narrative is” (personal interview, January 23, 2024). As a result, Perreault said, “rural journalists find themselves with audiences that are far more hostile than in the past” (personal interview, June 4, 2024).
This hostility also extends to coverage of hate groups in rural communities. A 2022 study from Perreault and his colleagues found that rural journalists were reluctant to identify instances of hate speech as such, at least in part because they risked compromising their personal, professional and psychological safety (Perreault et al., 2022).
“It would be physically as well as professionally disadvantageous to identify something as being hate speech or a hate group,” Perreault explained. “If they did that, that meant that people who knew where they live, and who they saw at the grocery store, would automatically perceive them as an enemy” (personal interview, June 4, 2024).
While violations of press freedom and instances of increased hostility towards journalists are undoubtedly worrisome, rural journalists and scholars alike say that these relatively isolated incidents misrepresent the day-to-day challenges of sustaining small-town, community journalism. As Marema put it, the difficulties rural journalists face on a daily basis are “far more mundane and important” (personal interview, March 27, 2024).
Everyday Risks to Rural Journalists: “Far More Mundane and Important”
According to researchers and practitioners, many of the day-to-day risks faced by journalists in rural regions of the country come down to one thing: a persistent lack of resources.
Experts said that this economic precarity manifests in several ways. For one, while rural newsrooms have never been huge, many are dramatically understaffed compared to previous levels. As a result, the remaining reporters and editors tend to be overworked and underpaid.
“In a lot of rural newsrooms, you’re it — like, you’re the whole newsroom,” Finneman said. “It is a tremendous responsibility to have to take on the entire coverage, essentially yourself, with very little help” (personal interview, January 23, 2024).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, these working conditions put rural journalists at a high risk of physical and mental burnout due to the ever-increasing demands of the job.
“I think the biggest risk is whether you have a sustainable work life,” Marema noted. “Now with these papers being so understaffed, I’ve heard of a lot of people who have left, saying ‘I just couldn’t do the job. If I did it with any kind of integrity, it would kill me. And if I didn’t do it with what I thought it needed, that was killing me, too’” (personal interview, March 27, 2024).
According to Perreault, these conditions are further intensified by the social and professional isolation under which rural journalists operate. In a forthcoming paper, Perreault and his colleagues examined the effects of precarious working conditions on rural journalists, including heightened risks to their mental health.
“I found it devastating in our most recent wave of interviews to hear how rural journalists felt so socially isolated,” he said. “They felt like, to do the work they needed to do, they need to be isolated. Which, to me, is a terrible place for a journalist to be because some of the things they cover are really hard on the mind and on the soul” (personal interview, June 4, 2024).
Another manifestation of persistent resource scarcity is its effects on rural newspapers’ coverage of their communities. As Brown noted, “there’s not only the threat of violence, which we’ve faced a few times. There’s also the threat of losing the revenue that keeps your business going” (personal interview, May 8, 2024).
Several current and former practitioners recalled instances earlier in their careers when local advertisers organized boycotts of their publications in response to controversial editorials or other disputes over coverage. While the outlets felt the squeeze at the time, they were ultimately able to withstand the boycotts. Today, rural publishers are not so sure they could do the same.
“We live on a very thin margin. I’ve never felt like I could be boycotted and survive that,” Brown said. “It’s daunting — you do what you’ve got to do, but it’s daunting. You’re always aware that there might be some backlash to something you write, the way you report something, but it’s just part of the job, I guess” (personal interview, May 8, 2024).
For Hamm, concerns around the impact of limited financial resources on coverage extends to rural news outlets’ inability to withstand legal challenges or fight open records cases, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. “People don’t realize how many cases for open records, open meetings aren’t being challenged today because the economic model has changed so much,” he said.
“You can be the best First Amendment advocate in your community and if you’re out of business, it doesn’t matter,” he continued. As a result, leaders of rural news outlets “may think twice if they think they’re putting themselves in a huge financial risk for filing open records requests or thinking they might be sued for libel or other things. These are very expensive propositions” (personal interview, May 21, 2024).
Third and finally, rural newsrooms’ persistent lack of resources is further exacerbated by infrastructure issues that prevent print newspapers from reaching subscribers. According to experts, recent changes at the U.S. Postal Service — the main delivery mechanism for many rural weeklies — are only making matters worse.
“At one point, we had a newspaper that was being printed in rural Kentucky that had to be picked up, sent to Lexington, sent to Knoxville, then sent back to Lexington, then sent back to rural Kentucky to be delivered,” Hamm lamented. “The efficiency is ridiculous. But it also meant that we were delivering a weekly newspaper four or five days after it was printed” (personal interview, May 21, 2024).
According to Finneman, these substantial delivery delays directly affect outlets’ already-thin margins. “It’s been an issue for years where the postal service doesn’t delivery newspapers on time,” she said. “People call [the newspaper] and they’re upset and they cancel their subscriptions.” To make matters worse, she continued, recent rate increases at the USPS have further squeezed outlets, “creating just a tremendous financial toll” (personal interview, January 23, 2024).
Altogether, experts say, these quotidian challenges around resources, reporting capacity and infrastructure present the greatest risks to the present and future of rural journalism.
The Future of Rural Journalism: “I Do Think It’ll Get Better”
So what do these challenges portend for the future of rural journalism? Perspectives from experts and practitioners are mixed, but there is an underlying sense of optimism — at least in the long-term.
Reader, for example, doesn’t believe that the hostility and incendiary political rhetoric directed at journalists in rural communities will be long-lasting. “I think that’s very short term,” he said. “It seems like it could last maybe a generation, but I don’t think it’s going to last much beyond that” (personal interview, April 16, 2024).
In the meantime, Reader and others are more concerned with community newspapers’ ability to recruit early-career journalists.
“In a lot of places, they’re having a very difficult time hiring people, particularly with people who are skilled and trained and then people who are coming out of journalism school,” according to Hamm. He went on to say that fewer journalism school graduates see print media as an option, and even fewer want to pursue a career in community news organizations. “We’re losing expertise, we’re losing experience, we’re losing a lot of different things that make these news organizations more vulnerable” (personal interview, May 21, 2024).
Challenges with recruitment also extend to difficulties with succession planning for longtime publishers who would like to retire — but can’t find people willing and able to take over for them. Even among the small-town, independent newspapers that continue to bring in a profit, buyers are increasingly hard to come by.
“It’s a succession crisis, basically, because publishers are at or past retirement age,” Reader said. “And they’re just done. They’re just worn out, and many of them can’t find buyers. They’re perfectly profitable newspapers — they can’t find buyers” (personal interview, April 16, 2024).
Brown is one such publisher. The Canadian Record’s print publication has been on a temporary hiatus since March of 2023, following a defamation lawsuit and two potential sales of the paper that later collapsed.
“I was getting tired. I was working ridiculous hours, and I’ve been doing it for a long time,” she said. “And although I loved the work, I was exhausted.”
While Brown is still regularly publishing stories on The Record’s website and Facebook page, she said that the paper’s physical presence has been sorely missed. Now, she’s having a different kind of conversation with neighbors when she’s out and about in Canadian.
“I can’t go to the grocery store without somebody accosting me and saying, ‘I miss my newspaper. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what’s happening in town. I don’t know about the elections,’” she said. “They want a newspaper” (personal interview, May 8, 2024).
The National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit trust, is working to conserve local community news organizations like Brown’s. Last year, the organization acquired dozens of community newspapers in Maine and Georgia, adding to their portfolio of publications in Colorado now under their nonprofit ownership. And rural journalism experts and practitioners say they’re optimistic about a nonprofit ownership model, given that it allows for greater focus on serving the community.
“Journalism should be a public service first, and a profit-generating business second, if it all,” Reader said. Nonprofit status means “that now we can commit to being public service and public service first. And the idea is that the more public service your journalism does, the more support you’ll get from the community.”
But Reader cautions that the financial benefits of converting to nonprofit ownership are not as dramatic as publishers might expect. “The financial gains are there. Not as significant as a lot of people think — they still have to pay taxes, they still have operating costs and things like that,” he said (personal interview, April 16, 2024).
Hamm also warns that, while nonprofit ownership works well for some communities, it’s not a universal solution. “The nonprofit models are going to help. They already are,” he said. “But every paper in America can’t be a nonprofit, so we’ve got to provide help to a lot of these other places” (personal interview, May 21, 2024). Brown, for example, said that she sees a lot of potential solutions, “but they don’t seem to trickle down to the smaller communities,” like Canadian (personal interview, May 8, 2024).
In Hamm’s view, organizations investing in supporting local community news — whether it’s nonprofit or for-profit — should focus on sustaining the outlets that are already there.
“If a place goes out of business, we can spend $1 million and put an online startup in a rural community and say you’re helping a news desert. But you could put $50,000 in right now and help this news organization better understand its business model and figure out a better way — and you’ll keep it,” he explained. “So, to me, it’s pennies on the dollar” (personal interview, May 21, 2024).
In her recently-published book,Reviving Rural News: Transforming the Business Model of Community Journalism in the US and Beyond, Finneman and her co-authors explore a potential membership-based business model for rural newsrooms. Drawing on extensive survey, focus group and oral history interview data, and working in close partnership with a small-town Kansas publisher, the “Press Club” model was born (Finneman et al., 2024).
“They ended up creating this model that people could pay an additional $60 to be a member of this club, and that would open them up to social outings every month,” she described. “Like going to baseball games, like touring a brewery and making it more of a social function, which is something that is greatly lacking in rural communities” (interview, January 23, 2024).
According to Finneman’s research, early indicators are that the model works — the experiment generated thousands of dollars in initial profit, signaled stronger connections with the community, and “resulted in a noticeable psychological shift among the journalism staff themselves” over time (Finneman et al., 2024, p. 2).
While these emerging models are encouraging, other practitioners believe that larger-scale, structural changes are necessary to ensure the future of local, community-focused journalism in rural America.
“I see the hollowing out that has occurred with Walmart and dollar stores, the closure of hospitals, the kind of unrelenting flow of wealth from rural areas to urban ones,” Marema said. “I think — and this is a very long game — that you’ve got to reverse that process and build stronger communities that both support journalism and understand its value.”
“You’ve got to look at economic and social conditions,” he continued. “And those have to change” (personal interview, March 27, 2024).
Other rural journalists, like Brown, are buoyed by the fact that their communities continue to place a high value on local, rural news — even when the print edition is on hiatus.
“News is important. Information is important. It is essential to our democracy,” she said. “I am passionate about it, and I passionately want to find a solution” (personal interview, May 8, 2024).
References
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Abernathy, P. & Stonbely, S. (2023). The state of local news: The 2023 report. Medill Local News Initiative. https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/2023/report
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Cross, A. (2023, December 5). Rural mirages: Shattered papers and ‘ghosts’ without local news. Medill Local News Initiative. https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/posts/2023/12/05/ghost-newspaper-solutions/
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Finneman, T., Mathews, N., & Ferrucci, P. (2024). Reviving rural news: Transforming the business model of community journalism in the US and beyond. Routledge.
Grieco, E. (2019, April 12). For many rural residents in the U.S., local news media mostly don’t cover the area where they live. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/04/12/for-many-rural-residents-in-u-s-local-news-media-mostly-dont-cover-the-area-where-they-live/
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Kabas, M. (2023, August 12). A conversation with the newspaper owner raided by cops. The Handbasket. https://thehandbasket.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-the-newspaper
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Moon, R., Perreault, M., Fargen Walsh, J., Perreault, G., & Lincoln, L. (2024). “Scooped by the town drunk”: Unpacking the effects of COVID-19 on rural journalism work. Digital Journalism.
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Sherrill, R. (1974, October 23). Warrants are issued by police arson investigators in burning of Kentucky newspaper. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1974/10/23/archives/warrants-are-issued-by-police-arson-investigators-in-burning-of.html
