Bluegrass Pro Chapter, Society of Professional Journalists

The owners of a weekly newspaper in West Kentucky, who have persevered for almost 30 years in the face of increasing challenges to the industry – and to them and their community – are the winners of the 2022 Al Smith Award for public service through community journalism by Kentuckians.

Chris Evans and Allison Mick-Evans own The Crittenden Press in Marion, a town of 3,000 and the seat of Crittenden County, pop. 9,000. It is one of Kentucky’s smaller newspaper markets, and is losing population, but the Press shows that a paper doesn’t have to be big to be good, said Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues in the University of Kentucky’s School of Journalism and Media. (The Institute publishes The Rural Blog.)

“The Crittenden Press has long been a standout newspaper in West Kentucky, from the days when Allison’s family, the Micks, owned it,” Cross said. “It has always punched above its weight and set an example for others to follow.”

The Institute presents the Smith Award with the Bluegrass Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Chapter President Tom Martin said, “The Press is the embodiment of a vital community newspaper.”

That has been especially evident in the last few months, as the City of Marion has endured a water shortage. The Crittenden Press has been a lifeline of information for citizens, digging into the reasons for the crisis, broadcasting City Council meetings, doing live interviews with emergency responders and giving news updates in real time.

The paper was an early adopter of online journalism, as evidenced by its URL, the-press.com; during a major ice storm in 2009, Editor-Publisher Chris Evans ran it on generator power and published a special news flyer with updates on electricity status and aid stations. The paper’s innovations are cited in a Publishers’ Auxiliary column by Chip Hutcheson, a retired publisher in the area.

During the pandemic, Evans found discrepancies in data from the district health department and coordinated with it to correct the numbers, and the Press was one of 14 Kentucky papers to publish a special vaccination section sent to all households in the county, in cooperation with the Institute, the Kentucky Press Association and UK’s Cooperative Extension Service.

A 2006 episode is an example of Evans’s investigative reporting. He revealed misuse of more than $200,000 by the local economic development director, who was indicted and forced to repay most of it.

When a drug bust prompted false, online rumors of shootings and murder, Evans countered them with online postings that carried credibility because they were not anonymous, and because people respect him and his newspaper. “Our task is to be in a position to provide credible information in whatever form people want it in,” he said in 2011. “You’ve got to embrace technology, understand where your audience is at, and get there—and the credibility you have will draw people back to you.”

Chris Evans “is everything to this paper, and the paper is everything to him,” Allison wrote. “He insists that content in The Crittenden Press be hyperlocal. No canned news, no state filler. It’s time-consuming, but it’s important to him.” Away from the paper, he has served nearly 30 years on the local park board, where he “essentially serves as the volunteer maintenance man: and orchestrated a major lighting renovation of the park with city, county and school partners to complete the project,” she wrote. “He has also served in various leadership capacities in his church.”

Cited as a community-journalism exemplar in Harvard University’s Nieman Reports in 2011, Chris described his journalism philosophy simply: “We are here to serve people. Then he quoted Bryant Williams, the Tennessee publisher for whom he had worked: “The only higher calling is the ministry.”

At a time when most newspapers are owned by chains that are struggling to meet profit goals and still provide public service, Chris and Allison have continued their local, independent ownership, even as they have had to reduce staff due to declining revenue, a burden for almost all local newspapers.

“We have never had any desire to sell, but I have to admit that with Chris’s retirement not too many years away, we’ve been talking about an exit plan,” said Allison, who is the paper’s advertising manager. “Sadly, seeing the decline of papers in our region that have sold to large conglomerates makes us uneasy. It’s like a parent thinking they, and only they, can adequately take care of their child.”

The sustainability of rural journalism, and the maintenance of local, independent newspaper ownership, are newly adopted goals of the Institute for Rural Journalism, which was founded in the UK College of Communication and Information 20 years ago.

The Smith Award is named for the late Albert P. Smith Jr., who was the driving force for creation of the Institute, headed its advisory board and was its chair emeritus until his death in March 2021 at the age of 94. He published newspapers in Western Kentucky and Middle Tennessee, was founding producer and host of KET’s “Comment on Kentucky,” and federal co-chair of the Appalachian Regional Commission. He was the first winner of the award.

The award will be presented at the Al Smith Awards Dinner Nov. 3 at the Embassy Suites Lexington on Newtown Pike, near Interstate 64/75. Winners of the Institute’s national Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, tenacity and integrity in rural journalism, to be announced soon, will also be recognized at the event.

Previous winners of the Smith Award, and their affiliations at the time, are:
2011: Al Smith
2012: Jennifer P. Brown, Kentucky New Era; and Max Heath, Landmark Community Newspapers
2013: John Nelson, Danville Advocate-Messenger
2014: Bill Bishop and Julie Ardery, The Daily Yonder
2015: Carl West, The (Frankfort) State Journal
2016: Sharon Burton, Adair County Community Voice and The Farmer’s Pride
2017: Ryan Craig, Todd County Standard, and the late Larry Craig, Green River Republican
2018: Stevie Lowery, The Lebanon Enterprise
2019: David Thompson, Kentucky Press Association
2020: Becky Barnes, The Cynthiana Democrat
2021: WKMS News, Murray State University

If you answered “yes!” to both questions, apply now for the Mike Farrell Memorial Scholarship, given by the Bluegrass Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. The chapter gives at least one scholarship each year in memory of Mike Farrell, who was managing editor of the Kentucky Post and later a journalism professor at the University of Kentucky’s School of Journalism and Media.

For more information, and to apply, go to this link: https://airtable.com/shrxxvvsaOTgaUh6R

Deadline: April 15, 2022*

*Outstanding journalism students don’t miss deadlines.

The journalists at WKMS-FM at Murray State University are the winners of the 2021 Al Smith Award for public service through community journalism by Kentuckians.

“We usually think of ‘community’ as one county, town or neighborhood, but there are geographic communities, and there are communities of interest. West Kentucky is a geographic community of interest, and WKMS has the only newsroom that covers the whole region and its interests,” said Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky (and publisher of The Rural Blog). “It does it well.”

The institute presents the award with the Bluegrass Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Chapter President Tom Eblen, a former Lexington Herald-Leader managing editor and columnist, said “WKMS has a history of reporting important stories in its region accurately, thoroughly and without fear or favor. It is a model for courageous public-service journalism, especially at a time when citizens are looking more to public radio to fill voids left by shrinking commercial media outlets.”

The station was nominated by Constance Alexander of Murray, a columnist and playwright who is on the Institute’s advisory board. She wrote, “With a consistent record of reporting on important events and community issues — and editorial leadership that dares to address controversial subjects and hold power accountable — WKMS serves the informational, cultural and community needs of the region, exemplifying the values represented by the Al Smith Award.”

The station is being honored for years of work and maintaining its high quality despite getting less money from the university. It has covered its paymasters forthrightly, reporting in 2013 that a quorum of the Board of Regents discussed official business, including an extension of the president’s contract and the station’s funding, at a social gathering the night before its official meeting.

In 2018, the station revealed that a Murray High School teacher’s predatory sexual behavior had been under investigation by the Kentucky Education Professional Standards Board for five years, with no public disclosure. After two suspensions, the teacher resigned.

In 2020, WKMS reported that the Marshall County judge-executive had refused to sign a grant application for more school resource officers after a deadly school shooting, while giving two employees raises totaling nearly $30,000, the amount the county would have had to contribute for the grant if awarded.

In daily and enterprise reporting on the pandemic, WKMS has been “a beacon of information, companionship and understanding in a time when we needed it most,” Alexander wrote. But the station also continued its accountability journalism. Assistant News Director Liam Niemeyer won a regional Edward R. Murrow Award for a story about a Paducah school official who appeared in blackface for Halloween. Rather than make the school official the main focus, Niemeyer framed his story within the context of the larger experience of the Black community in Paducah, giving a richer view of the city’s racial history, and a deeper understanding of why use of blackface by a trusted public official was so hurtful. The story launched an occasional series, “Black Lives in Red States,” that is continuing at Ohio Valley ReSource, a consortium of public radio stations in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia.

WKMS Station Manager Chad Lampe who moved up from news director in 2015, said, “I am so incredibly proud of our newsroom and our station staff as a whole. We take an ‘audience first’ approach to all of our work and this is why we remain committed to telling stories that matter. I am particularly proud of our Murray State student journalists who we bring into our newsroom, train and mentor to produce professional news right alongside the work of our staff.”

The station is an affiliate of National Public Radio. “WKMS is unique in our region as our only full-service provider of public media news,” noted Berry Craig, retired history professor at Paducah Community College. “The closest NPR affiliates to Murray are at Southern Illinois Universityin Carbondale – almost 114 miles north – and Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, nearly 119 miles east.”

WKMS punches above its weight by partnering with other news outlets in the region, which was once served by the Louisville Courier Journal and occasionally by papers in Tennessee and Indiana.

“WKMS has met the challenge, and then some, to report more deeply on stories about local governments, race relations, education, the environment, culture and the coronavirus pandemic,” said Hoptown Chronicle Editor-Publisher Jennifer P. Brown of Hopkinsville, a WKMS partner and a previous Smith Award winner.

The award is named for the late Albert P. Smith Jr., who published newspapers in Western Kentucky and Middle Tennessee, was founding producer and host of KET’s “Comment on Kentucky” and federal co-chair of the Appalachian Regional Commission. He was the driving force to create the Institute, headed its advisory board and was its chair emeritus until his death in March at 94.

Smith was the first winner of the award. This is the first time it has gone to broadcasters or a news outlet at a university.

The award will be presented at the Al Smith Awards Dinner in Lexington Oct. 28. The dinner was not held in 2020, due to the pandemic, so 2020 winner Becky Barnes, editor of The Cynthiana Democrat, will receive her award at the dinner, too. Winners of the Institute’s national Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, tenacity and integrity in rural journalism will also be recognized at the event.

Previous winners of the Smith Award, with their affiliations at the time, are:

2011: Al Smith

2012: Jennifer P. Brown, Kentucky New Era; and Max Heath, Landmark Community Newspapers

2013: John Nelson, Danville Advocate-Messenger

2014: Bill Bishop and Julie Ardery, The Daily Yonder

2015: Carl West, The (Frankfort) State Journal

2016: Sharon Burton, Adair County Community Voice and The Farmer’s Pride

2017: Ryan Craig, Todd County Standard, and the late Larry Craig, Green River Republican

2018: Stevie Lowery, The Lebanon Enterprise

2019: David Thompson, Kentucky Press Association

2020: Becky Barnes, The Cynthiana Democrat

The board of directors of the SPJ Bluegrass Professional Chapter issued this statement today regarding House Bill 312:

A bill moving quickly through the Kentucky General Assembly would weaken the state Open Records Act, and Kentuckians need to know more about it, the board of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Bluegrass Chapter said today.

House Bill 312 would make leaders of the legislature the sole judges of what legislative records could be released; give public officials five days instead of three to respond to a records request; keep non-Kentuckians from using the open-records law; and impose other restrictions.

The House of Representatives passed the bill Friday, the day after its text was revealed. The Senate could pass it as early as Wednesday.

“This bill would reduce government transparency, and legislators are rushing it into law in a non-transparent way,” Bluegrass Chapter President Tom Eblen said. “If legislators have legitimate issues with the Open Records Act, they should be willing to debate them in public. Many taxpayers don’t think we need more government secrecy.”

The Kentucky Press Association, the lobby for the state’s newspapers, did not oppose the bill, saying it was “the culmination of nearly two years’ worth of good-faith negotiations” and compromises by KPA, legislative leaders and the Kentucky League of Cities.

KPA General Counsel Jon Fleischaker, who largely wrote the Open Records law in 1976, told SPJ that the negotiations eliminated proposals that would have kept preliminary and economic-development records secret, and would have allowed individual legislators to decide whether to release records relating to themselves. KPA said its agreement not to oppose the bill prevented changes that would have “devastated the public’s right to know critical information about the state.

SPJ leaders said they appreciated KPA’s decades of leadership on open-government issues, and they understood the difficult situation the association faced. But they pointed out that the Open Records and Open Meetings acts were written to make government more accountable to citizens. While journalists use these laws to keep the public informed, most open-records requests are made by members of the public, not reporters.

“A deal between lobbying groups doesn’t have to be the last word when it comes to public access to government records,” said Bluegrass Chapter Secretary Al Cross, a former national SPJ president who directs the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues as a University of Kentucky professor. “News organizations face difficult times and are less willing or able to fight these battles nowadays, so we want to remind Kentuckians that they also have roles to play, as citizens and voters.”

The Kentucky Open Government Coalition, a citizens group that wasn’t involved in the negotiations, opposes the bill.

To download this flyer as a PDF, click here: SPJ program

The Bluegrass Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists is now taking applications for its annual scholarship, named in memory of journalist and journalism educator Mike Farrell. The chapter will award at least one $1,000 scholarship to a college journalism student from Kentucky or attending a Kentucky institution. For more information, and to apply online, click here.

The Bluegrass Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists objects to any ordinance, resolution or policy that restricts members of a public agency from commenting about discussions that the public agency holds in closed sessions.

We make this statement in response to the plan of the Frankfort city commission to add to its ethics ordinance language “that would prohibit commissioners from disclosing the contents of closed sessions,” according to The State Journal.

The Kentucky Open Meetings Act allows public agencies to meet in private for several legitimate reasons. Those exceptions can be abused, so public-agency members should be free to speak about such meetings without fear of official retribution. In the absence of journalists and others who act as watchdogs on government activities, public-agency members are the only available watchdogs, on themselves. They should not be muzzled. If they abuse their right of free speech, they are subject to political retribution by their fellow members and the voters.

Such whistleblowers should not be subject to official retribution, which appears to be the plan in Frankfort. The proposal there arose after one city commissioner told The State Journal what happened in a closed session immediately before the city manager was fired in open session (without any real discussion of the move) and another commissioner said the mayor had three votes going into the meeting to accomplish the firing.

The State Journal has filed a complaint with the attorney general, alleging that two commissioners and the mayor (a majority of the commission) violated the “rolling quorum” provision of the law, “which prohibits elected leaders from hashing out public policy in individual conversations rather than in full view of taxpayers,” as the newspaper accurately describes it in an editorial.

The State Journal also says, “While we agree that such disclosures should be rare, latitude must be left for an elected official to blow the whistle on illegal or improper behavior behind closed doors. An airtight ban almost certainly would violate an elected official’s First Amendment rights, if not a state law that protects whistleblowers.”

We agree, and ask the Frankfort city commission to forget this ill-advised notion – which would surely cost taxpayers for the defense of a lawsuit the city is likely to lose – and pay attention to the open-meetings law.

Tom Eblen, president
Al Cross, secretary

Approved by the chapter board, Oct. 11, 2020. 

Becky Barnes, editor of The Cynthiana Democrat, is the 2020 winner of the Al Smith Award for public service through community journalism by a Kentuckian.

Barnes, who has worked at the weekly for 44 years, distinguished herself most recently by arranging a special edition that was mailed to every household in Harrison County, funded by local government, less than two days after it was announced that the county had Kentucky’s first case of covid-19, in early March.

“Becky’s initiative was a groundbreaking piece of work that set an example for rural weeklies,” said Al Cross, director of the University of Kentucky’s Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, which presents the award with the Bluegrass Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

“At a time when everyone in her county needed reliable information, not rumors, about a clear and present danger, Becky and the local officials found a way to deliver it,” Cross said. “This example has been followed by other weeklies, and at a time when the pandemic has hurt newspapers’ advertising revenue, it shows how they can tap a new revenue source while rendering essential public service.”

Barnes and her newspaper have continued to focus on the pandemic and its local effects. She and staff writer Lee Kendall streamed live news conferences with the county judge-executive, mayor and public-health director, and thousands watched. She was widely noticed for an April 30 column about masks, which weren’t required at the time but were becoming controversial. It concluded, “I will wear a mask not because I am required to do so, but because it may help. This is all new. We are learning as we go. But if there is a chance it will help – I will wear a mask – for you.”

“Becky Barnes is a great representative of the best in community journalism in Kentucky,” said Tom Eblen, president of the Bluegrass Chapter and a retired columnist and managing editor at the Lexington Herald-Leader. “She has been tireless in her efforts to keep her community informed, while at the same time being a vigilant advocate for open government and the public’s right to know.”

Barnes has repeatedly stood out over a long career, said USA Today photographer Jack Gruber, who nominated her. He noted her support of Boyd’s Station, the arts-and-journalism nonprofit he founded, and a national photography workshop that brought 150 journalists to the county of 18,000 people.

He quoted local Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Tomi Clifford: “Becky often finds the light in the darkness whenever a major event has happened. Like in 1997 with the flood, or the coronavirus, she puts everything out there and is super personable, honest and remains positive during the most difficult times to be a journalist.”

Gruber also quoted from Cynthiana Mayor James Smith’s story of Barnes calling out him and the City Commission for appearing to have had an illegal, secret meeting to discuss “a serious issue” before the public meeting. “You would think that would be signs of an adversarial relationship between the mayor and the local press, but that would be the furthest thing from the truth,” Smith said. “Becky has always covered our meetings with fairness and focus on the facts. In fact, when the need is to get information to the public and not just report, Becky is always there to use her position and influence to educate.”

The Cynthiana Democrat is the only place Barnes has ever worked. “When you get it right the first time, there’s no need to keep looking,” she says.

Barnes began working for the newspaper five days after she graduated from Harrison County High School in 1976. A few months later, she married her high school sweetheart, Ernie Barnes. They have two children, Erin Slone and Seth Barnes, and a granddaughter, Olivia Slone.

In 1997 a Licking River flood cut Cynthiana off from much of the county, but Barnes was able to make it into town from her home in the county and took hundreds of flood pictures for a special edition that was printed within hours of the disaster. It included a list of the people at specific shelters, serving families who were divided by the river and had no way of knowing where their loved ones were. The newspaper later published a magazine that told the stories of local heroes and rescues.

So, Barnes was ready when she learned that her county was Kentucky’s “ground zero” for the pandemic. She rode with the mayor and county judge executive to a Frankfort press conference with the governor, and on the way back, told them that the information needed to be in the hands of the county’s residents immediately, not the paper’s Thursday publication day. The county picked up the tab.

“Local journalism isn’t always about the disasters,” Barnes said. “It’s about feeling and knowing the heartbeat of the community. It’s about Christmas parades and Homecoming football games, first tee-ball games and 75th wedding anniversaries. It’s also being prepared for those disasters when they occur.”

The Cynthiana Democrat is one of 47 owned by Landmark Community Newspapers, which is based in Shelbyville, Ky. The company’s executive editor, John Nelson, said, “Becky has been deserving of this level of recognition for a long time. We’re happy for her, proud to count her among our community editors, and pleased that her story — the story about Becky — is being heard.”

Told that she had received the Al Smith Award, Barnes said, “I am so humbled. Every day I come in to work with the same goal: to put out the best newspaper I can for the people of Cynthiana and Harrison County. Being honored by my peers is a bonus.”

The award is named for Albert P. Smith Jr., who published newspapers in rural Kentucky and Tennessee, was founding producer and host of KET’s “Comment on Kentucky,” and federal co-chair of the Appalachian Regional Commission. He was the driving force for creation of the Institute, headed its advisory board and is its chair emeritus.

The award is usually presented at a dinner in the fall, but presentation is being delayed until next year due to the coronavirus pandemic.