When the last reporter leaves: Kentucky’s spreading news desert

By James Branscome and Bill Bishop | Kentucky Lantern

In the late sum­mer of 1974 some­body set fire to the Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg. The blaze took the offices, the files, the bound archives — most of the insti­tu­tion­al mem­o­ry of Letcher County that Tom and Pat Gish had been accu­mu­lat­ing since they bought the paper in 1956 and changed its mast­head from “A Friendly Non-Partisan Weekly Newspaper” to the two words that made it famous: “It Screams.”

When the next issue came out, Tom had changed the words beneath the eagle. Now it read “It Still Screams.”

A Whitesburg city police­man, Johnny Caudill, had paid two young men $50 apiece to pour the kerosene, in retal­i­a­tion for the paper’s report­ing on his depart­ment. He was con­vict­ed of arson in 1975 and giv­en a year, sus­pend­ed, by a judge who owned coal mines. In January 2022, Caudill filed to run for may­or of Whitesburg. The Eagle — Ben Gish now in his father’s chair — report­ed it straight, in a sin­gle sen­tence not­ing the con­vic­tion. He with­drew with­in days. That is what a local paper is for. Subtract it from a coun­ty, and the arson­ist runs unopposed.

The Eagle sur­vived the fire­bomb, the deaths of Tom and Pat, and the 2022 flood. What almost no paper like it can sur­vive is the qui­et eco­nom­ic ero­sion that has car­ried off close to a third of all American news­pa­pers in a sin­gle gen­er­a­tion. Northwestern University’s Medill School counts near­ly 3,500 papers lost since 2005, and 213 coun­ties now have no local news out­let at all. Nearly 80% of those news deserts are non­metro­pol­i­tan, and the dig­i­tal star­tups fill­ing the gap clus­ter in the met­ros. They do not, by and large, reach the hol­lows. The fire­bomb was an attack the Eagle could see com­ing. The news desert is an attack with no arson­ist to name.

Advertising left Main Street when retail monop­o­lies elim­i­nat­ed the local drug­stores and gro­ceries, then migrat­ed to Google and Facebook. The cuts that fol­lowed made a thin­ner paper, the thin­ner paper shed read­ers, and lost read­ers drove rev­enue down again. Ben Gish says his news space is lim­it­ed by anoth­er fright­en­ing fact: he has to print so many obit­u­ar­ies because of Letcher County’s aging population.

A 2025 land­scape study com­mis­sioned by the Appalachia Funders Network found that where the aver­age American coun­ty has 2.5 news out­lets, rur­al Central Appalachian coun­ties have 1.2. Ninety-three of the region’s 249 coun­ties do not have so much as one full-time-equiv­a­lent local jour­nal­ist work­ing inside them, and of the 60 coun­ties in the Appalachian Regional Commission’s orig­i­nal Central Appalachia, 39 have less than one.

Letcher is the excep­tion, and a thin one. The Eagle’s full-time report­ing staff is two peo­ple, Ben Gish and Sam Adams. That is enough to put Letcher at 9.4 full-time-equiv­a­lent local jour­nal­ists per 100,000 res­i­dents, above a nation­al aver­age of 7.8 that stood near 40 in 2002. It is not a sign Letcher is well cov­ered. It is a sign of how far the bar has dropped, when a two-per­son week­ly clears it.

Kentucky’s coal­field and Cumberland Plateau coun­ties have tak­en some of the worst of it. Around the turn of 2023, the Citizen Voice & Times and the Clay City Times pub­lished their last issues, and the Todd County Standard retreat­ed online. Community Newspaper Holdings — owned by the Alabama state pen­sion fund — fold­ed its north­east­ern Kentucky week­lies into its Ashland dai­ly, so that Morehead, a uni­ver­si­ty town, lost its own paper. The Paducah-based Paxton Media Group has swal­lowed dozens of com­mu­ni­ty week­lies, many now run with a sin­gle staffer. Much of Kentucky now reads what the indus­try calls ghost papers — name­plates kept alive to har­vest the last sub­scribers, with almost no reporter behind them.

Population and press

Lay a sec­ond map over the first. Between 2020 and 2025 those 60 coal­field coun­ties lost close to 49,000 peo­ple, and the coun­ties bleed­ing pop­u­la­tion fastest are the same coun­ties whose papers have gone dark. Our chart pairs each county’s pop­u­la­tion loss with the reporters it has left. Each starves the oth­er. Once the paper is gone, so is the insti­tu­tion that record­ed what the gov­ern­ment did and told a young fam­i­ly whether the schools were worth stay­ing for. The rea­sons to leave mul­ti­ply. The rea­sons to stay go unwritten.

There are coun­ter­weights. In July, WEKU at Eastern Kentucky University and the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom launched the Appalachian News Exchange, a con­tent-shar­ing net­work whose part­ners include Kentucky’s Nolan Group Media papers and the Kentucky Lantern.

Press Forward Blue Grass is the state chap­ter of a nation­al coali­tion that has raised $400 mil­lion to aid local news. Press Forward has help pay for three Report for America reporters in Kentucky. 

Press Forward is intent on build­ing local news from the com­mu­ni­ty up.  For exam­ple, the group has helped the pub­lish­er of the Woodford Sun in Versailles to con­vert the fam­i­ly-run paper into a non­prof­it. The idea, says Press Forward Blue Grass exec­u­tive direc­tor Melissa Newman, is to help “news­rooms across the state look with­in them­selves and into their com­mu­ni­ties to cre­ate a sus­tain­able local news mod­el that is unique to them.”  In Eastern Kentucky, Newman says, the goal of Press Forward “isn’t to replace” exist­ing news orga­ni­za­tions, “it is to strength­en them.”

So Press Forward doesn’t seek to import reporters, but to bring emerg­ing jour­nal­ists in the com­mu­ni­ty into the newsroom.

In Versailles, the pub­lish­er of the Woodford Sun donat­ed the paper to the com­mu­ni­ty this sum­mer, the first lega­cy Kentucky news­pa­per to con­vert to non­prof­it own­er­ship. But the fun­ders’ own study warns there is not enough phil­an­thropy in the coun­try to run a rur­al news indus­try on grants.

What the chains did to the moun­tain press is what absen­tee cor­po­ra­tions did to the coal­fields a cen­tu­ry ear­li­er — bought the local asset, took the cash it still threw off and ran it thin. The cure for absen­tee own­er­ship of land is to put the land back into local hands. The cure for news­pa­pers is the same. Rebuild Local News calls it replant­i­ng: help­ing local non­prof­its and res­i­dents buy back the papers the chains have hol­lowed. It is, in plain terms, a home­stead act for the press, and the rest of the menu — a pay­roll-tax cred­it to keep a reporter on staff, a set-aside of the state’s pub­lic-notice spend­ing — is mod­est and non­par­ti­san. It is the dif­fer­ence between treat­ing the news desert as weath­er and treat­ing it as policy.

In March 2023, the Welch News, in McDowell County, West Virginia, print­ed its last edi­tion. Missy Nester had bought it in 2018 to try to save it and went five years with­out pay­ing her­self. When it closed, McDowell lost its only inde­pen­dent record of what its gov­ern­ment was doing — just as long-delayed fed­er­al mon­ey for the county’s fail­ing water and sew­er sys­tems began to arrive, with no one left to fol­low where it went.

“Like, can any of y’all hear us out here scream­ing?” she asked an Associated Press reporter on her way out the door.

Sixty miles to the south­west, across the Kentucky line, the Mountain Eagle still screams. Two papers, one verb. The his­to­ry of the Appalachian press in this last half-cen­tu­ry lives in the dis­tance between Tom Gish’s defi­ance and Missy Nester’s despair.