At the National Summit on Journalism in Rural America, journalism educator and researcher Clay Carey of Samford University said one way journalists in academia can help the news business is case studies of news outlets. For two and a half years, Buck Ryan of the University of Kentucky has been doing what he calls a "participatory case study" of the Chatham News+Record, a weekly paper in central North Carolina; at the summit, he moderated a discussion between Editor-Publisher Bill Horner and another innovative rural publisher, Terrence Williams of The Keene Sentinel, a daily in southwest New Hampshire. They have the same print circulation: 3,800.

Horner's and Williams' presentations at the Summit showed some significant differences in the papers and their communities. Chatham County's population is up 17% since 2010 and is more than one-fourth minority; Cheshire County's went down about 1,000. The News+Record's revenue is dominated by advertising, with only 21% from circulation, while the Sentinel gets almost half its revenue from its audience.

Asked what partnership has been the most lucrative or profitable, Horner said the News+Record's promotion of nonprofits helped prompt the local Council on Aging, "which is really a county department but mostly funded privately," to use two pandemic-relief grants "to give us $10,000 to provide subscriptions to senior citizens they serve who didn’t subscribe. We also got $18,000 in financial support from Mountaire Farms, a poultry processing company with Spanish-speaking employees, for our La Voz project to bring a Spanish-language publication, La Voz de Chatham (Voice of Chatham), to the community."

Williams noted the Sentinel's partnership with the local Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship on Radically Rural, a multi-track community development symposium that includes a track on community journalism.

Read the full article about nonprofit news partnerships by Al Cross at The Rural Blog.