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Monday, January 30, 2006
Not law but interesting - The day the Louisville Courier Journal left town
"The Day the News Left Town" is the headline to this lengthy story today that begins on the front page of the business section of the NY Times. Some quotes:
HAZARD, Ky. — On a rainy day in mid-January, Alan Maimon, a reporter here for The Louisville Courier-Journal, packed up his desktop computer, fax machine and printer in his company-owned Ford Explorer. He then drove three hours to Louisville, turned in the equipment to the newspaper and, with that, officially brought to a close The Courier-Journal's storied Hazard bureau in eastern Kentucky."The paper doesn't even circulate here anymore," Mr. Maimon, 33, said before leaving the bureau he has run from his house for the last five years. "There's no financial reason to keep it open."
It was an anticlimactic moment, especially compared to some of the high drama witnessed by a string of correspondents who had run the Hazard bureau over the years. From the heart of coal country, the reporters used the megaphone of The Courier-Journal's front page to tell the world about mining disasters and the strip mining that cut across the roller-coaster terrain here. The strip mining articles won the paper a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1967. In 1998, its reporters wrote about the widespread doctoring of air quality tests in the mines, which left hundreds of miners breathing dangerous levels of coal dust, leading to black lung disease.
And always, the paper served as a roll call for the region's dead — 38 miners killed near Hyden in 1970; 15 in the Scotia mines in Whitesburg in 1976, and then, two days later, 11 more; seven in Floyd County in 1982; and so on.
The Courier-Journal, which was bought 20 years ago by the Gannett Company, announced in December that it was pulling the plug on its bureau in Hazard (population 5,000) and two others in the state.
They are the last of the newspaper's once-robust statewide system of bureaus, all of them gone now except for one in Frankfort, which is the state capital. * * *
The paper became a force in eastern Kentucky decades ago with its crusade against strip mining. And its uncovering of abuses helped lead to the establishment of the Mine Safety and Health Administration.
"The Courier has had such an impact in eastern Kentucky," said Bill Gorman, 81, who has been the mayor of Hazard since 1978 and ranks The Courier-Journal with the Bible in terms of required reading.
"We used to have bad floods, and The Courier-Journal took a look at it and got the dams built," he said. "We got the road situation improved and developed eastern Kentucky because of The Courier's influence in Frankfort and in Washington, D.C."
Now, he said, "they've pulled their horns in, and closing the bureaus will hurt the regions they've been serving more than it will hurt The Courier-Journal."
For the paper's commitment to the region, Hazard deserves a "historic sites in journalism" marker, said Al Cross, a former Courier-Journal reporter who now directs the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, based at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
"It showed the willingness of a faraway institution to make a substantial investment in a place where it gained nothing economically," he said.
One group not weeping over the loss of the Hazard bureau is the coal industry. Bill K. Caylor, president of the Kentucky Coal Association, which lobbies in Frankfort on behalf of coal operators, said there was little need for the paper's presence in eastern Kentucky because the industry had cleaned up its act.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on January 30, 2006 07:23 PM
Posted to General News