Coronavirus in rural America (Part LXIX): More on the hit to journalism--and jobs generally--in small towns and cities

I'm back tracking here to a late May story out of Pueblo, Colorado, population 106,595 (not exactly rural, but a place with a significant extraction economy). The headline is "An American Jobs Crisis with Few Reporters to Cover It."  Here's the lede to Abe Streep's story:

In late April, Jim Richerson, the chief executive officer of the Sangre de Cristo Arts and Conference Center in Pueblo, Colo., emailed Blake Fontenay, the editorial-pages editor at the town’s newspaper, The Pueblo Chieftain. Richerson and Fontenay occasionally discussed happenings at the Arts Center, which had temporarily closed and laid off most of its staff because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Richerson hoped Fontenay, a 54-year-old newspaper veteran from Tennessee, might be interested in a story about the center’s virtual dance classes. 

Since the paper — the oldest daily in the state — had laid off its business editor the previous spring, Fontenay had written a local business column. His editorial voice was often optimistic, counseling positivity during a recent spate of layoffs in town. But when Fontenay replied, he said he could not produce the story; he had been laid off himself. 

His last Chieftain column, titled ‘‘A Journalist’s Final Whistle?’’ invoked his father and grandfather, both of whom had been journalists, and reminisced about the paper he started himself in elementary school. ‘‘I guess I could be bitter,’’ he wrote, ‘‘but that’s just the way life is in the newspaper business these days.’’

A key data point:  "Between March 15 and May 16, 476,613 people in Colorado applied for unemployment benefits — nearly as many as applied in all of 2009 and 2010, according to the state Department of Labor and Employment."

I've written elsewhere on the blog about the rural newspaper crisis, aggravated as it has been by the pandemic.

And here's another quasi-rural media story, this one out of Missouri, about two women newspaper owners who walked out on the paper when their father, the newspaper publisher, ran a racist syndicated cartoon in the wake of the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police protests in early June.  The dateline was Washington, population 13,982, in Franklin County, Missouri, population 101,492, and Michael Cavna reported for the Washington Post.  More coverage of that incident is here.

Post script from July 5, 2020:  Another story of local media faux pas is out of Anderson County, Kansas, population 8,102, where a newspaper editor compared the Kansas governor's mask wearing requirement to the Holocaust.  John Hanna reported for the Associated Press.  Here's the lede:

A Kansas county Republican Party chairman who owns a weekly newspaper apologized Sunday for a cartoon posted on the paper’s Facebook page that equated the Democratic governor’s coronavirus-inspired order for people to wear masks in public with the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust. 

Dane Hicks, owner and publisher of The Anderson County Review, said in a statement on Facebook that he was removing the cartoon after “some heartfelt and educational conversations with Jewish leaders in the U.S. and abroad.”