‘It’s really sad.’ Two Kentucky newspapers closing, leaving one county with no paper
Two Kentucky counties lost newspapers this week, joining hundreds of others that have closed around the country in the face of tough financial conditions for traditional print papers.
The Dec. 29 editions were the last for the Citizen Voice & Times, in Estill County, and the Clay City Times, in Powell County, said Teresa Hatfield-Barger, who owned both.
The papers published weekly.
Estill County has another newspaper, the Estill County Tribune, but the end of the Clay City Times leaves Powell County with no local paper, Hatfield-Barger said.
“It’s just really been hard to come to this point,” she said. “It’s really sad. Really sad.”
Hatfield-Barger said there were personal and financial reasons behind the decision.
At 67, she was ready to move on from the work of running the papers.
On the financial side, the papers had faced a loss of advertising — partly as a result of businesses closing during the COVID-19 pandemic — and slow payment from some customers, Hatfield-Barger said.
Hatfield-Barger’s late husband, Guy Hatfield III, started a newspaper in Irvine called The Citizen Voice in 1973, then later bought a competing paper, the Irvine Times-Herald, and merged them to form the Citizen Voice & Times, according a story announcing the end of the paper.
The Clay City Times, which Hatfield bought nearly 30 years ago, had a much longer history, dating to 1900, the story said.
Hatfield died in 2005.
Hatfield-Barger said she contracted with a search firm a few years ago to try to find a buyer for the papers, but nothing came of that effort.
Besides Hatfield-Barger, there were three employees at the two newspapers plus a man who delivered them.
“It’s been terrible. These people are like my family,” she said.
David Thompson, executive director of the Kentucky Press Association, said with Powell County losing its paper, there will be three counties in the state with no printed newspaper.
The other two are Boone and Campbell.
‘It’s been a struggle’
Increases in mailing and newsprint costs and an erosion of advertising have created challenges for small newspapers, Thompson said.
Some large companies have stopped paying to have advertising circulars placed in local papers, or moved advertising online, and businesses also cut advertising during the pandemic as they looked for ways to reduce costs.
“It’s been a struggle for the weekly newspapers,” Thompson said, but the state actually hasn’t lost that many papers.
Six local newspaper closed soon after the pandemic started in early 2020.
In most cases, however, people started new newspapers in places where papers closed the last few years, Thompson said, so the state hasn’t actually lost that many.
In Wayne County, for instance, the Wayne County Outlook closed in 2020, but the publisher of a paper in nearby Adair County started The Wayne Weekly.
There are a number of counties in the state with a community paper owned and edited from another county.
‘Crisis for democracy’
More than 360 newspapers closed around the country between late 2019 and May 2022, according to a report from the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing at Northwestern University.
That left more than 200 counties in the U.S. — about 7 percent of all counties — with no local newspaper, the report said.
“This is a crisis for our democracy and our society,” said Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at the school who wrote the report. “Invariably, the economically struggling, traditionally underserved communities that need local journalism the most are the very places where it is most difficult to sustain print or digital news organizations.”
Abernathy said research shows that in communities without a strong print or digital news organization, voter participation declines and corruption increases, which contributes to the spread of misinformation, political polarization and reduced trust in media.
Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky, said the closure of the papers in Estill and Powell counties “is one of the most worrisome development I have seen in my 18-plus years in this job.”
The institute posted an appeal to support local journalism the same day the Citizen Voice & Times and the Clay City Times published their final editions.
“I salute the newspapers that are trying to cross county lines to provide local news coverage, and expect to see more of that, but there’s no full replacement for a locally edited and owned newspaper, Cross wrote in an email to the Herald-Leader. “Unfortunately, as Joni Mitchell sang in “Big Yellow Taxi,” in some communities ‘You don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone.’ “
Cross said the institute and KPA are working with the National Trust for Local News on ways to preserve local, independent newspaper ownership in Kentucky.
This story was originally published December 30, 2022 at 10:03 AM.
