The best of times, the worst of times. Kentucky journalism needs your support.

The irony was lost on no one that the week after Courier Journal reporter (and Lexington native) Joe Sonka helped the paper to a Pulitzer Prize for exposing former Gov. Matt Bevin’s twisted set of pardons, he was scheduled for an unpaid furlough because of downturns in ad revenue. The furloughs were ordered for employees across Gannett, which owns the Courier Journal in addition to 100 other daily newspapers.

But many may have missed some related news: The week before Kentucky journalism circles were celebrating the Courier Journal’s well-deserved national recognition, four small, local weekly newspapers in Kentucky simply ceased to exist.

The Morehead News, the Grayson Journal-Enquirer, Olive Hill Times and Greenup County Times-News were shut down on April 29 by their parent company, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. All four were weekly papers. All four Eastern Kentucky communities no longer have a source of local news. Coverage will now be done by the Ashland Daily Independent.

From Louisville to Greenup County, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken the bare bones of a once thriving business and ground them into dust. David Thompson, executive director of the Kentucky Press Association, has kept a running tab of these changes, from the Richmond Register, going from five to three days a week publication, to The Bowling Green Daily News stopping Saturday print publication (as the Herald-Leader did in January, before COVID-19 hit).

As journalists produce some of the most important stories in U.S. history, ad revenue continues to plummet. Now, according to Poynter, 33,000 American journalists have been laid off, furloughed or given pay cuts, many of them in Kentucky. Nearly 1,800 newspapers have closed since 2004. McClatchy, the Herald-Leader’s parent company, is working its way through bankruptcy and a possible sale.

Even as they are battered, local newspapers continue working to evolve, through groundbreaking digital forms and new help from philanthropy, such as Report for America, with whom the Herald-Leader and other Kentucky newsrooms have partnered to deploy more journalists. Still, the main support remains the same: Ad revenue and, increasingly, paid subscriptions that make it possible to do the kind of accountability journalism that is so important, whether it’s in Washington County or Washington, D.C.

Once a newspaper is closed down, however, it’s almost impossible to revive. That integral part of every community, what keeps us informed about COVID-19 and holds our leaders accountable, is too important to lose. All of them need your help. As journalist Howard Fineman noted in a column about the Courier Journal’s win: “This Pulitzer, and others like it to other papers, should remind us (and surely was meant to remind us), that what we call “local” journalism is profoundly essential to self-government as the Founders designed it, and to the American way of life.”

You can support this vital local journalism directly by subscribing to your local Kentucky newspaper. Now, more than ever, they need your help.