Categories
Community Journalism

What is a ‘newspaper of general circulation’?

Folks in the newspaper business, as well as the public sector, may often come across the term “Newspaper of General Circulation.” It sounds official enough, but what does it really mean?

By law, certain legal notices are required to be published in a “Newspaper of General Circulation.” These may include (but are certainly not limited to)  a probated will, a bad audit at the school district or a public tax sale.

By publishing these notices, the affected party has made an effort to inform the public as to the legal action taking place. Publishers charge for these postings. By charging to run them, they have to run. If they were not paid ads, posting them would be at the discretion of the editor.

And we all know how editors can be.

So, this takes us back to the term “Newspaper of General Circulation.” Though publishing styles and formats for these required ads are as varied as the office that require their postings, the one constant is they must be published in a “Newspaper of General Circulation.”

This became an issue in our office a few months back when a local school district posted some legals with us instead of the competitor down the road in which they had a history of running legal ads.

The posting had to do with some real estate and construction deals. Soon a petition was circulated to host a referendum on the actions the district had in the works.

A lawyer wrote a letter to the district, on behalf of the petitioners, demanding the district cease their already planned project.

There were three arguments upon which the litigator based his demands. The first two reasons were to argued by people not in my line of work, but the third directly affected our standing as a newspaper.

Their lawyer said we weren’t a “Newspaper of General Circulation” in the community.

Granted, the district had only, in the past two years, started sending us their legals instead of the competitor down the road. But that was not my concern. Their business was very appreciated, but even more so unsolicited.

All of this leads the original question: What is a “Newspaper of General Circulation?”

While Texas has no statute defining a “Newspaper of General Circulation,”many states do. As such, the consensus among other state statutes and virtually every state press association in America is that:

A “newspaper of general circulation” is a newspaper that is:

  • issued at least once a week (daily newspapers are included in this description);
  • intended for general distribution and circulation; and
  • sold at fixed prices per copy per week, per month or per year, to subscribers and readers without regard to business, trade, profession or class.
  • Basically, any daily or weekly newspaper that is sold to the public in general is a “newspaper of general circulation.”

A “Newspaper” is defined as:

  • a printed paper or publication;
  • bearing a title or name;
  • reporting local or general news;
  • printing editorial comment, announcements, miscellaneous reading matter, commercial advertising, classified advertising, legal advertising, and other notices;
  • must be at least four or more pages long per publication;
  • published continuously during a period of at least six (6) months, or as the successor of such a printed paper or publication issued during an immediate prior period of at least six (6) months;
  • is circulated and distributed from an established place of business to subscribers or readers;
  • is sold for a definite price;
  • either entered or entitled to be entered under the Postal Rules and Regulations as periodical matter (formerly second class mail); and
  • subscribed for by readers at a fixed price for each copy, or at a price fixed per year.

Free newspapers are not considered “newspapers of general circulation.” Legal advertising cannot be done in free newspapers even if they meet all of the above requirements. So, if a newspaper just shows up in your mailbox at no charge, it does not satisfy the legal requirements for public notices. (except in one very vague stipulation for one county in Texas, but that should be the subject for a separate blog).

Texas has gone as far as issuing an Attorney General’s opinion about Newspapers of General Circulation in 2005, issued by (now) Governor Greg Abbott. The case involved the Harrison County Commissioners Court when a second newspaper popped up in Marshall. The Commissioners wanted to have the discretion to determine in which newspaper to publish.

Attorney General Abbott, in the opinion, defined a newspaper in much simpler terms than those outlined above. The opinion states:

“Texas statutes do not define ‘newspaper of general circulation.’ In Attorney General Opinion JC-0223*, this office said that a ‘newspaper of general circulation’ is a newspaper as defined by section 2051.044, Government Code,  that has ‘more than a de minimis number of subscribers among a particular geographic region, [and] a diverse subscribership.’ Tex. Att’y Gen. Op. No. JC-0223 (2000) at 2, 10. In that opinion, this office recognized that the factors constituting a newspaper under the Government Code could be determined on an objective basis, see id. at 6, but that the ‘general circulation’ criteria involving subscribership were subjective and involved factual considerations to be resolved by the body that is to arrange for publication of the notice.”

The footnotes of the opinion further explain JC-0223 (noted by the asterisks above) by saying:

*”Attorney General Opinion JC-0223 also said that a newspaper of general circulation is one that publishes ‘some items of general interest to the community.’ Tex. Att’y Gen. Op. No. JC-0223 (2000) at 2. This criteria is duplicative of item (1) in the definition of ‘newspaper.’”

The summary states that the Harrison County Commissioners had the discretion to choose in which newspaper to publish as long as it met the requirements outlined above.

Based upon this, industry practice and common sense; it became apparent the Whitesboro News-Record is certainly a newspaper of general circulation in the community in question.

We have rack sales and subscribers there. We cover local news and general interest stories there. We:

  1. devote not less than 25 percent of its total column lineage to general interest items;
  2. publish once each week;
  3. enter as second-class postal matter in the county where published; and
  4. have been published regularly and continuously much longer than 12 months.

Also importantly, I reminded the attorneys, we have published in Grayson County  since 1877. We have been a newspaper in Grayson County longer than any other newspaper in Grayson County, therefore we have been a newspaper of general circulation in there for over a century.

Beyond that, the Attorney General clearly stated that governmental boards have the discretion to choose in which newspapers to publishes as long as the above repeated criteria is met. Clearly, the Tioga ISD Board of Trustees made that decision and we appreciated them for it.

All this being said, the incident ended up in a court hearing. The district’s attorney’s asked me to attend and testify as to our validity as a “Newspaper of General Circulation.”

I was happy to do so and was a little bummed when all sides agreed in the courtroom that there was no reason for me to take the stand. It was decided from the outset of the hearing that we were, indeed, a “Newspaper of General Circulation.”

Categories
Uncategorized

Polls, data can serve readers

Polls have long been common devices at metropolitan daily newspapers, but are rare at community weeklies – and I’m not counting those unscientific, self-selected surveys on papers’ websites, which ought to carry disclaimers saying they’re not good barometers of public opinion.

The weekly Rappahannock News in rural Northern Virginia got a marvelous opportunity to see what the people of Rappahannock County think about important issues this year, when a local nonprofit funded a professional survey and hired top-notch journalists to write it up, edit the stories and illustrate them.

The survey by the nonprofit Foothills Forum was mailed to every address in the county of 7,400 people, and got responses from 42 percent, more than double expectations and enough to make it as reliable as a random-sample poll.

“The Foothills survey offers a statistically accurate snapshot about the issues our community cares about most,” the News said in an editorial. “We feel this is valuable information — unbiased, non-agenda-driven data. . . . In the weeks and months ahead, we will explore some of the top issues highlighted in the survey by featuring in-depth stories, with the help of resources provided by Foothills Forum. This partnership allows us to deliver coverage that a small community newspaper could not afford to do otherwise.”

The Foothills Forum was created in response to comments at a coffee chat hosted by the News, “urging broader deeper coverage,” Larry “Bud” Meyer, chair of the group, wrote for the paper. “All manner of interests now have real numbers to back their causes. Not speculation. Not assumption.”

The nonprofit raised $43,000 for the survey and worked with the paper “because the Rappahannock News remains the best source of reported, vetted and edited news,” Meyer wrote. “More important, the survey finds folks are roughly twice as likely to rely on the weekly for their news as all local internet sources.”

The nonprofit gave the News $5,000 for enhanced design, news graphic/data reporting, and the paper made additional investments in design and printing multiple open pages for the series, which also increased its postage costs. “Everyone’s desire has been to deliver in-depth reporting that is beyond the capacity of a very small community news organization,” Publisher Dennis Brack told me. “The survey stories proved the value of this partnership.”

As we reported this project on the Rural Blog, we said the poll showed that Rappahannock County “may be a classic case of a rural place that wants to maintain its environmental qualities while having more urban conveniences,” then quoted from the stories of former Associated Press reporter and editor Chris Connell.

Polls are just one form of data, and we’re big on localized data as a way to help illustrate and explain local issues. A key part of using data is presenting it visually, and a recent Rural Blog item highlighted Data USA, which calls itself “the most comprehensive visualization of U.S. public data.” The same item drew from our friends at Journalist’s Resource to list several sources of help for using data.

Regular readers of this column know we’re also big on national maps that show county-level data, and we’ve had several examples in the blog recently. The Washington Post created a map that shows how home values changed, by ZIP code, from 2004 to 2015, in most counties (those that had enough data to be reliable).

Buried in a New York Times story about employers having trouble finding workers who could pass a drug test was a tragic set of maps, showing county by county the growth in drug-overdose deaths from 2003 to 2014 – a trend so fatal that it is now resembles the HIV-AIDS in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said an official of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The crisis in Flint, Michigan, over lead in water supplies has caused concern in other places, but the risk of lead exposure “is surprisingly difficult to estimate, due to a variety of state-by-state differences in reporting standards,” Sarah Frostenson and Sarah Kliff reported for Vox. They worked with epidemiologists in the Washington state health department to add housing and poverty data to the mix to create a county-level map of the estimated risk.

Because some health-insurance companies are reducing their participation in health-insurance exchanges, more than 650 mostly rural counties will have only one Obamacare option in 2017, The Wall Street Journal reported.

There have been doubts about the quality of care at some rural hospitals, and that has hurt them financially. But a recent study found that surgeries are safer and cheaper at critical-access hospitals, which by definition are rural.

The financial problems are rural hospitals are getting little attention from Congress and the Obama administration, Shannon Muchmore reported for Modern Healthcare.

The Rural Blog has started excerpting the “Thinking About Health” columns of Trudy Lieberman, distributed by the Rural Health News Service, which use specific examples to illustrate issues in health care from a consumer viewpoint. Her latest piece reported that consumers get little help resolving their complaints.

A pair of studies concluded that abstinence pledges don’t keep young people from having sex, contracting sexually transmitted diseases or avoiding pregnancy.

If you do or see good work that deserves national notice or could help other rural journalists, by appearing on The Rural Blog, email me at [email protected] so we can publish it at irjci.blogspot.com.

 

Categories
Polls

Rural hospitals in trouble: Resources for health care reporting

If your rural hospital is in trouble, it’s not alone. At least 66 rural hospitals have closed in the last six years, due to a combination of factors, such as changes in federal reimbursement and patients’ increasing preference for larger hospitals. About 300 are in financial straits, says the National Rural Health Association.

Is your hospital one of them? Could it be? Which of those factors are affecting it most? Do you know how to put its problems in a national context so you and your readers can better understand them?

The troubles of rural hospitals can be hard for rural news media to cover in detail, partly because they are special kinds of businesses and their managers and boards are often unwilling to be forthcoming about problems. Sometimes it’s difficult because your hospitals may be hampered by managerial shortcomings that may follow local tradition but hurt the bottom line.

It’s important to get managers and board members to open up, because few local institutions are as important or, in some communities, as much at risk. To do that, you must arm yourself with some basic knowledge so you know what questions to ask.

One place you can start learning more about rural hospitals and their problems is The Rural Blog, which has published more than 300 aggregated stories about hospitals in the last nine years. Last year, stories about rural hospitals led the list of most-read topics on the blog.

Two recent stories on The Rural Blog are good examples of how to cover rural hospitals. The stories were written by Harris Meyer of Modern Healthcare, but they were written for a general audience. Both were about small hospitals in Appalachia, but their problems are common across the nation.

At the Pineville Community Hospital in Kentucky, which had hired a management company to save it, Meyer found an administrator who was willing to be frank about how he is doing it – even to the point of telling an older surgeon that it was time for him to retire.

Meyer walked around the hospital with the chief nursing officer, and they encountered an internist who vented to her “about some of the changes being asked of him.” The nursing officer said later, “We have an older medical staff, and they are set in their ways.”

See what you can find out just by walking around? And Meyer went beyond the staff, talking to patients, board members and community leaders who “see the Pineville hospital’s future as pivotal to the future of the town,” as he put it. Too many times, stories about trouble at hospital are done too late, after it’s too late to save it.

Our excerpt of Meyer’s Pineville story is on The Rural Blog. The story is available with free registration. If you’re really interested in covering health care, Modern Healthcare is a good source for background knowledge.

Meyer’s other story was on the Jellico (Tenn.) Community Hospital, which serves many Kentuckians because it’s near the Kentucky border. Tennessee has not expanded Medicaid under federal health reform, but Kentucky has, and that has helped keep the hospital afloat.

In states that have not expanded Medicaid, hospitals are the leading pleaders for it, because it brings them more business and reduces the write-offs they make for indigent care. That’s just one example of how state policy can affect local hospitals.

Health reform isn’t a cure-all. While it has decreased the number of uninsured Americans and charity cases at hospitals, it has also led to an increase in the number of high deductibles they can’t collect, a particular problem in rural areas where hospitals are already struggling financially. John Lauerman reported on that for Bloomberg Business. Rural hospitals have closed their maternity facilities, a phenomenon reported by Kaiser Health News, another excellent source of story tips and background knowledge about health care.

Early this year, iVantage Health Analytics reported the 210 “most vulnerable” rural hospitals by state, along with data on critical-access hospitals (a definition you need to know) and data on how many health-care and community jobs the hospitals provide.

In reporting on hospitals’ problems, it’s also important to report on those that do it right. We did that a few months ago, excerpting a report that listed the nation’s top hospitals, which included 24 rural hospitals. Those could be good examples of how to address problems.

If you would like help reporting on hospitals or other facets of health care, please ask us. We’re at 859-257-3744 and [email protected]. In addition to The Rural Blog, we publish Kentucky Health News, which includes original reporting and other story ideas, approaches and sources.

Categories
Future of news

News consumption is changing, and newspapers have to change too

Imagine three baskets in your newsroom – and you have to put every story in one of the three baskets.

One is labeled what, another one so what, and the last is now what? The idea of the baskets, the brainchild of Washington Post reporter Chris Cillizza, comes from the reality that journalism has shifted away from being a “what happened” field.

Modern journalism was built on reporting what happened. We brought the news to America. People turned to newspapers to find out what was happening in their world. But that franchise has been eroding at the hands of first radio, then TV, then the Internet. For several decades now, our major metro newspapers have not been the primary medium people turned to for up-to-date information.

But community newspapers were different. Our job is not to cover the world or the nation or even the state. It’s to cover our city and county. And often, we were literally the only game in town – the only medium that had the reporters to go out and cover the news in print and photographs. People could read their news in the paper or in our online editions.

So whether it was a school board meeting or a football game or the county fair or a fatality accident just outside of town, we had complete and accurate information – and pictures. Sure, maybe people heard about the accident or talked about it at the coffee shop, but when the paper came out we satisfied their news hunger for complete information. They may have known who won the football game, but we gave them the quarterback’s completion stats, the number of tackles the star linebacker made, the post-game comments of the coach, and a rundown on next week’s opponent.

Radio and TV and the Web ate into the hard news franchise of the metros, but for community papers – not so much.

Until social media.

Facebook now has 1.6 billion users, more than 60 percent of whom are logged in for at least 20 minutes a day, according to the Economist. Contrast that with the Washington Post, which has the biggest Web traffic of any U.S. publisher. The Post received 73 million visits during the entire month of March, with readers spending an average of one to three minutes per visit.

No matter how small or isolated your community, people are spending lots of time on Facebook every day. When they hear about news, they share it – with pictures. It’s an axiom that a lie can spread halfway around the world while truth is putting on its boots. The modern media equivalent of that is that news can spread through your community while you are figuring out who should write the story.

So if your newspaper’s claim to fame is being first with the news, that ship has probably long since sailed. If you tell people only what they already know, they’ll think you are irrelevant. And nothing is so damning to a newspaper as the reputation that it contains “old news.”

Facebook is not a “detail” medium. Facebook readers get only the big picture, the major points of the news. But when we write that same story, what do we lead with? The big picture, the major points — so it’s the readers’ perspective that we’re telling them what they already know.

Of course, we still need to print the what-happened news, but there has to be more. As we move more of the breaking news to social media and our online edition (because you may be a weekly in print, but you have to be a daily online and in social media), that means we need to focus more on the other two boxes – so what and now what.

We don’t just tell readers what happened at City Council. We look for how those actions will impact citizens. What will that mean for their safety or their pocketbook or the economic future of the community? We do a rundown of the what-happened, but we focus on its impact on the community and on our readers.

So perhaps the school board has voted to reduce the teaching faculty in elementary schools as a cost-cutting measure. What will that mean to class sizes? How will it impact student learning and test scores? What do teachers think? A budget saving proposal might look good until your realize that your kid’s third-grade class will go from 25 to 34 kids – and the students with learning problems will be the most adversely affected.

Unfortunately, this kind of reporting takes more time. It’s a lot easier to take notes at a meeting and produce a story that reports votes and quotes from the participants.

The real issue here is staying relevant for our readers. And if it takes re-thinking our stories – classifying each as a what or so what or now what story, that will be time well-spent.

Note: This blogpost has focused on news coverage. To see how this same idea impacts sports coverage, see our earlier blogpost.

 

 

Categories
Community Journalism Future of news

“Do you think newspapers are endangered?” A community journalism perspective

So what if someone asks:  “Do you think animals are endangered?”

There’s literally no answer to that.  We know that mountain gorillas, elephants, rhinos and tigers are critically endangered and we may well see their extinction in our lifetime.

But other animals exist in abundance – rats, rabbits, dogs, deer and hundreds of others.

And that’s the problem with the question newspaper people are asked so often:  “Do you think newspapers are endangered?”

Here’s your answer for the next time someone asks: “Depends.”

And mostly, it depends on the size of the market.  Metropolitan dailies are in a world of hurt because their business model doesn’t work anymore. Large cities are media-saturated and there are countless places to get the news – and countless places for businesses to advertise.

Just over a decade ago metros made money from display advertising, classified advertising and circulation.  The big display accounts realized that there were many other ways to get their message out.  Classified died, killed by Craigslist and similar sites.  And circulation declined in the face of many other places to get the news.  Of course, as circulation declined, advertisers noted the dwindling audience for their commercial messages.

Depressing, huh?  But the metro newspaper is like the endangered animal – don’t assume that because lowland gorillas may die out that we’ll soon have no dogs or deer or rabbits. They exist in superabundance.

And people who would never lump all animals together find it easy to lump all newspapers together.  Lots of folk don’t realize that there are some 7,000 paid circulation weekly papers and around 1,300 daily papers with circulations less than 25,000 in the U.S.

So that’s around 8,300 community newspapers with a circulation of more than 45 million readers. Counting the pass-along rate (the number of people who actually read the paper, as opposed to the number who purchase it), readership of community newspapers in the U.S. exceeds 150 million a week.

Or take Texas.  Our largest newspaper is the Dallas Morning News, with more than 400,000 circulation.  But the No. 10 paper in circulation, the Lubbock Avalanche Journal, has just over 27,000 circulation.  So obviously, most newspapers in Texas and in the U.S. are community papers.

Community newspapers still dominate in smaller communities.  Rather than just being one voice among many as with their metro brethren, they are often the only game in town.  You want to know what happened at City Council?  Why school taxes are going up? How the local teams are doing? Who was involved in that big wreck on Center Street?  Why the old warehouse burned down? What’s for lunch tomorrow at your kid’s elementary school?  Check out the community paper – because you won’t find it anywhere else.

One rural publisher, in a speech to a journalism conference, put it this way:  “To our readers, we are not the newspaper, we are their newspaper. Down the block at Rogers Mini Stop, we sell more than a hundred papers every week. If our press run is late we get frantic calls from the Rogers family. They have a store full of irate customers who want their papers now…. We all know the traditional reasons — the little stories that never would be considered ‘news’ anyplace else. Our readers really care about those things.”

So when someone asks why newspapers are dying, explain that they are talking about a small – if highly visible – part of newspaper journalism.  Most papers are community papers, not metros.

And we’re doing quite well, thank you.

Categories
Ask an Expert Questions and Answers FOI

Can officials routinely wait 10 days to respond to my records requests?

Question: City officials routinely wait 10 days on all my open records requests, even when those records are easily accessible. Is that a violation of the Texas open records laws?

Answer: The Texas Public Information Act (552.221) does indeed give officials 10 days to produce a document “if it is in active use or in storage.” But otherwise, the law stipulates that the record shall be produced “promptly.” The law leaves no doubt about what that means: “An officer for public information of a governmental body shall promptly produce public information for inspection, duplication, or both on application by any person to the officer.  In this subsection, “promptly” means as soon as possible under the circumstances, that is, within a reasonable time, without delay.”

For city officials who want to quibble about the definition of “promptly,” note that the law itself defines the word: “without delay.”

Also, the Attorney General’s Guide to the Public Information Act specifies this on page 22: “’Promptly’ means that a governmental body may take a reasonable amount of time to produce the information, but may not delay. It is a common misconception that a governmental body may wait ten business days before releasing the information. In fact, as discussed above, the requirement is to produce information ‘promptly.’ What constitutes a reasonable amount of time depends on the facts in each case.”

 

Categories
Sports coverage

The traditional sports game story is dead!

When is the last time you waited for the morning newspaper to learn the final scores of last night’s sports action?

Do you anxiously wait for the thump of the newspaper on the front porch to learn if Eric Hosmer went 2-for-4 with three RBIs, or how many strikeouts Adam Wainwright threw in the Cardinals’ most recent victory?

Didn’t think so.

With the advent Twitter, live blogging, dedicated apps for every major and minor sports league, score alerts on smart phones and Apple watches, the traditional sports game coverage story – “the gamer” – is dead.

The final score, the leaders on the stat sheet and sometimes even player and coach reaction is reported in the seconds and minutes after the game. The Twitter feed has become the sports fan’s best friend instead of the random stranger sitting on the next barstool.

This does not mean sports reporting is no longer an integral part of the newspaper or newsroom. It does mean sports editors and reporters need to think differently about the content they create, and the stories they tell.

If your newspaper is still publishing the majority of its sports page with 25-inch play-by-play game stories then it might be time for a content remodel. And this sports page remodel will work at a metro daily with a circulation of 200,000 along with at a small-town weekly with 2,000 copies hitting the street.

I know what you’re thinking: “But how I am going to get all of the names of athletes in the paper? Those names sell papers to the parents and relatives in the market. That’s revenue, especially in small markets.”

You are right. And I am not suggesting to not report the game’s highlights.

I am proposing a way to do it differently.

You have access to the coaches, players and stadiums that Joe Fan does not, so use it: What can a sports reporter provide that fans can’t get on their own? Access. Your coverage should provide Joe Fan access to the players, coaches and team. Go heavy with “notebook” type coverage about players who are trending up and down, and why. Talk to players more, and report what they think about their game or the team’s performance. You have the chance every day to interview the coach — use that access to provide insight to the team and its performance. Fans can’t go up to the coach and players and ask them questions about a certain play, but you can. So do it.

Focus on the big play, moment: Instead of providing a play-by-play recap of the Friday night game, focus on the one big play that changed the game, or possibly the player that hit the winning shot, returned from injury to make a difference in the game, or a player who had a special moment that can’t be found in the box score.

Deliver stats, recaps in an alternative format: In baseball, do a breakout “how they scored” box that provides the play-by-play recap, and allows you to get those all-important names in the paper. For football, break down the scoring by quarters; hockey by periods; soccer by halves. You get the picture. This content should be featured in a graphic format with the analysis or feature post-game coverage.

Three stars of the game: Another great way to get names in the paper outside of 25-inch copy is a breakout “Three Stars” box to highlight three players who made a difference on the stat sheet or with a big play. Use mug shots of the athletes to add a little visual pop.

Look ahead, not back: This coverage model is especially true for weekly newspapers. While providing coverage of the past week’s action in alternative format such as graphic boxes and features, consider focusing the majority of your efforts previewing the coming week’s big games. And, as always, use your website throughout the week after publication days to report final scores, and game highlights right after the game to provide that “daily coverage” from a weekly print publication.

Those are just five examples of thinking differently when reporting and editing your sports coverage.

By moving away from the traditional 25-inch game story and incorporating some of these new elements, you might just hit a home run with your readers.

Categories
Professional Development for Journalists

Low- and no-cost professional development for community newspapers

Somewhere, every publisher has a list with a heading something like this: “Stuff We Really Need to Do If We Had the Money and/or the Time.”

It’s frustrating to look at because, as the list-heading says, these items are necessary – but not affordable in terms of money or time.  Probably, both.

And at the head of the list: Professional development of your staff.

It hasn’t been that long ago that professional development was a luxury item for financially successful newspapers.  But that was before newspapers became more than just print-on-paper.  Now we’re trying to reach audiences across various media platforms and new hardware and software and journalistic techniques mean that we always seem to be playing catch-up.

So is training available for community newspapers?  You betcha. But it often involves travel and hotel stays and expensive tuition and time away from the job.

Fortunately, there are lots of training/professional development opportunities for community newspapers – and lots of it is free.  So let’s look at what’s available.

Online training

The downside to online training – as opposed to classes you may attend – is that you have to make time to do it.  It takes self-motivated staffers.  If you suspect that motivation, you may get several people take the training online and to share what they are learning with others.

Let’s look at some free or low-cost training that’ll jump-start your professional development program:

NewsU.  Probably the best-known online training is the Poynter Institute’s News University.  NewsU offers a broad range of online training on everything from reporting to writing to FOI to social media to grammar to sports to video, and lots more.  A few are free. Lots are one hour and cost $29.95.  They are also archived, so you can access them anytime you want to.

Lynda.com.  Lynda offers the motherlode of online training.  You can get a free 10-day trial to check it out, and subscriptions begin at $25 a month.  Lots of great software and tech training – including photo courses.

The National Press Foundation.  The NPF offers free resources and webinars for any journalist.  Put them on your “check occasionally” list to see what they having coming up. Some are more appropriate for metro journalists, but others are valuable for reporters at community newspapers.

The Reynolds Center for Business Journalism.  The Reynolds Center focuses on the business beat, but some of their workshops relate to broader topic areas.  You’ll find archived workshops online.

The Society of American Business Editors and Writers.  This group offers podcasts on important skills for journalists – you can spend an hour developing skills like using Linked-In as a reporting tool or developing an email newsletter for your newspaper or digital business writing.

Google. Don’t forget one of the best tools you have – asking Google to find you the training you are looking for.  Have a new staff member who needs Photoshop training?  Ask Google, and tell the search engine you want free training:  “free online photoshop tutorials.”  That search term, by the way, netted 2.6 million responses.

Online Media Campus. These online modules offer training in advertising, editorial, technology, management, even revenue generation.  The cost for most is only $35.

Investigative Reporters and Editors. IRE and its sister organization NICAR (National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting) offer all kinds of seminars and webinars for your reporters who want to deep-dive into investigative reporting.  You have to join IRE first, but after you do, the organization offers lots of training and other resources free.

The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.  The Knight Center has free digital books on journalism you can download (the classic “Web 2.0,” “10 Best Practices in Social Media”).  You can also sign up for free online courses.

DigitalEd.  You can register for live webinars for $39 or view archived webinars for $19. At this writing, available archives include Advanced Social Media Analytics, How to Personalize Your Content for Better Engagement, Learn to Use the Amazing Camera on Your Mobile Phone and more.

Texas Press Association.  The TPA offers online training, including some that are free.

The MulinBlog Online Journalism School.  You probably haven’t heard of this, but it offers online courses in topics like Writing for the Web, Intro to Data Visualization, Audio Slideshow Storytelling, and Social Media Marketing.

The Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.  If your staff members need a refresher in Texas open meetings and open records laws, check out one of the FOIFT’s Open Government Seminars.  They are held in various locations around the state and they are reasonably priced at $50.

In-house training

Don’t overlook what you can do in your own newsroom. You can start with a training lunch once every two weeks.  The paper should provide pizza or burgers or salad, and for openers your staff can talk about their training needs.  What do they want to know?  What kinds of software training, for instance, would be valuable.  Do they want to know more about copyright law?  InDesign? Smartphone photography?  Once you know this, you can go to work.  For some things, you may find that your expertise is right there in-house.

And for other areas, you may need to bring in someone.  But don’t assume that “bringing in” means paying a trainer or consultant.  You’d be surprised whom you can Skype in for a half-hour talk.  Some of the country’s top professors and trainers would be willing to talk by Skype to your staff.  All you need is a free Skype account on both ends. Then open a laptop and you have a trainer.

Another great resource that’s free is the Journalist’s Toolbox. This site, sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists, is the best collection of resources you’ll find.  Anywhere.  So let’s say, for instance, that you want to beef up your reporting on weather-related stories.  Go to the weather tab on the Toolbox, and you will find literally more than 100 weather-related sites.  And that doesn’t even include covering drought, where you’ll find more than 10 resources just for covering that topic.

Also consider getting workshop leaders from local universities and community colleges.  You may even get a high school English teacher to talk about grammar problems your writers are having.

The resource close to home:  TCCJ

If you’re a Texas newspaper, TCCJ exists to help with training issues.  You know already about our workshops – both two-day and one-day workshops.  All are free, underwritten by the Texas Newspaper Foundation.  TCCJ has held free workshops on iPhone and Android photography, advertising sales, advertising copywriting, advertising design, newspaper management, reporting and writing, sports journalism, media law, FOI, newspaper design, photojournalism, and more.  We announce our workshops on our Facebook site and in emails to our extensive list of Texas journalists.  If you’re not on our email list, just send your name and email address to us at [email protected] and ask to be included.

We also put the PowerPoint presentations from our workshops online at Speaker Deck. You can use anything you find there to do your own in-house workshop.

At TCCJ, we think one of our best training resources is the Center’s Facebook page. We spend a lot of time monitoring the online world for information of interest just to community newspapers.  Then we link to it on that page.  You could literally have an in-house training session where all you did was to look back at our postings over the last couple of weeks and talk about the articles you find there.  In addition to news of the industry, we also post lots of training-related articles – anything from news of an upcoming webinar to an article on how to improve your leads. And if we find something that’ll make you laugh, we post that, too.

And one of our best resources is the phone on the desk at the Center.  If you want to train your staff in something and don’t know where to start?  Call us at 817.257.6551.  If we don’t know, we’ll research it for you.

Categories
Ask an Expert Questions and Answers Link topic

Are inmate health records public?

Question: I interviewed a jail inmate yesterday who claims that deputies broke his ribs in two places when they arrested him on Dec. 16. He said he complained of the pain daily, but they didn’t x-ray him until Jan. 29. Can I get a copy of the x-rays and any related medical documentation provided the inmate signs off on it?

Answer: I’m sure a request would (appropriately or not) denied with HIPAA as an excuse.  The inmate can request those records, of course, and pass them on to the reporter.

I’d argue that AG Open Records Decision 577 (1990), as noted in the AG handbook, would allow a person to request personally identifiable health information maintained by a state agency with the permission of the person named in the record.  That would be under 552.023.

Categories
FOI

Into the issues: Resources for community newspapers

Underlying most of the issues we cover as journalists is the principle of open government, which is under attack on many fronts. Local governments want state legislatures to weaken public-notice laws; public officials evade open-meetings laws with private conversations; and legislators all over the country are trying to weaken open-records laws. For example, two bills in Florida would eliminate mandatory awards of attorney fees in cases where plaintiffs prove that government officials have violated the state Public Records Law, as we noted on The Rural Blog at http://bit.ly/1Q17PjT.

Bipartisan efforts continue to improve the Freedom of Information Act. In January, the House sent the Senate a bill that would scale back exemptions to the law and make it easier to use. We reported on it at http://bit.ly/1PFcF52.

Meanwhile, keeping track of what’s going on in Washington has become more difficult as news organizations reduce staff in the capital. More than 20 states have no reporters dedicated full-time to covering their congressional delegations. We updated the Pew Research Center’s annual report on that problem at http://bit.ly/1KpuAxz.

Closer to home, members of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors recently debated, on the list-serve we host for them, whether they should carry guns to public meetings. Barbara Selvin, a journalism professor at Stony Brook University, did a story about it for The Poynter Institute and we excerpted it at http://bit.ly/1TnGiKt.

More than once, editors on the list-serve have discussed how to handle reporting of suicides, and a recent discussion revealed that the dominance of social media has prompted some editors to be less timid in their coverage. The discussion prompted Brad Martin, editor of the Hickman County Times in Centerville, Tenn., to write an article for the online Daily Yonder about his coverage of suicide as a public issue, and his involvement in community efforts to prevent it, after his county had six suicides in four months. Suicide rates are 70 percent higher in rural areas than urban ones, according to 2013 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Rural Blog noted that and covered both discussions at http://bit.ly/1PFeM8T.

A growing problem in rural areas is the financial condition of their hospitals. Stories about the problems of rural hospitals led the list of most-read topics on The Rural Blog in 2015. Of the 60 blog posts that were viewed at least 250 times by TRB readers, eight excerpted stories about rural hospitals, and some related items also had high readership. We gave some examples in a Jan. 1 blog item, at http://bit.ly/1R7Q0i6.

Another growing health issue in rural areas is intravenous drug use, evident in increasing numbers of drug overdoses and local epidemics of HIV and hepatitis C. Our latest blog item on the issue is at http://bit.ly/1opAzJ6.

Even in rural areas, some health problems are causes or exacerbated by air pollution. How polluted is your county’s air? If you’re in one of the 25 most polluted states, you can find out from maps compiled by HealthGrove, a site that emphasizes data. The Rural Blog reported on it at http://bit.ly/1SSayie.

The biggest factor in U.S. air pollution, and the nation’s contribution to climate change, is coal-fired power plants. Most rural electric cooperatives are very dependent on coal, so they cheered the Supreme Court’s order blocking the Obama administration’s new power-plant rules while the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals considers legal action. Our latest item on the issue is at http://bit.ly/1PQodjG.

County-level maps are a favorite Rural Blog topic. The Center for Food Safety created a map of concentrated animal feeding operations in Michigan, and says it will map CAFOs in any state upon request; see http://bit.ly/1XxtAcF.

Another map, by researchers at the University of Vermont, identified areas where bees are in trouble; see http://bit.ly/1mHaDGY. The recent increase in number of inmates at rural jails is illustrated by a map compiled by the Vera Institute of Justice. We published the map at http://bit.ly/1ooCCwl.

A vast array of data about rural areas is available in Rural America at a Glance, from the Agriculture Department. We noted it at http://bit.ly/1TnGs4J.

If you do or see good work that deserves national notice or could help other rural journalists, by appearing on The Rural Blog, email me at [email protected] so we can publish it at irjci.blogspot.com.