Berea Brunch - 1909

In this day and age, it seems the prices at the grocery store never seem to stop rising! Wouldn't it be great if we lived 100 years ago? Costs of food were lower (a bushel of corn for 80 cents? Oh my!) and you could everything you wanted at the local market, if you didn't grow it or raise it yourself. Then again, you could even buy stock animals - you had to butcher them yourself a great deal of the time; but, hey, what a way to budget! The "Best lambs," straight out of Louisville, for $6.50! Who can beat that? Just check out this ad from the October 7, 1909 edition of the Berea Citizen, and compare it to your local grocery store circular! -------------->

And what to do if you need time to rest while cooking for your adoring husband (even while the women's movement was at its height, upper and middle-class females still held the role of housewife in many ads)? Use the Fireless Cooker and make "Mother's Oats," as the ad on the left describes!

To view this page - Page 4, of the October 7, 1909 edition of the Berea Citizen - in its entirety, on the Kentuckiana Digital Library (KDL) - just click on this link: http://bit.ly/1r4Lsm

Many items from The Rural Blog

Our friends at the Rural Blog had much to report this week concerning newspapers and the people who make them happen.

Longtime agricultural journalist Bernard Brenner died Sept. 17 of lung cancer. He was 87. Brenner was the longtime farm editor for United Press International, when it was a major wire service, and was president of the Newspaper Farm Editors of America, now the North American Agricultural Journalists, in 1975.

Horace Carter of Tabor City, N.C., publisher of the first weekly newspaper to win a Pulitzer Prize died September 16 after suffering a heart attack. He was 88. The Pulitzer went to the Tabor City Tribune, now the Tabor-Loris Tribune, and The News Reporter in Whiteville, for a "four-year crusade against the Ku Klux Klan that saw 254 Klansmen convicted and 62 sent to the penitentiary or fined," the Fayetteville Observer said in a staff report.

And finally, this:

Rural newspaper publishers are helping the U.S. Postal Service lobby for a bill that would give it some financial relief but continuing to oppose its efforts to win congressional authority to end Saturday mail delivery.

For more on these and other fascinating stories, see The Rural Blog

more newspapers moving online

Ann Arbor and Tucson among them. Read more.

Movie Making

We've just returned from a highly successful trip with our NDNP Partners in Washington, DC. There, we premiered (sounds fancy, doesn't it?) our latest video that details the University of Kentucky's background with newspapers and our in-house microfilm-to-digital methodology as part of NDNP.

The video was wildly successful - more than we could have hoped for. We've put it on YouTube if you're interested in seeing it (and we hope you are) plus, NEH and LC will be linking to it from their sites soon. For now.....enjoy it here

KY-NDNP Website

The KY-NDNP website has gotten a much needed facelift. In addition to the usual "about us" stuff, we've included a "tech talk" page and FAQ.

an innovative idea

The Silverton Standard & The Miner (Silverton, CO), a small weekly with a circulation of 1,000, was about to die. That is, until the owner donated it to the local Historical Society. 

This novel idea, if successful, could be the saving grace for many a small town paper, so reports The Denver Post. The Society is seeking $10,000 in grants to maintain the newspaper.

proud colleagues

The Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues is receiving this year's Media Award from the East Kentucky Leadership Foundation tonight in Hazard, Ky. "The Institute serves as a public policy center to help rural journalists grasp the local impact of broader issues, find sources, and develop new story approaches," reports Marie Luby of WYMT-TV in Hazard.

The Institute is being recognized for its role helping rural journalists tackle tough stories and keeping rural communities informed. "It's a lot more difficult to be a good, ethical, hard-nosed journalist in a small town than it is a big city because you never know when someone's going to come in, walk right in to your office, no receptionist or security guard, and start banging on your desk about something you wrote," IRJCI Director Al Cross told Luby.

The Institute was founded by the University of Kentucky in 2001 and staffed in 2004 with the hiring of Cross, thanks to a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Its initial focus was on Appalachia, and though it quickly became a national program, the region and the state are its homes. The university has adopted the program, which is raising money for an endowment to expand its work.