Growing up in rural Iowa, Becky Vonnahme didn’t have access to many local news sources. Now, as part-time executive director of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation, Vonnahme has discovered why. Small publications, like small businesses, have a hard time getting funded. After all, ad sales alone just don’t support local journalism anymore. The foundation works…
The challenges of rural journalism are mainly the challenges of the communities it tries to serve, and many of those challenges are daunting. But they are not dispositive. That was made clear at the National Summit on Journalism in Rural America by some sharp, innovative and courageous editors, publishers, academics and other journalism supporters. “Community…
Missouri Solicitor General D. John Sauer was the man who rounded up 17 Republican attorneys general to support the Texas claim that the electoral votes of four other states should be thrown out of the 2020 presidential tally. As important as that role was, Sauer is not well known to the public. His family, on…
Many of the St. Louisans who played roles in fomenting the Jan. 6 insurrection had relationships with one another and with national figures in the chaos at the Capitol that have not been explored. Many haven’t even been previously identified. What follows is an account of some of those roles and relationships. Jim Hoft, the…
Over more than a decade, St. Louisans have heard many flattering things about LockerDome, a pioneer in the region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem that has hired dozens of computer-savvy graduates from Washington University and elsewhere and put them to work downtown doing computer-savvy things. What would surprise most St. Louisans is that a “jewel” of the St.…