Jeremiah Ariaz is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow whose photography explores the decline of small-town U.S. newsrooms, and celebrates the rural reporters who are fighting long odds to keep local media coverage alive in their communities.
Born and raised in small Kansas towns, Ariaz has focused his photographic efforts on his home state. Between 2022 and 2026, he criss-crossed Kansas to document the state’s 151 operating newsrooms. With the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he completed his fieldwork this past June. He is particularly interested in sharing his work in Kansas, near the communities he has photographed. In doing so, he hopes to spark productive conversation about the increasingly fraught relationships between government officials, everyday U.S. citizens, and members of the press.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Daily Yonder: Tell me about your rural upbringing, and how it informs your photography of small-town newspapers?
Jeremiah Ariaz: I grew up in Great Bend, Kansas, and honestly, I was pretty eager to get out of my rural community when I graduated high school and moved to Kansas City for college. It wasn’t until a decade or more later that I began to reflect on my time in Kansas. Then starting about 10 years ago, I had opportunities to spend prolonged amounts of time back in the state. And it has since become the center of my creative attention. Being from Kansas has become a larger part of my identity.
DY: Let’s talk about the exhibit and periodical you presented in 2023, The Kansas Mirror | The Fourth Estate in the Heart of America. What’s the meaning behind the name? And what were the major takeaways you had from that initial effort to photograph small-town newsrooms?
JA: “The Kansas Mirror” developed as a vehicle to share the work following a 2022 Tallgrass Artist Residency. I interviewed newspaper men and women across the state, and as I began trying to imagine how the work might live in the world, it started to seem obvious that it should take the form of a newspaper. I was thinking of the old adage “the medium is the message.”
So, I selected 10 of the journalists I spoke with who I thought collectively provided an overview of my subject – Kansas journalism – and the importance it has to communities, as well as challenges the industry faces. I thought, rather than trying to tell their story, they could help me tell mine. I thought of the text like a “letter to the editor.” I’m so grateful everyone was on board. Collectively, the images and text create a portrait of small town journalism today. Ultimately, I thought of the publication as a mirror to community journalism, thus the name.
Julia, office manager of the Jewell County Record in Mankato, Kansas, 2026. (Photograph by Jeremiah Ariaz)
Though focused on Kansas (the geographic center of the country by the way), I wanted it to be a window to think about journalism nationally. I set out to photograph every newspaper office in the state, not then realizing how many there were. It’s an impressive number. Especially in relation to the state’s population. It’s taken me five years to complete the task. It feels appropriate that the work would conclude this year, at the nation’s 250th anniversary.
One of the reasons I feel that photography is a relevant medium to tell this story is that the media has been framed as elites, detached from the communities they serve. I think when you look at these photographs, and you see the newspaper staff and the spaces they’re reporting from, you see these are everyday people, maybe like your friends, family, and neighbors.
Flag, Montgomery County Chronicle, Caney, Kansas. 2023. (Photograph by Jeremiah Ariaz)
DY: I think my favorite image from the collection is this picture of a rolled up U.S. flag, lying atop some tarped-over objects at the Montgomery County Chronicle in Caney, Kansas. Why did that scene capture your attention in the moment?
JA: I’m always looking for images that can speak not just to the individual offices, but to the concerns motivating the work. When I began driving in the northwest corner of Kansas to systematically photograph each office, I soon discovered several had closed. Some operations were being run from home, some offices had been downsized, some operations had closed altogether. The Montgomery County Chronicle is a family-owned paper serving its community, but that scene with the white drape and the American flag from the back room of the office could represent the closures I’d seen.
I’ve been able to gain access to a number of the buildings that, until recently, had housed a town’s newspaper. In some cases, for more than a century. Often the contents were still in place, a layer of dust settled upon the empty desks and equipment. A startling average of two newspaper offices a week close across the country. A third of the nation’s offices have closed since 2005. How can we make sense of that? How do we comprehend the extent of that loss and its consequences to our communities, and to our country?
On my most recent trip, [I saw that] a number of offices I had already photographed have since closed. I was able to get back inside a number of those spaces. This created a real sense of urgency for me to complete the project.
Cover page from the first edition of The Kansas Mirror, Jeremiah’s periodical about small-town Kansas newsrooms. (Photograph by Jeremiah Ariaz, design by Derek Hamm)
DY: You’ve got a new issue of The Kansas Mirror coming out in October, focusing on an August 2023 police raid of the Marion County Record, which resulted in the death of one of the paper’s co-owners. Tell me a little about that incident, and what you think it says about the relationship between the decline of small-town newsrooms, and the degradation of our national democracy?
JA: When the Marion County record was raided by police, it was an alarm heard across the country. When it happened, it seemed unimaginable that in the United States a newspaper could be the target of a law enforcement raid like that. Police raided not only the office, but also the homes of the editor, the co-owners, and the newspaper reporters. They seized reporting equipment, personal cell phones, any equipment they thought could be used to produce a newspaper.
I’m returning to the community of Marion for the forthcoming edition of “The Kansas Mirror” because, in retrospect, that raid feels like the headwind of a storm that has since blown across the country threatening First Amendment Freedoms. I’m collaborating with Timothy Schuler, a writer from Marion, Kansas. His reporting and my photographs from multiple visits to Marion are coming together into an edition I’m very excited to soon share.
One might imagine that, after an incident like this, a community would come together to support their newspaper. But that hasn’t necessarily been the case in Marion. There had been a breakdown of trust between the community and the newspaper prior to the raid, a breakdown that seems to have calcified since. The reasons for that breakdown, and the growing mistrust of reporters nationally, are something we want to explore in this next Kansas Mirror.
The Volland Foundation will host an exhibition of Ariaz’s photographs from Marion to correspond with the release of the second edition of “The Kansas Mirror”.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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