NOTE: This is an adaptation of a speech Daily Yonder Publisher Dee Davis delivered at the 2025 Al Smith Awards Dinner, hosted by the University of Kentucky Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues in Lexington, Kentucky, November 13, 2025. Honorees at the annual dinner were Bill Estep (Al Smith Award for community service journalism) and The Mountain Citizen of Inez, Kentucky (Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity, and tenacity in rural journalism).
Thank you to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues for this event and honoring the legacy of Tom and Pat Gish. It is also great to be here because when Rural Strategies was starting out, we worked closely with the Institute’s founders, Al Smith and Rudy Abramson. And I would like to acknowledge two thirds of our former Daily Yonder editors, here tonight. Bill Bishop and Tim Marema. I’ve ridden on their coattails.
Also I would like to thank our Rural Strategies Board of Directors, and especially Ligia Cravo of the Hearst Foundations. She was to be our board meeting host tonight in Manhattan, but when she learned I had been invited to make this speech, she suggested we abandon the New York plan and all come to Lexington.
My first job other than lifting heavy things for my dad at Hazard Furniture Company was social work in ALCOR, the Appalachian Outreach Reserves, a program that Dr. Grady Stumbo and Benny Ray Bailey started. Benny Ray got a Laurence Rockefeller fellowship, used the money on billboards, and got elected to the Kentucky Senate. He told me when you get elected to the General Assembly, you get two speeches. One of them is your back-home speech, where you say, “Folks, we’re not getting our fair share, and I’m going down to the capitol and squawk till we get it.” And he said you have your Frankfort speech, where you get on the floor and say, “Boys, we are all in this together, and we got to look after one another.” Benny said the surest way you can tell a member is going to get beat is when they start making the we-want-our-fair-share speech in Frankfort or their we’re-all-in-this-together speech back home. And now I am afraid I am in perilous danger of mixing up my New York and Kentucky speeches.
Paperboy vs. Lawn Jockeys
I got into the newspaper business at 24 years of age. I was between gigs. I had just lost my job at Appalshop, which was a very difficult thing to do at the time. One day a stranger, a representative from the Louisville Courier-Journal, showed up in a shirt and tie at my basement apartment in Sassafras, Kentucky, and offered me the job of paperboy. Really, it was the job of super paperboy for the city of Hazard. For $100 a week (he said $110, I collected $92), I would pick up the papers at the North Main Chevron and supply the 12-year-old paperboys, fill the vending machines, and drive the motor route from Peter’s Peak to Frogtown.
And here it will sound like I’m bragging, but I was good at it. The Courier guy said I had to get the papers there by 10; no one got a paper later than 8. I put an electric alarm clock in a pot pie plate. It would blast off before dawn, and off I would go. Customers would flag me down just to tell me how much they appreciated reading the paper at breakfast and then tell me how sorry the paperboys were before. But the truth is, and this is bragging, I could fold a Courier-Journal, slow the car to a crawl, and fling the paper across the seat, out the passenger side window, across a 30-foot lawn, across a front porch, and hit a storm door so loud it would wake up neighbors on either side of the house. Papers were heavier then.
At the annual journalism awards dinner, Bill Estep received the Al Smith Award for public service through community journalism from the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues and the Bluegrass Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Estep retired in 2025 after a 40 year career with the Lexington Herald-Leader, during which he primarily covered Appalachian Kentucky. (Photo by Jemi Chew/IRJCI)
The Mountain Citizen of Inez, Kentucky, won the Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity, and tenacity in rural journalism. Pictured are Ben Gish, left, son of Tom and Pat Gish and editor of the Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Kentucky; Roger Smith and Lisa Stayton of The Mountain Citizen; and Benjy Hamm, director of the UK Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues. (Photo by Jemi Chew/IRJCI)
The Courier used to run an ad that stated Abraham Lincoln was not a paperboy. It would go on to say that these guys were: Truman, Eisenhower, Bob Hope, Walt Disney, Martin Luther King, Jr. The idea was that delivering papers built character, which was something parents were focused on back in the analog age. And had I stuck to my knitting, I might have been the next Walt Disney.
Sadly, our nation’s bicentennial was approaching, and I began having ideas. I started taking great offense at these statuary lawn jockeys that were standing in front of houses on the route. You think differently before dawn.
My birthday is July 4th. On the nation’s 200th birthday, I was going to be 25, with no noteworthy accomplishment.
I convinced my wife at the time to be my wheel man in a scheme . She was the granddaughter of Mark Ethridge, the legendary former editor of the Courier. He had been a crusader for civil rights in the South, on the board of the Ford Foundation. She was probably wondering when I’d achieve something noteworthy as well.
I also recruited Robert Ray, a pal from the University of Kentucky. He was my next-door neighbor, a Christian County farm boy who’d become a state strip-mine inspector. That was the summer they landed the Mars probe. We were watching the camera pan around the Martian landscape, and Robert said he kept expecting to see a sign that said, “This mine has been reclaimed by Falcon Coal Company.”
With commando stocking caps, charcoal briquettes rubbed under our eyes, and a measure of Dutch courage in our bellies, we set out on our liberation mission and to deliver my papers on time. The first one went down easy with karate chops, and we it hoisted into the back of a borrowed station wagon. Next one was two hernias waiting to happen. A lawn jockey anchored in a yard of concrete with rebar. It was owned by the guy who wrote Roscoe’s Roundup, the hunting and fishing column in the Hazard Herald. A fellow newsman.
The fourth jockey was when we could see it all unravel. One, it was concreted into the ground and, two, the owner tapped on the window, then called the cops. The jockeys all appeared at my bicentennial birthday bash, but the next morning when I showed up to get my papers, officer John X. Begley was there to ask me if I knew anything about missing statues. I told him I did not, but I might have a lead. John X. lived beside my Granny Davis, a saintly woman. She helped out with the Begley’s newborn. And John X. thought the whole incident was so funny that he could not keep a straight face.
It turned out that a couple of the statue owners had tried to bring charges, but fortunately the police judge, Don Fouts, was on a periodic bender, and the substitute judge, Little Doc Combs, was a guy I played $5 Rook with after I got finished delivering papers. Little Doc explained to the victims that we were not a threat to society and refused to issue a warrant for my arrest.
What really made me realize I was not ready for the responsibilities of the journalism profession was the third statue owner on my route. He met me the next day with a loaded carbine and told me he had drawn a bead and thought about shooting me the night before.
I said, “You’d kill a guy over a lawn jockey?”
He said, “That statue has a lot of sentimental value.”
If my character was going to grow, that would have been the day.
“In the Presence of Old Men”
We started the Center for Rural Strategies in 2001. What put us on the map was an unusual campaign to stop CBS from airing a reality show called “The Real Beverly Hillbillies.” Yucks at a family for being poor and rural. It became a big deal. The Kellogg Foundation put up $150, 000 for someone to figure out a way to stop the show. We got the money and stirred up a fuss. We put ads in the big dailies, got union endorsements, sign-ons from groups as wide apart as the Heritage Foundation and the Southern Poverty Law Center, editorials, 100 million newspaper impressions. It all got mean. A lot of invective. One farmer in Vermont kept asking if we wanted him to dump a truck load of manure at CBS headquarters at Black Rock. It was the first time a protest ever stopped a network series in production.
A year or so after I got asked to present at a conference in East Tennessee where the producer of the “Real Beverly Hillbillies” series, Dub Cornett, was also slated to take part. They wanted Dub and me to get in some moderated argument about the show. Dub was a decent guy, from Appalachia, Virginia. A hustler. We had gotten along fine during the kerfuffle.
All I really remember from our debate was that Dub said he modeled the reality series after the sitcom where, in the end, the Beverly Hillbillies characters always turned out to be smarter than the city slickers. And I brought up the episode where Granny thought she turned Jethro into a chimpanzee.
After the session, I ran into Al Cross, who asked if I wanted to meet the keynote speaker, Rick Bragg. They must have had a budget. He was a Pulitzer winner. His dispatches from the revolt in Haiti were amazing. His books like “All Over But the Shouting,” about his mom in rural Alabama, were so good. Granny Davis was from Alabama.
Al took me to this VIP space for conference donors, and there was a line of people getting autographs and fawning over the author. Cross waited with me.
When the couple in front of us got to Bragg’s table, the guy kept going on, asked if Bragg had ever thought about writing a book about his father, who was a mean drunk. Bragg said, “I always said I’d never write about him, but I am seeing these men he came up with, and they are still around, and now I’m feeling…”
For some reason I do not understand, I blurted out, “Because there is nothing better than being in the presence of old men.”
He looked up at me like I was from outer space, pointed up, and said, “That is exactly right.”
I know there are a lot of women who have done extraordinary things to keep me employed, out of jail, and not shot. Several of them are in this room. But I would like to mention a few old men who passed on some instruction that might be useful in our current circumstances.
Tom Gish
The first is Tom Gish. When I was working at Appalshop, there was this weekly job of driving the Mountain Eagle to the printer in Prestonsburg. You would take the galleys in the Gish’s car. The car had two tapes you could listen to on the ride, The Eagles “On the Border” and a Dickie Betts solo recording, which you would crank and careen past these towns like Pyramid and David at 70, then wait around for them to print the paper. Ah, the journalistic life. I’d get paid as much in a day driving the Eagle as I would a week at Appalshop. But the thing was, that the paper was never ready when you got there. They’d still be writing or laying it out. So I would sit there among these stacks of Congressional Records and read and crack wise. There was a lot of material in these records of officials announcing commemorations or railing against spending. My goal each week was to crack Tom up. He was taciturn, stern, but I might get a smile, occasionally a chortle.
But years later I went with my wife, Mimi, to help interview Tom and Pat on camera. He said something I think of everyday. He said that his dad, a foreman at South East Coal, a man that had helped develop the roof bolt, lent him the money to buy the paper. He said his dad told him, “Our people are smart, they’ve had to do so much with so little, They’re creative. Don’t ever talk down to them.”
Tom (1926-2008) and Pat Gish (1927-2014) were reporters who dreamed of owning their own newspaper, and with the help of Tom’s dad, a coal miner, they purchased the Mountain Eagle in 1956.The paper practiced a hard-hitting style of journalism unusual for small towns trying to keep the peace with local ad buyers. The Eagle, with the motto “It screams,” always punched above its weight. It influenced the creation of War on Poverty and played an outsized role in bringing coal mine safety, housing, literacy, and cultural projects to the Appalachian region. The reporters who came to East Kentucky to work for Tom and Pat comprise a list of accomplished journalists and social change practitioners.But the Mountain Eagle was never a go along, get along institution. The newspaper endured advertiser boycotts. After a it did a series of reports on local police abuse, the paper was firebombed and the offices destroyed. Despite the attack, it published the next week. In successive years the John Peter Zenger Freedom of the Press Award was given to the New York Times for the Pentagon Papers, The Washington Post for Watergate, and to the Whitesburg Mountain Eagle with the banner “It still screams.”
Mark Ethridge
Another old journalist I spent time with is Mark Ethridge. He’d been editor at the Courier-Journal and Newsday. He taught journalism when he retired at the University of North Carolina. He’d read Shakespeare to his students, telling them they needed to know the beauty of the language.
When I met him, he’d already had a stroke. He could sing better than he could talk. He liked me to read him poetry. His favorite was Benét’s “John Brown’s Body.”
I’d push him to tell me about governors and the great 1937 flood. I remember asking him about Ed Prichard, an FDR brain truster. Prich was a political operative who got caught stuffing a ballot box in a Bourbon County sheriff’s race.
Mark said, “He was brilliant. He was my friend. And when they caught him, I wrote the editorial that said ‘Throw him in jail.’”
Mark Ethridge (1896-1981) worked at the Louisville Courier-Journal from 1937-63. During his time there he served as editor in chief, vice president and general manager, publisher, and chairman of the board.Mark began his career as a high schooler writing the Baseball Bubbles column for the Meridian (Mississippi) Dispatch. He served in the Navy from 1917-1920. Mark subsequently became managing editor of the Macon (Georgia) Telegraph, editor and publisher of the Richmond (Virginia) Times-Dispatch, and, after Louisville, editor of the Long Island Newsday. He was given the title “Radio Czar” in 1938 as first president of the National Association of Broadcasters. Ethridge also served as special envoy and on commissions for Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, as well as for the United Nations. He was on the boards of the AP and the Ford Foundation.Mark Ethridge left the following goodbye note, on his last day with the Louisville newspapers: “Sometime when your voices are well lubricated, I hope you will take one more and then sing for me: ‘Adieu, kind friends, adieu, I can no longer stay with you; I will hang my harp on a weeping willow tree, And may the world go well with thee.’”
Rudy Abramson
Like Mark, Rudy Abramson was an Ole Miss grad. A Nashville Tennessean reporter and Los Angeles Times senior reporter who covered coal mining and moon shots. He was co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Appalachia. When Al Smith got Rudy involved in starting the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, he was spending time in Whitesburg writing a book on the letters of author Harry Caudill. And when we took on CBS over the Beverly Hillbillies reality show, he was there for us, because he had led a quixotic and victorious campaign himself against the Walt Disney Company and their attempts to turn the Civil War battlefields in Virginia into a theme park. He wrote the book Hallowed Ground as a response, and he wrote the first op/ed in the LA Times opposing “The Real Beverly Hillbillies.”
Rudy and I would meet for dinner every few months, along with my son Willie, then a student in Washington, D.C., and talk about things that mattered. He told us the Daily Yonder should strive to provide understanding, not just news and opinion. We talked about writing (he asked to be our book editor). But then mostly we’d talk about basketball. Rudy was at Mississippi when Bill Sturgill was a sub for the University of Kentucky. For those who don’t know, Sturgill was a coal operator, a businessman whose name is now on the University’s William B. Sturgill Development Building. I knew him from growing up in Hazard. He was hirsute. When he came to the swimming pool, he looked like a bear. Rudy said he and his buddies would get behind the Kentucky bench in Oxford and yell at Coach Rupp, “Put in mossy back.”
Rudy Abramson (1937-2008) was an Appalachian farm boy from North Alabama who attended the University of Mississippi because of his interest in William Faulkner. He was a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean during the civil rights era and in 1966 the science reporter for the L.A. Times covering the space program and coal mining.His books included Spanning the Century, an acclaimed 1992 biography of Averell Harriman, the former secretary of state, New York governor, and business titan. He was working on a book of the letters of Kentucky activist and historian Harry Caudill at the time of his death.Abramson’s obituary in the Daily Yonder quoted a letter he wrote to a friend: “If enough northerners could have been introduced to okra fried in bacon grease, I do believe the Civil War could have been averted. My most treasured memory of my mamma is her mastery of fried okra. It was as light as popcorn and I would have gladly eaten it three meals a day to the end of my life. I often told her that if my failings somehow led to my execution in the electric chair, I wished her fried okra to be the last food that passed my lips on this earth.”
Al Smith
Another old man I want to talk about is Al Smith. I knew Al from his days as chairman of the Kentucky Arts Commission. Then he became Co-Chairman of the Appalachian Regional Commission. He said because we messed up, he had to come down and dedicate the Appalshop building twice. Which is true. And he said when he would come to work in the morning at the ARC, I’d be there asleep in the hall by his door waiting to ask him for money. Truth is that only happened once or twice. And I wouldn’t sleep there; I would just get the custodial staff to let me early.
So many of us knew Al as a civic leader: the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, Leadership Kentucky, the Shakertown Roundtable, Comment on Kentucky, which aired after the PBS News Hour on Friday nights.
But for whatever reason, Al took some pains with me. When we started publishing the Daily Yonder, he decided I was enough of a journalist to come appear on Comment on Kentucky with news people like Al Cross, Jamie Luckes, Mark Niekirk, and Ronnie Ellis. I think he just wanted me to smart off about Frankfort and talk about East Kentucky. But people would see me in in the grocery store after that and talk to me like I was someone. I know my mother started thinking more highly of me.
I was on the West Coast and Al called me one morning about 6 a.m. He said, “Davis, Al Smith, here. I need you to nominate Bill Bishop and Julie Ardery for the Al Smith Award. And today’s the last day, so you have to get it in.”
I did not even know there was an Al Smith Award. I was groggy and said, “Wait, you’re Al Smith. Why don’t you nominate them?”
He said, “I can’t. I’ve already promised someone else I’d nominate him.”
But as many of you know, the great thing about being with Al was listening to his stories: governors, politicians, people with purpose. I wanted to hear ’em all, who did what to whom. But now so often I come back to the story of his time as a hot shot New Orleans reporter on the Times-Picayune and how he drank himself out of a career full of promise. What it meant to be humbled, and what it meant to be given a second chance in Logan County with the Russellville paper. And how his own experience with redemption in a small town led him toward a life of purposeful imagination and public and gratitude. Al gave a lot of people a second chance.
Al Smith, left, shakes hands withDee Davis at the 1991 LeadershipKentucky graduation.
At 15 Al Smith (1927-2021), of Hendersonville, Tennessee, won an American Legion oratorical contest with more than 100,000 entrants. That gave him the opportunity to tour the country selling War Bonds and go to Vanderbilt University on scholarship. Al dropped out of Vandy to pursue a career in journalism in New Orleans, and after personal setbacks moved to rural Logan County, Kentucky, to become a newspaper editor and subsequently an owner of 13 weekly newspapers.Smith was the original host for Kentucky Educational Television’s popular weekly “Comment on Kentucky” show. He took leadership roles in important statewide organizations including the Kentucky Association of Electric Coops, Kentucky Arts Council, Leadership Kentucky, Shakertown Roundtable, and the Kentucky Oral History Commission. He received honorary doctorates from nine colleges and universities; was named a Rural Hero by the National Rural Assembly; and won the Media Award from the East Kentucky Leadership Foundation. Jimmy Carter appointed Al to the position of Federal Co-Chairman of the Appalachian Regional Commission.In 2004 when Al was working on his first autobiography, Wordsmith, he was having difficulty getting everything into one volume. He went to speak to the imminent Kentucky author and historian Tom Clark for advice. (Clark had been a student at the University of Mississippi with William Faulkner and Mark Ethridge.) Clark at 102 was near death and not overly responsive to the visit. None the less Smith explained to him the challenges of fitting all the stories into his manuscript and his thoughts about writing a second volume. Clark looked to Al and held up his finger. “One. No man needs two books.” Al went on to also write Kentucky Cured, a second volume.
Bill Kirby
Likely no one here will know Bill Kirby, but he was the lawyer for big names like Preston Tucker, the carmaker, and the Pritzkers, who built Hyatt. He also represented insurance magnate John MacArthur, and he was the force behind establishing the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
MacArthur had a massive heart attack at his ranch in Arizona. He survived and called for Kirby to fly down. Mr. Kirby said he walked into his bedroom and John, who was under an oxygen tent, attached to monitors, looked up to him and said, “I was about to die, but I kept thinking about this foundation. Now tell me again why I should to it.”
Mr Kirby said, “Well, John, you could just do nothing and let the government come in and get it. With your money, they could probably buy a battleship or an aircraft carrier or something. Or you could put it in a foundation and let me and your pals give it away.”
I’m going to clean this part up: Mr. Kirby said John lifted the sides of the oxygen tent, took a drag off his cigarette, and said, “Screw the government.”
A few years later Kirby called maybe a dozen of us documentary TV producers to his office with the unspoken idea to create a satellite channel.
John MacArthur had died by then. Kirby had become acting president of the foundation. But it was his last day in that job. He kept leaving to sign papers. We would all ask each other when he was out of room, why are we, what’s he want. And finally when he returned someone spoke words you don’t ever say, “Mr. Kirby what do you want us to ask for?”
This puckish Irishman look at us and said, “It’s 1961, I’m on an official delegation to Berlin, when the East Germans announce they are going to close the Brandenburg Gate that night at midnight. The press asks Willy Brandt, mayor of West Berlin at the time, what it means. He says well, ‘If they close the gates, but leave the subways open, it means one thing. If they allow truck traffic it means another.’ Diplomatic answers. Cold War tension.” Kirby says it’s a long day, after dinner he goes back to his hotel, puts on his pajamas, gets under the covers, lies there for a minute, then says to himself, “Kirby, you lazybones, get out of bed, there’s history being made.” He gets dressed, goes down to the taxi line in front of the hotel and explains what he wants to do. The cab driver refuses; thinks he crazy. Kirby goes back to the hotel night manager, who in turn makes the driver take him. He said the gate was not easy to close. It had been open for 170 years. Crews with sledge hammers banged on it for what would be hours. Mr. Kirby said he spotted a late night café. He went in and bought a couple of slices of Black Forest cake and some cocoa for him and the surly driver. Then they sat there in silence and watched until the gate was shut.
Then Kirby says it’s rush hour November 9, 1989. He is in a cab going down Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Suddenly he hears on the radio the East Germans have pushed through the Berlin Wall. He tells his cab driver he has to find a bakery. Driver thinks he’s crazy, but they spot one up ahead on the street, and Kirby gets out. It’s closing time, and you know how in New York City they pull a metal awnings down over doors at night. This one is not all the way down, so he pounds on the lower glass, and some woman comes to tell him they’re closed. He tells her, “You don’t understand, I need to have a piece of Black Forest cake.” Kirby says she looked at him with some exasperation and pity, and probably thinking it was for some sentimental occasion, retreats into the store and returns with a slice on a paper plate. Mr. Kirby said he stood there on Sixth Avenue and the crowds pushed past on the sidewalk, eating Black Forest cake.
Then in the office in Chicago, Mr. Kirby looked to around the room to us, and said, “You are the ones, you are the witnesses.” And then the tears just burst from his eyes. He said, “Forgive me, I’m an old man, and they say old men weep.”
William T. Kirby grew up in Waukegan, Illinois, and graduated from both Notre Dame University and Notre Dame Law School. He served in the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II.Though Bill Kirby is likely best known for creating the MacArthur “Genius” Awards, he had a string of prominent clients before leaving private practice to join the MacArthur Foundation. One client was the iconoclastic carmaker Preston Tucker, whom Kirby defended in what may have been the nation’s largest anti-trust and fraud case ever to go to trial. The government, with the encouragement of the big three auto companies, called seventy-three witnesses and produced a tranche of tax documents, S.E.C. filings, and business correspondence. The defense so ably crossed up the prosecution’s witnesses and cast doubt on the selective release of the documents, that Kirby chose not to call any witnesses for the defense and go straight to closing once the prosecution rested.In one emotional presentation to the jury Kirby said of Tucker and his co-defendants, that they “either intended to cheat and that’s all they intended to do or they tried in good faith to produce a car. The two are irreconcilable.” Kirby, who had arranged to have a line of Tucker autos parked in front of the courthouse, then invited the jurors to go outside for a ride. Tucker was acquitted and Kirby lived long enough to see himself portrayed in a Francis Ford Coppola film, “Tucker: The Man and his Dream.”
Here are the instructions I think these old men gave me:
Our people are smart, though not always.
We want justice, but we make exceptions.
Our heritage has incalculable value, but that doesn’t mean our neighbors won’t sell out.
Our towns are full of forgiveness and redemption, but not everyone gets a second chance.
We need the witnesses, but we are not always ready to accept what they see.
Taking Roll: Quintissa Peake
I want to mention one more person, not an old man, Quintissa Peake. She was my colleague at Rural Strategies, a member of the University of Kentucky Alumni board, and the former Kentucky spokesperson for sickle cell disease, which took her at age 44, three months ago this week.
Last summer, we had forums on the First Amendment in Fleming-Neon, her home town. She was supposed to be part of the exchanges with FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, but Quintissa was too sick that morning. She spent every day in pain. She underwent hundreds and hundreds of blood transfusions. She dealt with what would have brought toughest tough guys to their knees. But she spent her days helping others, lifting them up, being a good citizen, a friend. Things that may or may not end up in the community column in the weekly paper, but certainly what keeps towns pushing, pulsing.
The church was packed for her funeral, members of the Letcher County African-American diaspora community, comprised of lawyers, preachers, scientists, soldiers, even an opera singer who flew in from Japan. And civic minded, community helpers like Quin.
Quintissa Peake (1981-2025) was born in the small coal mining town of Fleming-Neon, Kentucky. A daughter and granddaughter of Baptist preachers, she and her cousins grew up arranging the younger siblings into congregations and choirs and then took turns preaching.Quintissa was diagnosed with sickle cell disease at 11 months and spent her adult life advocating on behalf of those who were suffering. Having endured more than 500 blood transfusions, she called herself a “sickle cell warrior” and even showed up in Louisville, four hours away, to shoot a sickle cell awareness spot just after her home was devastated by the 2022 East Kentucky Flood. Quintissa won the East Kentucky Leadership Foundation’s 2025 Carolyn Sunday Award for Diversity, Inclusion, and Social Change.
I bring this up because a lot of what we do as journalists is transactional. We report the news. We fill the paper.
We do our best to tell the truth. We try to be fair. We listen to our critics when God knows we criticize ourselves more harshly than they ever could. But there is something else we do. And it is biblical. We take roll. Who got engaged. Who shot his first buck. Who is on the prayer list. And we shout out danger. We make the case for our people, even when our people have lost their way. When we are at our best, we are advocates for civic life that is our one remedy when the food banks run low, and they talk about closing the hospital. We got each other — you and me —and a newspaper, if we are lucky.
It’s not all rainbows, unicorns, and economic development. But it is a cudgel in a tough fight. We are all in this together.
Dee Davis is president of the Center for Rural Strategies and publisher of the Daily Yonder.
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