#WeTheCivic: How Appalachia is Rebuilding Civic Infrastructure One Rural Newsroom at a Time

This article was reported on Behalf of Invest Appalachia and The Appalachia Funders Network. 

Disclosure: The author works for Invest Appalachia, which manages the Fund’s capital deployment and program design.

In January 2026, the owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette—founded in 1786, a decade after the Declaration of Independence—announced they were shutting the newspaper down. After $350 million in losses over two decades and a three-year labor strike, the paper of record for the largest city in the Appalachian region was set to publish its final edition on May 3. When a nonprofit stepped in to acquire the paper just before its final press run, Pittsburgh narrowly avoided becoming the largest metro area in the country without a daily newspaper.

While a late, dramatic rescue of a civic institution makes for good news, the Post-Gazette was somewhat unlikely to be set adrift. With a 240-year institutional legacy, a metro audience, 40 peer outlets in the same market, six Pulitzer Prizes, and a philanthropic ecosystem large enough to sustain a sizeable investment, the Post-Gazette had enough visibility to attract a last-minute buyer who would fly to Toledo in a snowstorm to negotiate.

Addressing News Deserts in Central Appalachia

Most of the news outlets in Central Appalachia, meanwhile, lack all of the above. In a region where 200 of 257 counties are classified as news deserts or near-deserts, the consequences of losing local newsrooms are measurable: voter turnout declines and public corruption goes unmonitored. The decline of local news results in lower bond ratings, higher financing costs, higher taxes, and higher borrowing costs for local governments, likely because lenders can’t evaluate the quality of public projects, and engaging local stakeholders becomes more difficult. The loss of local news is often seen as a symptom of community in decline, but the research is consistent on causal direction: these are structural failures in the machinery of self-governance. The loss of local news doesn’t follow civic decline—it drives it.

Central Appalachia, a region spanning six states from southeast Ohio to western North Carolina, has long grappled with the consequences of corporate and federal extraction. For communities already over-narrated by outsiders and under-heard on their own terms, the collapse of local news entrenches the suppression of civic voice. Local news is the primary mechanism through which residents hold institutions accountable, access emergency information, and participate in the civic life of their own communities. And with one of the highest concentrations of news deserts in the country, this region doesn’t need to theorize about what that loss means, because disaster makes it visible.

When Radio Becomes a Lifeline

When Hurricane Helene struck western North Carolina in September 2024, it knocked out cell towers, internet, and power across the region. Blue Ridge Public Radio was the information system that survived, broadcasting government briefings, road closures, and Spanish-language emergency information. In communities without electricity, residents gathered around car radios to hear updates together, rationing fuel to keep the one working information source alive. Eastern Kentucky communities hit by catastrophic flooding in both 2022 and 2025 relied on local radio the same way: as the last link between isolated households and the resources meant to reach them.

Beyond acute crises, local media’s civic function often hums along in the background, embedded in daily community life. At WMMT, a radio station in Whitesburg, Kentucky, a Calls From Home program has broadcast toll-free messages from families to incarcerated loved ones in the region’s eight state and federal prisons for more than two decades. It started when two coal miners moonlighting as volunteer DJs took a song request and learned the listener was in a maximum-security facility. The program that grew from that moment isn’t journalism in any traditional sense; rather, it’s a community connection system across the walls of mass incarceration in one of the most prison-dense regions in the country. Because family contact during incarceration is one of the strongest predictors of reduced recidivism, this radio station has made a quiet, weekly commitment to civic health that no other institution provides.

Local media is civic infrastructure—as essential as bridges and water systems—and, in Central Appalachia, just as vulnerable. The old business models for sustaining news infrastructure are inadequate. Advertising revenue has migrated to platforms. Subscription bases in small rural markets were never large enough to support professional newsrooms. And philanthropy, while increasingly interested in local news nationally, has historically underinvested in Appalachian media—part of a broader pattern of capital bypassing the region that extends well beyond journalism. Central Appalachia receives less than one-fourth of the national average in philanthropic investment per capita, and just 1 percent of all national philanthropic funding for news reaches rural counties.

Local media is civic infrastructure—as essential as bridges and water systems—and, in Central Appalachia, just as vulnerable.

The breakdown of local news is a lagging indicator of community health; it’s a sign that systems of belonging are already in jeopardy. The information that communities need to govern themselves, hold power accountable, and make decisions about their own futures is what keeps people rooted—willing to stay, to show up, and to invest energy and resources where they live. This is the connective tissue at the heart of civic infrastructure.

A New Fund Aims to Boost Journalism Infrastructures in Appalachia

While controversial rescues make headlines, for most of what’s fragile or broken in our region, there aren’t billionaires waiting in the wings to fix it.

The Rural News Fund is an attempt to build something different. Launched in 2025 through Press Forward’s Central Appalachia Chapter, the Fund is a cooperative initiative led by the Appalachia Funders Network, with Invest Appalachia serving as fund manager and supported by national philanthropic and Press Forward partners.

Infrastructure investment in local news—the kind that outlasts media and philanthropic cycles—is what it takes to uphold a democracy that won’t require a last-minute rescue.

The model treats local news as civic health infrastructure, and therefore deliberately structures resources as infrastructure investments. Each of the eight cohort members—a mix of for-profit, nonprofit, and public media organizations spanning all six Central Appalachian states—enters a two-year program combining initial capacity-building finance with one-on-one coaching from experienced industry “Navigators,” peer learning, and access to flexible repayable capital in year two. The cohort includes legacy outlets, digital startups, and organizations like WMMT (the Whitesburg station behind Calls From Home); Enlace Latino in North Carolina; and Black By God, West Virginia’s only Black-led newspaper. The paths to sustainability will be as varied as the communities these newsrooms serve. The Fund provides the capital and capacity for each organization to build the one that fits.

Whether in the wake of disaster or in the daily work of building communities positioned to determine their own futures, the need is the same: information systems that are cooperatively built, community-governed, and funded as the public good they are. The forces dismantling civic infrastructure here in Central Appalachia—disinvestment, extraction, the collapse of sustainable local business models, the concentration of narrative power in institutions far from the communities they cover—are not unique to these mountains. They are coming for every community that isn’t large enough, wealthy enough, or loud enough to be at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

A free and functional press was central to the vision of democracy at the time of our nation’s founding. In his 1787 letter to Edward Carrington, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” James Madison considered the press so essential that he structured the postal system itself around it, with high postage on commercial mail subsidizing the cost of delivering newspapers.

By 1840, Americans printed more newspapers than any other nation in the world. The news wasn’t purely local in its reporting, but it was entirely local in function. Each paper, printed locally, was an expression of a specific community’s civic life—a shared language for what communities were and what they might become. The founders understood that democracy requires an information infrastructure, and they built one. Infrastructure investments in local news—the kind that outlasts media and philanthropic cycles—is what it takes to uphold a democracy that won’t require a last-minute rescue.

The Rural News Fund is a collaborative initiative of Press Forward Central Appalachia, led by the Appalachia Funders Network with Invest Appalachia as fund manager. For more information, visit ruralnewsfund.org