Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
Here’s the obituary describing the newspaper’s death. I worked with Jonathan Austin, and I interviewed Jonathan for a story I wrote about his great work a couple of years ago. Here’s part of the story from The Rural Blog:
The Yancey County News, born in western North Carolina three years and five months ago, died last week after a life that can only be described as meteoric.
The weekly newspaper never exceeded a regular circulation of 1,000, but punched above its weight from the get-go, reporting in its first edition about a state investigation of vote-fraud allegations. Then it analyzed state investigators’ records to report that the county had an unusually high number of absentee ballots, many of which were witnessed by employees of the county sheriff’s department and cast by criminal defendants, some of whose charges were then dropped.
The paper also revealed that the mountain county’s chief deputy, the arresting officer in several cases in which the suspects immediately voted and were given leniency, was also pawning county-owned guns for personal gain. He has resigned and pleaded guilty to failing to discharge his duties.
For that and other work, publishers Jonathan and Susan Austin won the Ancil Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism, the E.W. Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment, and the Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity from the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, based at the University of Kentucky.
“I’m not gonna whine. We had a great run,” Jonathan Austin said in an interview. He said the paper closed when Ingles, an Asheville-based grocery chain, stopped running run-of-press ads in weekly newspapers. Ingles’ full-page ad was, usually by far, the largest ad in the Yancey County News. The company places inserts in the county’s long-established paper, the Yancey Common Times Journal, which boasts a circulation of 7,000.
The Ingles move came in May, after an April that had been the new paper’s best ever for revenue, Austin said. “We had a great spring,” he said, partly due to political ads from unexpected sources. Still, circulation didn’t grow, despite two-for-one special. Asked why, Austin started to say, then demurred and said he didn’t want to pop off so soon: “Ask me in six months. . . . I’m accepting of the closing of the newspaper. It’s fine.”
Click over to read the full story. Here’s the short notice Jonathan posted to FB:
As of May 29, the Yancey County News has closed and will not publish again. We close because Ingles grocery decided to stop running advertising with us. It was a no brainer, given that Ingles was our largest account and their check kept the business afloat.
