"A year ago, the last Kentucky newspaper staffer dedicated to the environmental beat full-time left his job. He was not replaced."
"In 1952, American newspaper publishers ranked Louisville’s Courier-Journal as the fourth-most important paper in the nation, behind the Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and the St. Louis Post Dispatch. By then, the C-J, as it’s known, was nearly a century old. It was founded in 1868, when two Louisville papers, one that had been opposed to slavery and one that had been in favor of it, merged. (A decade earlier, the papers’ editors had squared off in a duel. Both survived.) For a white-owned, Southern newspaper, the young C-J was relatively enlightened on issues of race, supporting improved schooling for blacks—though racial slurs and racist cartoons appeared in its pages. In its early days, news reporting wasn’t the paper’s strong suit. That began to change after it was bought, in 1918, by Robert Worth Bingham, a progressive judge who had married into an oil fortune and saw civic value in good journalism. After the Second World War, the C-J moved into a new Art Deco building downtown, and a quote from Bingham was engraved above the elevators in the lobby: “I have always regarded the newspapers owned by me as a public trust and have endeavored to conduct them as to render the greatest public service.” The paper has won ten Pulitzer Prizes, including the Public Service award, in 1967, for its “successful campaign to control the Kentucky strip mining industry, a notable advance in the national effort for the conservation of natural resources.”
James Bruggers kept a reprint of those 1967 stories on his desk at the office."
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