Does a community mourn when its newspaper shutters, or loses most of its staff, or do people even notice?
For the Appalachia Mid-South Newsroom, Andrew Henderson sat down with Alex Acquisto, a reporter at the Lexington Herald-Leader, who started with the paper covering Eastern Kentucky and was recently laid off with a dozen of her colleagues.
Editor's note: Audience Editor Andrew Henderson is a former employee of the Lexington Herald-Leader and worked with Alex Acquisto while at the newspaper. He was laid off in 2025 by McClatchy Media.
This transcript was edited for clarity and length.
Andrew: Alex, you started at the Herald-Leader in 2019, initially covering public health in Eastern Kentucky, and your job at that time was explicitly to fill the gap that existed there in news coverage. Your position there was initially funded through Report for America, you were part of the second cohort of that program. Tell me a little bit about when you first started there at the Herald-Leader in 2019, with the explicit purpose in mind of, “We have hired you here to cover this gap in news coverage that exists in Eastern Kentucky.”
Alex: Report for America in 2017 decided to help supplement legacy newsrooms like mine who couldn't cover the scope of things that they once covered. The Herald-Leader, needing to cover Eastern Kentucky because it's a wide swath of our geography with financial implications, the collapse of the coal industry, the public health crisis that exists there, saw it as a need to be covered and so they petition Report for America. You have to apply to basically pay through a combination of grants to place a reporter in one of these what are called news deserts for a certain amount of time, and partner with the local newsroom to provide coverage of this area that otherwise wouldn't be covered.
Andrew: I want to talk a little bit about a recent commentary piece that you wrote for Poynter, where you pose the question as to what is the greatest value of journalism. What do you see as the greatest value of local news?
Alex: Local news on its own anymore is not necessarily a big revenue driver, but it is a community necessity. Despite what elected leaders in this country will say, journalism exists for the community that it serves. Our goal is to shed light on corruption of all kinds, but it's also to just let people know how their government works because citizens are entitled to that knowledge. They are entitled to government transparency. They are entitled to know how their taxpayer dollars are spent. I think increasingly across this country, as you get fewer family-owned newspapers and more newspapers that are owned by large hedge funds, which need to turn a profit, there is an irreconcilable difference between what is the value here. The value is not a huge money maker because the value for us is informing our communities.
Andrew: Here in Central Appalachia, specifically including counties in Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia, a report last year from the Appalachia Funders Network found that where the average American county has 2.5 news outlets, these rural Central Appalachian counties have 1.2. I've asked you what you see as the value of local news and the value proposition of that. What is lost in a community when these papers go dark?
Alex: There are still a handful of very small local newspapers in Eastern Kentucky, like the Mountain Eagle, for instance, which has this entire section in each edition. I think it's each edition of its print issue, where readers can just write in, explaining a thought or something and they run the gamut. Sometimes they're political. Sometimes it's an expression of frustration over something that an elected leader did. Sometimes it's thanking somebody for something that they did for them. It's a community message board, also. And so I think we lose this sort of connection with our wider community when we lose these papers, and it's so much easier to, you know, be around people who think the same way as you, have the same ideologies as you, without considering an alternative. And I think newspapers, at their best, provide that in addition to providing sort of a play-by-play of what's happening in your community. They keep us less polarized. They keep us less isolated.
Andrew: Earlier this year, the company [McClatchy] unveiled an internal AI tool to generate and summarize different versions of stories initially written by actual human reporters, and this effort from the company required reporters to share bylines with this AI tool. I know many unionized newsrooms in McClatchy, including the Herald-Leader, pushed back on that effort. Where do you see the use of AI in any form or fashion in journalism? Is there a place for it, or is it just something that we will inevitably use until a company or a hedge fund says, "Well, now we're just going to rely on this thing to do the job you had.”
Alex: I think if that plays out that way, it will not happen without a fight from journalists everywhere across this country. AI has a purpose and a role in journalism, just like you could argue in most industries. I have used it occasionally for research purposes. I think a lot of us use it for transcription purposes through apps like Otter. There are tools where it's extremely beneficial that are not content creation tools, and I think this threshold that McClatchy crossed, as you said earlier this year, is one that disturbed journalists everywhere, and you know, guild protected newsrooms pushed back on, including mine. I'm the president of our guild. I think the problem is an ethical one. Largely, we heard from subscribers from the get-go who did not want something like this. You can go anywhere in the annals of the internet and find some sort of AI slop, AI-generated picture, AI-generated text. People come to local media to read stories vetted by humans, who are sort of experts in their communities, experts on their beats. They had issues with wanting to read this content. We had issues with wanting to produce it, and since these layoffs, McClatchy has insisted they are not related to the use of AI. But I think you know, connect the dots, read between the lines. Increasingly, they as a company are trying to rely on AI, maybe not to entirely replace reporters, but certainly they are trying to use it more as a tool to create content.
Andrew: Alex, the last thing I'd like to ask you today, and this is the million dollar question, and I think if you can solve it, then you'll probably get an award or some sort of endowed chair or something along the lines, but how do we save local journalism? How do we do it? And is it worth saving?
Alex: It's funny because I have spent a lot more time than I thought, maybe not asking myself that last question explicitly, but asking myself, basically gaslighting myself to think: Is this as important as I actually think it is? Does the rest of the citizenry value this? Is it worth saving? I continue coming back to: yes. As long as we live in a democracy where people need information to then make the best choices about their communities, local journalism is necessary, and it will be necessary in perpetuity. How we save it? We are increasingly seeing communities banding together to form nonprofit outlets. You have real rallying, local rallying around these outlets by communities to save them, and so far it seems like it is working. I don't know if that is what will happen in place of what's happening at the Lexington Herald-Leader. You know, there are still about a dozen reporters and sports reporters left there, but it's for all intents and purposes a shell of what it once was. Will the community band together and do something like that? I don't know, but I think increasingly that is the model and the way forward.
