A College Partnership Saves a Newspaper, Helps a Rural Community, and Prepares Its Students for the Future
William H. (Dink) NeSmith was supposed to be getting out of the newspaper business.
In July 2021, at the age of 72, he’d stepped down as president of the Athens-based Community Newspapers Inc., a publisher of dozens of local papers throughout the American Southeast, which he’d led since 1989.
A native Georgian with a folksy flair for storytelling, NeSmith had also distinguished himself as a writer throughout his career. He’d authored a book about his father called The Last Man To Let You Down: My Daddy the Undertaker. He’d earned national attention for using The Press-Sentinel in his hometown of Jesup to crusade against coal ash dumping. After he’d moved to Oglethorpe County, a rural area in northeast Georgia with fewer than 15,000 residents, he’d begun writing columns for a paper — The Oglethorpe Echo, a now 151-year-old weekly with a circulation of 2,200 — that wasn’t part of his company but was an integral part of his new community.
Yet NeSmith decided he had more to do. Two months after retiring from his leadership role, he got a call from the Echo’s publisher, an old friend named Ralph Maxwell. As a result of the paper’s revenue challenges and some personal health issues, Maxwell had made the difficult decision that he’d have to close the paper. The county was about to lose its only local news source and the oldest continuously operated business in the county. NeSmith says his reaction was instantaneous: “I don’t want to live in a community without a newspaper.”
Within days, he’d formed a plan to save the Echo — he’d help transform it into a partnership between a new nonprofit he’d start and his beloved alma mater, the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, 17 miles away in Athens. Students would report the news as part of their coursework, and the paper — along with all of Oglethorpe County — would become their learning laboratory. “I put in $10,000 of seed money to get it started, and we were off,” NeSmith says. “I was the kid with the bicycle pump keeping air in the tires so it would roll.”
Three years after NeSmith staged his intervention, the Echo is still rolling — and attracting a lot of attention. Influential journalists like former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr., are touting the paper as a model amid an existential economic crisis for local reporting — a way to deliver information to the vast expanses of “news deserts” across the United States, where roughly 3,000 papers closed between 2005 and 2024.
Even more fundamentally, this partnership involving about 20 students per semester offers a template for how colleges can bolster all kinds of important institutions in their communities, not just newspapers — and find new ways to prepare students for the work force in the process.
“It’s imperative in modern education to have hands-on experiential learning,” says Amanda Bright, a Grady faculty member who teaches a twice-a-week capstone class through which students work on the Echo. “Gen Z doesn’t want to learn in the old ways. They’re very mission-driven and practical. They want to see how things work.”
With each story they report, students are having new experiences out in the county, both with their sources and the rest of the Echo team, which go beyond traditional academic learning. By putting students to work at the Echo, NeSmith says with confidence, “We’re putting gold stars on their diplomas.”
After he’d convinced Maxwell — whom, he says, needed barely any convincing — to donate the newspaper to a new nonprofit, The Oglethorpe Echo Legacy Inc., NeSmith quickly secured the support of Grady’s dean, Charles Davis, who worked with him to develop the plan further. Soon Bright and another faculty member, Andy Johnston, joined the nascent effort. Johnston, a veteran sports journalist, came on as the managing editor, while Bright, a longtime journalism educator, signed up as an assistant editor and the instructor for the class, which she runs with Johnston like a newsroom.
“I always wanted to do community journalism, because I felt like the impact was the strongest,” says Bright, who worked in local news in Illinois as a young reporter in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “I loved the tight feedback loop. You feel like you really get to know a place and its people.”
Students working on the Echo certainly have gotten to know the places and people of Oglethorpe County. Comprising roughly 442 square miles, the county’s home to a single stoplight and a single grocery store. It is more rural and has far fewer people than Athens. “It’s got some of the most beautiful scenery,” NeSmith says. “We’ve got rolling hills, streams, and woodlands. We love its natural beauty and wide-open spaces.”
The close-knit communities in Oglethorpe are fiercely protective of how they live, Bright says. It’s a place that’s often resistant to doing things differently. “There was talk about putting up a second stoplight, and boy, it was messy. The stoplight never went up. People don’t want their quiet, rural way of life to change.”
Despite that, she says, the communities seem to be adapting to the changes at the Echo: “We’ve been able to win trust by doing consistent, good journalism, and that’s been powerful for our students and the community. We’re averaging between three and seven letters to the editor a week. That’s bonkers in the current local-news climate. People are really engaged.” (“In the first 18 months, we added six digital products, won awards, tripled advertising, and doubled subscriptions to the 149-year-old weekly newspaper,” Bright wrote last year for Nieman Lab.)
The first edition of the Echo’s new era appeared on November 4, 2021, which happened to be the newspaper’s 148th birthday — 16 pages produced with a team of student interns, because the class wasn’t up and running yet. (Interns continue to fill the role of reporters during the university’s summer and winter breaks.)
Since it doesn’t need to pay its student reporters, the Echo is able to keep costs down, although the publication very much relies on — and actively solicits — donations, grants, and other fund raising, which it’s able to receive through The Oglethorpe Echo Legacy Inc. Every student in Bright’s class receives a stipend each semester to support their travel to Oglethorpe County from Athens — between $75 and $200, depending on how much funding is available from grants or other funding to the nonprofit.
Oglethorpe Echo Press Run
“Not having to pay an editorial staff makes a big difference, but we’re still paying for printing, delivery, graphic design,” Bright says. The organization now has a part-time business manager and a front-office manager for the office the paper still maintains in Lexington, not far from the Oglethorpe County Courthouse on Main Street.
Students in the Echo class typically turn around seven or eight stories a semester, and their schedules are structured so they’re reporting one week and helping to produce and edit the paper the next week. Another way the Echo minimizes costs is by having NeSmith retrieve stacks of each new edition from the printer, which is 50 miles away.
“On Wednesdays, I go pick up the papers and bring them back, which saves $125 a week,” he says. “Fellas in rural America have pickup trucks, so I’m happy to do it. A retired electrician and his wife bring the papers to the post office and the convenience stores. There are about 20 places where the Echo is sold.”
You can hear what students are getting out of working for the Echo by talking to Ella Kroll and McCain Bracewell, a pair of seniors at the paper this semester. Kroll, 21, recently wrote a story about a local taxidermist, Andy Nimmons, 55, who won a World Taxidermy Championship title in 2005.
She interviewed him and visited his workshop and showroom, where she says she noticed he “had a clipping from the first time he was in the Echo in 1996.” To her, that showed how much he — and others in the community — valued the newspaper and the recognition it provides, and it reminded her of why what she was doing was worthwhile.
Nimmons says that, when it comes to local news, the Echo is “all we got down here — our little hometown country newspaper,” and he’s glad the university has been able to keep it alive. He’s advertised for his business in the paper over the years, and he appreciates its coverage of crime and law-enforcement issues.
“I really enjoy connecting with the people I meet,” Kroll adds, “and it exposes me to so many things I haven’t seen before.”
Bracewell, 22, says working for the Echo has reminded her of the value of preparedness. She gives the example of how she once got a transcript of a local meeting, while one her fellow reporters didn’t, and that proved invaluable in putting together her story. She also talks about how she and her colleagues have increasingly been able to build their professional relationships in the county, including with local officials, and keep engaged with them over time. “I’m communicating with editors and sources. You don’t want to piss off your sources or ghost them,” she says, using a slang expression for suddenly cutting off all communication with someone.
NeSmith makes the point that building strong relationships with residents is basically a prerequisite for good community news. “We sit next to these people in church,” he says. “We see them in the grocery store. Our kids play Little League baseball with their kids. You don’t have the opportunity to be anything but professional because not only do they know your name — they know where you live, and they will come talk to you.” If local journalists encounter skepticism of the media — hardly uncommon in today’s political climate — NeSmith says the message has to be: “We aren’t ‘the media.’ We’re your hometown newspaper.”
He also says he’s confident that working in community news encourages you to “build people skills, wordsmithing skills, and confidence that will help you wherever you’re headed.” Whether it’s tracking down hard-to-find information, working with a team, meeting a deadline, or navigating a tough conversation, training in journalism is applicable to many other kinds of work. Students at the Echo are also gaining digital-content creation skills and learning about online analytics.
Bright hopes the Echo will continue to be a good model for similar partnerships — she says it’s currently “financially sustainable,” if not yet thriving — but she thinks the lessons of the partnership aren’t only applicable to journalism. “Business students could be doing this with local businesses in rural counties, helping them come up with business plans to flourish in the digital age,” she says. “This is transformative — and can be translated — in lots of different ways.”
