The Hollowing of the Appalachian Press, from Pittsburgh to Birmingham

The Hollowing of the Appalachian Press, from Pittsburgh to Birmingham

This story was originally published by Jim Branscome on Substack. In the late summer of 1974 somebody set fire to the Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Kentucky. The blaze took the offices, the files, the bound archives—most of the institutional memory of Letcher County that Tom and Pat Gish had been accumulating since they bought the paper in 1956 and changed its sleepy masthead, “A Friendly Non-Partisan Weekly Newspaper,” to the two words that mad…