While many college graduates interested in journalism are being pulled toward big cities, some are choosing to stay in local rural communities.

We sat down with the 23 year old editor of the LaRue County Herald News to learn about the significance of rural journalism.

I didn't always know that I was going to go into journalism.

I know some people wake up and they know what they're going to do.

I was actually a nursing student beforehand and decided that it wasn't for me, and I really just tried to look at myself and think about what do I like?

What do I enjoy?

I was a Kentucky Press Association intern.

I came here in May of 2022, having written two news stories in my whole career.

Really great experience.

But I came in and my first day I had a story on the I had I wrote a story and we had it in the newspaper two days later.

Rural journalism is in many cases important to Kentucky because Kentucky is largely a rural state.

So outside of Louisville, Lexington, northern Kentucky, and a few other places, we can classify almost every county in Kentucky as being rural.

And again, for most of those places, they're being served by one news outlet, possibly two.

And in today's world, it's almost exclusively newspapers and their online news sites that are providing that coverage.

And in Kentucky, if we don't have strong rural journalism, then a lot of the communities are not going to be well served.

It's important to have fresh voices.

I think many graduates who are coming out right now are skilled in a number of different areas.

They're skilled and broadcast their skilled in video, they're skilled in social media, presentation and other things.

Campbell's University, I think, prepared me very, very well as a mass communication major.

I took journalism classes, but I also took television classes in graphic design and and this, that and the other.

They they covered everything.

So coming here and I think that really helps me because in today's world, we're not just a print newspaper.

You have to be more than that.

We update websites now daily, sometimes hourly.

We push out social media post about recent deaths in our communities to keep people involved.

People are going digital.

But here in LaRue County, during the COVID time, our newspaper subscriptions actually increased, and they have not fallen off from a pandemic levels.

Local journalism here in LaRue County is about LaRue County.

Everything is about here.

So from church to our farm ground to real estate, to our local heroes, to the ball teams, it's in our paper each and every week.

I think that the spirit of local journalism could not be any more real than in a local newspaper.

One of my favorite things about what I do is that I get to tell people what's going on.

I get to keep them informed.

I get to help them engage in their community back.

An example would be we, as many other school districts, we need more school bus drivers.

We've seen a lot of decrease in that.

So I wrote a story about it that, you know, we need more people.

This is what's going on.

This is, if you're interested, go here to apply.

And I actually had a director of transportation here come up to me at a recent meeting, and he said, Hey, I just want to I just wanted to let you know that a woman came in and she put in her application and she said that she read it in the newspaper.

She read that we needed help.

And so she's come to help.

What I've learned here, coverage wise, is that you have to follow what the communities priorities are.

The longer that you are here, they begin to trust you more.

They trust you with information.

They understand that we want the best for the community and we want to help them do that.

However possible.

A bright future for her.

Indeed, Cox will celebrate her first full year as editor in June, just as the LaRue County Herald News welcomes a new intern.

And we want to give a big shout out to our intern, Emily Sisk, from Northern Kentucky University for putting that story together.

Way to go, Emily.