Northern Kentucky is just like many cities and towns with dwindling sources for local news as traditional papers scaled back or even shut down.

One publication is trying to fill that regional information gap with a digital first publication called Link Inquiry for our On the Road Reporter's Notebook.

I sat down with the president and CEO Lacey Starling to learn how the small staff of 13 is improving news, literacy and even civic engagement.

One byline at a time.

Talk to us about what Link K why is and the void it's trying to fill and the information gap.

Absolutely.

Lincoln K Why is the voice of Northern Kentucky?

And we were founded three years ago in order to give Northern Kentuckians a voice in the region and the state and nationally.

When the Northern Kentucky Post shut down in 2007, it did.

It left a void in northern Kentucky, where our residents didn't have a news organization that was large enough to cover all of the issues that affected our residents.

We have 400,000 people who live here in northern Kentucky, and they deserve to know about what's happening in their local area.

When we talk about northern Kentucky and maybe this is just a media ism, we always condense it down to three counties Boone, Kenton, Campbell, and we say it so fast, it sounds like one county, right?

Is that an accurate depiction of the vastness of northern Kentucky?

It's it's not.

Now, that is our coverage area.

So some of the southern counties, Pendleton County, Grant County, are lucky enough to still have weekly print publications that have been going for 100 150 years.

Boone, Canton and Campbell County, which we do.

We missed it altogether.

Right.

They were left without that.

And so for us, in order to make the most of the resources that we have, we focused on the population centers.

And that is that is really those three and.

400,000 residents, citizens.

Yes.

And growing.

And growing.

Right.

And I will have talked to some folks who were going to talk to us about the growing pains and the need not to be complacent.

Right.

Because there was so much happening.

You still want to keep setting the bar higher.

Right.

When you think about let's talk about maybe this election cycle.

And a lot of eyes, of course, are focused on globally, the presidential race.

But talk to us about the information you're trying to get out to readers and citizens about the important races that really hit home with them on an everyday basis.

Absolutely.

And yes, luckily, we don't have to cover the presidential election.

We have lots of folks who are doing that really effectively, who we partner with.

But in northern Kentucky, there are 34 cities.

23 police departments, 17 school districts.

All of those have elections that affect them and that affects the residents directly.

What is your property tax rate?

How fast of the potholes get fixed on Madison Avenue in Covington?

What does your school board decide about having a school resource officer in your school or the subjects and topics that your students are taught?

All of that hyper local elected officials are the ones who really affect our everyday lives.

Of course, the national election is important, but for us it was.

It's critical that we tell the citizens of northern Kentucky about the down ballot races that are going to affect them immediately.

Yeah.

Talk to us about the circulation that you all have, how often you publish and if there's print only, digital only or mail in option.

Mail option.

Yes.

So we are a digital first publication, so pretty much everything that we publish goes up online almost immediately.

About 100 stories a week about northern Kentucky.

Wow.

We have a weekly print publication, so we are the paper of record for Northern Kentucky.

So we have a weekly subscription paper and then four times a year, we mail to every single household in northern Kentucky.

And so we have an election guide that will be mailed to every house in northern Kentucky.

It's 173,000 households, and that's coming out in mid-October.

That seems like such an investment on your part, right at a time where it's not even just digital first, it's digital only, right, for even the large newspapers.

How are you able to provide that kind of level of service?

So for us, it was such a key part of our mission.

It's difficult in this day and age because it's been said that we all exist on different Internets, right?

I see information from different places than you see, than my husband, than my daughter.

And our question was, how do we bring the entire community of northern Kentucky together around the issues that matter, whether that's the election, whether it's education, whether it's housing.

And print is the way to do that.

If every single mailbox in northern Kentucky has the same stories in it four times a year, maybe we can agree on what the situation is.

We can all have the same information from which we can then make decisions.

And we don't care what the decision is.

We just want people to be informed and to participate.

And the best way to participate is to be informed.

And you think that link in a way, is making a sizable difference in citizen engagement and civic engagement?

Yes.

So one of the ways that we judge impact is how many contested races there are in any election cycle.

Because when you lose your local news organization, research has shown that not only does voter participation go down, but there are fewer candidates for office.

We we started in 2021, so the 2022 election was the first one we covered.

We have significant ently more contested races this year than we did in 2022, which means more people are participating in the process.

And that means that voters have choices when they go into the voting booth.

And that makes everybody, I think, feel better that they aren't just like, well, here's the one candidate, hope you like them.

And that for us is a sign of progress.

And we hope to maintain that.

We hope also to see voter turnout increase this fall.

It's a presidential election year that typically drives greater voter turnout.

But can we see that higher level of voter turnout as well?

Because more people feel informed, Right.

And they feel able to go into the voting booth and make a decision?

That's right.

Oftentimes when readers, viewers, Americans, citizens are polled about their trust in our major institutions, whether that's Congress or the Supreme Court or the media, it's not always the most flattering numbers that are returned.

How do you feel the community responds and trust link and why?

So this is a big problem and national news media struggles more with trust than local news media.

And I think it's because what we've discovered is when readers can look you in the eye and they know that you are part of the community.

I live in Covington.

My daughter goes to school here and they know that I have the best interests of the community at heart as well.

I'm not a national journalist who's parachuting in to northern Kentucky to tell us about ourselves.

We are from here and of here.

It's taken us time to earn that trust.

We've been around three years.

We're still working on it.

The longer we're in existence, the more measured we are in our reporting, the more folks can see that we are independent and unbiased and that we are going to do our best work to make sure that they have information to make their own decisions, the greater trust they'll develop in us.

And that's just the work we have to do as journalists.

Well, I say thank you so much for your time and your great work.

Thank you for serving the community as well as you do.

Thank you, Renee.