Community journlism hero dies

As noted on the COMJIG blog, one of the heroes of community journalism is dead. Tom Gish published The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Ky.

He and his wife were among the first to take on strip-mining interests and famously changed the paper's motto from "A Friendly Non-Partisan Weekly Newspaper Published Every Thursday" to "'It Screams."

When they were firebombed out of their office, they kept publishing from their porch and changed the motto to "It Still Screams."

More papers might take note ...

(More from the Courier-Journal and the N.Y. Times.)