We have noted, many times, that the Lexington Herald-Leader has been significantly out-of-touch with the views of the people in the central-and-eastern Kentucky counties it (supposedly) serves. So, when Executive Editor Peter Baniak was promoted by McClatchy to become its vice president of news for small and medium markets, why what better place to go than Santa Rosa, California, and The Press Democrat for a new Executive Editor! Sonoma County, where Santa Rosa is located, gave 199,938 (74.52%) of its votes to Joe Biden in 2020, to just 61,825 (23.04%) for President Trump, an even higher percentage than Mr Biden’s 63.48% to 34.32% advantage statewide.

Herald-Leader names award winning former Kentucky journalist as new executive editor

by John Cheves | Monday, August 28, 2023 | 4:15 PM EDT | Updated: 4:40 PM EDT

The Lexington Herald-Leader on Monday named as its new executive editor Richard Green, the former editor of The Courier Journal in Louisville who led that newspaper to a 2020 Pulitzer Prize and two 2021 Pulitzer finalists.

Green is currently executive editor at The Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, Calif., north of San Francisco. He will start work in Lexington on Sept. 25.

“I am so honored and incredibly excited to be returning to Kentucky and for the opportunity to work with the talented Herald-Leader newsroom. I have admired that staff for decades, and I cannot wait to roll up my sleeves and join it,” Green said.

There follows a long section detailing Mr Green’s curriculum vitae, which I shall not reproduce here. Rather, I shall drop down to the closing two paragraphs:

Green said Herald-Leader readers and subscribers should “expect a sharp focus on fair and fearless journalism.”

“Our credibility is only as good as the sophisticated content we produce. That means our staff will have just one objective: to be the best newsroom of its size in the country, defined by our memorable storytelling, breaking news coverage and watchdog journalism,” Green said. “We’ll defend the First Amendment, cover news as it happens digitally and protect the most vulnerable among us across the commonwealth.”

I guess that we’ll see, won’t we?

I have some affection for the Herald-Leader, in that I delivered the newspapers, then the morning Lexington Herald and afternoon Lexington Leader when I was a teenager in Mt Sterling, Kentucky, back during the days of linotype, seemingly just past the era of quill pens! The newspapers were delivered far wider than Lexington and Fayette County, through much of central and eastern Kentucky.

But now? I cannot get home delivery of the newspaper just two counties away, and the paper itself is a sad shadow of its former self. Yeah, that’s happened to print newspapers all across the country, but most of the counties of eastern Kentucky do not have daily newspapers at all, being left with small weeklies, if they have a newspaper at all.

Finding the circulation numbers for the much-diminished newspaper has been sketchy, but Wikipedia directed me to an archive of a page by McClatchy, the newspaper’s owner, which stated that in 2017, the print newspaper had an average daily circulation of 34,888, and twice that, 68,545 on Sunday. Yet the newspaper itself claimed 159,826 daily and 190,057 Sunday Circulation, and a combined online and in print audience of 348,400 (in market unduplicated), which it dated very close to the date of the McClatchy report: “Sources: Dec. 31, 2016, Alliance for Audited Media & Scarborough, 2016, Release 2. DMA all 40 counties.”

A check on that? The Press Gazette’s top 25 print newspaper circulation figures for 2022 indicate that The Philadelphia Inquirer, serving a metropolitan area of 6,245,051 people, greater than the population of the entire state of Kentucky, 4,512,310, has a daily print average circulation of 61,180. The Herald-Leader did not make the top 25, nor did the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Bluegrass State’s largest newspaper, in Kentucky’s largest city and metropolitan area. The 25^th ranked newspaper was the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, at 47,832.

In other words, someone was lying greatly mistaken about the newspaper’s circulation numbers!

The newspaper also claimed a “circulation area” of “70 counties in Central, Eastern and South-Central Kentucky.” Yet the editorial slant of what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal has been decidedly not just Lexington-urban, but basically far-left #woke Democratic Party. When the newspaper has made its political endorsements, it has made endorsements that might make sense for the liberals in Lexington, but haven’t swayed the voters in the sixth congressional district, or Kentucky as a whole.

Mr Green has a chance to address that, but I am not optimistic that he will.