How a small Kentucky newspaper ended up running a Huffington Post story

The Huff­in­g­ton Post is, in the minds of some jour­nal­ists, the web's bad guy, a neme­sis that sub­verts the norms of lega­cy media, soak­ing up other peo­ple's work in the pur­suit of money and the all-powerful pageview.

And maybe it is! But here's one tiny tale where the con­tent flows in the oppo­site direc­tion. Read­ers of The Har­lan Daily Enter­prise, a small news­pa­per locat­ed in south­east Ken­tucky, found some­thing strange on the front page a cou­ple months ago — a Huff­in­g­ton Post byline. (There's no evi­dence Huff­in­g­ton Post Rural Ken­tucky is the web giant's next planned vertical.)

When Huff­Po Labor reporter Dave Jamieson wrote a 4,000-word-plus por­trait of a miner fight­ing for safer work­ing con­di­tions, the 6,000-cir­cu­la­tion paper in Ken­tucky reached out to Jamieson to ask if they could reprint the story. The answer: Yes.

The one-off col­lab­o­ra­tion result­ed in bylines for Jamieson and the Huff­in­g­ton Post over a two-day peri­od as the paper ran the story in full. What's remark­able about the part­ner­ship was the single-minded sim­plic­i­ty of it: One side gets a story valu­able to read­ers, the other gets expo­sure for an enter­prise piece and a lit­tle good­will. No need to try to clone the story or wait for AP to do a take, as might have been SOP when it was one news­pa­per scoop­ing in anoth­er's turf: This was more like a neigh­bor bor­row­ing a cup of sugar. One edi­tor called anoth­er. "I don't think any­one here would have had much hes­i­ta­tion about a print news­pa­per want­i­ng to use a story like that," Jamieson ..........

How a small Kentucky newspaper ended up running a Huffington Post story
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/11/how-a-small-kentucky-newspaper-ended-up-running-a-huffington-post-story/