LaFollette Press

The LaFollette Press is a weekly newspaper published in La Follette, Tennessee, serving La Follette and communities across Campbell County. The Tennessee State Library and Archives dates the Press to about November 30, 1910, and lists it as published from that year to the present, which makes it one of the longest continuously published newspapers in the Cumberland Mountains of East Tennessee. The Press publishes on Thursdays and online at lafollettepress.com, covering Campbell County government, schools, sports, obituaries and community life. It is part of Paxton Media Group, the Kentucky-based newspaper company whose Tennessee titles were listed by Editor & Publisher as including the LaFollette Press alongside papers in Lebanon, Cookeville, Portland, Lafayette and Sevierville, among others.

La Follette and Campbell County

La Follette is the largest city in Campbell County, a mountainous East Tennessee county on the Kentucky border whose county seat is Jacksboro. The county's communities — La Follette, Jacksboro, Caryville, Jellico and Rocky Top in part — grew up around coal mining, railroads and, in La Follette's case, iron: an early gazetteer description of the town, preserved in Campbell County historical collections, noted its mining industries, banks and one of the largest iron furnaces in the South, along with its weekly newspaper. A newspaper in La Follette has therefore always covered a working industrial and mining county as well as a farming one, and the Press's century of publication spans the boom years of Campbell County coal, the coming of Norris Lake, and the county's modern mix of manufacturing, retail and outdoor recreation around Cove Lake and the lake country.

Founded in 1910

The State Library and Archives' newspaper inventory dates the LaFollette Press to about November 30, 1910, published weekly. It was not La Follette's first paper: the inventory also lists the LaFollette Times, published from January 1902 to about 1906, and two 1903 ventures, the Campbell County Citizen and the Powells Valley Courier. The Press outlasted them all. Its early decades are documented in the State Library's holdings, which include scattered issues from 1921, 1925, 1926 and 1929 and a fuller run from the early 1930s onward; Campbell County's newspaper microfilm record generally becomes complete from 1931. Surviving items quoted from the Press in genealogical collections — a May 21, 1925 item on the local high school, for example — show it already performing the school and community reporting that remains its stock in trade.

A Semiweekly in the 1930s

For part of its history the Press published more often than once a week. The State Library records that its frequency varied, with a semiweekly schedule from July 3, 1934 to November 5, 1942, before it returned to weekly publication. Surviving evidence fits that pattern: an obituary notice carried by the Press in its September 29, 1936 issue appeared on a Tuesday. The semiweekly years coincided with the Depression and the transformation of the Tennessee Valley — including the construction of Norris Dam and the creation of Norris Lake on Campbell County's southern border — a period when a twice-a-week paper in a coal county had no shortage of news, even if advertising revenue was scarce.

County Competition and Neighbors

For part of the twentieth century the Press shared Campbell County with a second paper. The State Library lists a Campbell County Times published from June 1969 to June 1980, continued briefly as the Campbell County News/Times and then the Campbell County News into December 1980, filmed with the Jacksboro papers. Those titles ended in 1980, leaving the LaFollette Press — already seventy years old — as the county's enduring newspaper. Papers were also published historically in Jellico and Jacksboro, and Campbell County readers today are within the circulation orbit of Knoxville media, but the Press remains the only newspaper published in and devoted to Campbell County itself.

Ownership: Landmark and Paxton

In the digital era the Press was associated with Landmark Community Newspapers, the Kentucky company whose name appears as the developer of the LaFollette Press mobile app, described as covering local news, sports and more for Campbell County and as the news source in LaFollette and Campbell County. Landmark's publications were sold to Paxton Media Group in May 2021, in a deal reported by the Associated Press and industry press that made Paxton the owner of some 120 publications across 14 states. Editor & Publisher's later account of Paxton's Tennessee holdings lists the LaFollette Press among the company's eleven existing titles in the state, together with the Lebanon Democrat, the Hartsville Vidette, the Cookeville Herald-Citizen, the Macon County Times, the Portland Leader, the Roane County News, the Mountain Press of Sevierville and others — placing the Campbell County weekly inside one of the largest community-newspaper groups in the Southeast.

What the Press Covers

The Press is a general community weekly whose franchise is Campbell County public life. Its reporting on the Campbell County Commission is substantial enough that regional media cite it: in December 2021, Knoxville television station WVLT reported on the commission's vote to collect and display controversial statues in a proposed museum expressly according to the LaFollette Press, drawing on the paper's account of the workshop and the 11–1 vote. That is the classic role of a county weekly — it is the outlet that actually attends the meeting, and larger media downstream rely on its record. Around that core, the paper covers county and city government in La Follette and Jacksboro, Campbell County schools and high school sports, courts and public safety, obituaries, church and community news, and the property and public-notice material that makes a weekly a legal as well as journalistic record.

Digital Presence

The Press publishes online at lafollettepress.com, maintains a Facebook community with an active local following, and has offered a dedicated mobile app for iPhone and Android carrying its local news and sports. The app's listing describes the paper straightforwardly as covering local news, sports and more for Campbell County, LaFollette, Tennessee. For a county whose residents are spread across mountain valleys — and whose former residents are spread across the country — the website, social channels and app together perform the function the mailed weekly once did, keeping Campbell County news in the hands of people who no longer live within delivery range.

The Press and Campbell County Life

The Press's place in local life is visible in small, telling ways. When the Campbell County Historical Society arranged a reprint of Dr. George Ridenour's Land of the Lake, the early history of Campbell County originally published in La Follette in 1941, copies were to be available at the LaFollette Press office alongside the public library — the newspaper office serving, as hometown newspaper offices do, as one of the town's public counters. Its pages and files, preserved on microfilm from the 1920s and in a complete run for Campbell County papers from 1931, are a standing resource for local genealogists; the obituaries and death notices researchers extract from the Press fill Campbell County family-history collections. A paper that has published since 1910 becomes, inevitably, part of the archive of the place it covers.