Ohio Valley ReSource
The Ohio Valley ReSource is a regional journalism collaborative of public media outlets reporting on economic and social change in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia. Managed by Louisville Public Media in Louisville, Kentucky, the collaborative pools reporters based at partner stations across the three states so that stories rooted in one community — a mine closure, a contaminated water supply, a struggling rural hospital — can be reported with regional context and shared with audiences throughout the Ohio Valley. Rather than operating as a single centralised newsroom, the ReSource works as a network: journalists remain embedded in their home stations and communities, while a small central team in Louisville coordinates projects, edits collaborative work and supplies data reporting that individual stations could not easily produce on their own.
That model was designed for a region that traditional media economics had left underreported. The Ohio Valley and Appalachia have experienced decades of decline in coal employment, persistent public health challenges and significant economic transition, at the same time as local newspapers and broadcasters cut staff. The ReSource was created to ensure that those changes were documented by journalists who live in the region, and that reporting produced in Whitesburg, Murray, Bowling Green or Athens could reach regional and national audiences through partner stations and NPR.
Origins in a Corporation for Public Broadcasting Grant
The collaborative was established with a $445,000 grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), announced in November 2015. CPB funded the project as an Ohio River regional journalism collaboration, intended to produce hard-hitting, high-quality multimedia journalism examining the region's economy, energy, environment, agriculture, infrastructure and health. The grant supported the hiring of eight journalists at the seven partner media outlets for two years, with station support expected to continue the work in later years.
CPB's journalism leadership framed the investment as a way for stations to tell important stories from an underreported area locally, regionally and nationally, arguing that the combined effort would be greater than what any single station could achieve alone. Louisville Public Media led the news operation from the start and housed the project's managing editor and data journalist — an early signal that data analysis would be central to the collaborative's identity, not an add-on to conventional reporting.
The Partner Stations
Seven public media outlets formed the original partnership. Louisville Public Media, home of Louisville's public radio stations, served as the lead organisation. The other partners were WEKU in Richmond and Lexington, Kentucky; WKU Public Radio and WKU-PBS in Bowling Green, Kentucky; WMMT and Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky; WKMS in Murray, Kentucky; West Virginia Public Broadcasting, providing radio and television across West Virginia; and WOUB in Athens, Ohio, also operating radio and television services.
The geography of the partnership matters to its journalism. The partners span the Ohio River itself, eastern Kentucky coal country, the far western tip of Kentucky, the West Virginia hills and southeastern Ohio. That spread allows the collaborative to compare how the same forces — the collapse of coal markets, the opioid crisis, flooding, changes in federal policy — play out differently in neighbouring states and counties, and to report stories that cross state lines in the way the region's economy and environment actually do.
Leadership and How the Collaborative Works
Editorial leadership sits with Louisville Public Media. The organisation later created a dedicated managing editor for collaboratives role, filled by Ryland Barton, to serve as editorial and operational leader of both the Ohio Valley ReSource and the Kentucky Public Radio Network. Barton had previously been Capitol bureau chief for Kentucky Public Radio and had covered politics and state government for NPR member stations KWBU in Waco and KUT in Austin, bringing statehouse experience to a collaborative whose stories frequently involve state policy in Frankfort, Columbus and Charleston.
Day to day, the model combines shared planning with local execution. Reporters at partner stations pursue stories in their own coverage areas, the Louisville-based team contributes editing, coordination and specialist data work, and finished reporting is distributed across the partner network. Early data reporting by Alexandra Kanik, for example, supplied maps and analysis that anchored collaborative projects on elections and on the benefits system facing sick miners. Stories produced through the collaborative have also regularly reached national audiences through NPR, extending the reach of small regional newsrooms.
A Coverage Agenda Built Around Transition
From its founding grant onward, the ReSource's agenda has centred on a region in transition. Its stated subject areas — economy, energy, environment, agriculture, infrastructure and health — describe a place where the decline of one dominant industry, coal, touches everything else: employment, tax bases, public health, land and water. Reporting has examined what replaces coal jobs, how communities cope with economic anxiety, and how environmental legacies of extraction persist after mines close.
The collaborative's approach pairs narrative reporting with data analysis. Election coverage, health projects and environmental investigations have all used datasets — voting results, groundwater monitoring records, federal dust and disease figures — to test official accounts and to show patterns across the three states that would be invisible from a single county or a single newsroom.
The Black Lung Investigation
The collaborative's best-known early work was its investigation, with NPR, into the resurgence of black lung disease in Appalachia. ReSource reporter Benny Becker worked with NPR's Howard Berkes to gather data and interviews documenting far more cases of complicated black lung — progressive massive fibrosis, the disease's worst stage — than the federal research agency tracking it had identified.
Investigative Reporters and Editors honoured the reporting in 2017 with its national award in the large market radio category. The judges noted that official counting methods, which focused on working miners, had missed hundreds of cases among miners who had been laid off, whose mines had closed, or who had become too sick to work, and that the disease was striking younger miners. Becker's audio portrait of one sick miner and Kanik's graphics explaining the maze-like federal benefits process gave the data a human frame. The reporting prompted renewed attention from lawmakers to funding for black lung clinics, which had been frozen for years, and the partners continued following the disease as later NPR reporting drew on decades of mine dust monitoring data.
Coal Ash Uncovered
In 2018 the ReSource and Louisville station WFPL published Coal Ash Uncovered, a multi-part series analysing the first round of groundwater testing data from coal ash disposal sites across the region, released under federal coal ash rules. Coal had long powered the Ohio Valley and left behind dozens of massive ash disposal sites; the analysis found widespread evidence that sites were leaking contaminants into surrounding groundwater.
The series reported that in Kentucky and West Virginia, every power plant covered by the rules had ash sites with evidence of contaminated groundwater, and it examined specific places, including Louisville Gas and Electric's Mill Creek plant on the Ohio River and the Tennessee Valley Authority's Paradise plant in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, alongside residents living beside the country's largest coal ash waste site in West Virginia's northern panhandle. It also considered proposals to change how the sites were regulated. The project illustrated the collaborative's formula at its best: a regional dataset, analysed centrally, reported locally in the communities living with the results.
Elections, the Economy and Health
Beyond its signature investigations, the ReSource has produced sustained coverage of the region's politics and health. After the 2016 presidential election, its reporters fanned out across Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia for a project examining coal's collapse and economic anxiety among voters, combining interviews in places such as Whitesburg, Cumberland and Wheeling with county-level voting and economic data across the region's 263 counties.
Health coverage has been another pillar. The collaborative produced multi-week projects on the Affordable Care Act's impact in rural communities — reporting on rural hospitals and clinics, federally qualified health centres, substance abuse treatment and the opioid and HIV crises — with staff including longtime health reporter Mary Meehan. The work was recognised by the Association of Health Care Journalists as an example of collaborative rural health reporting, mixing policy analysis with the experiences of individual patients and providers.
From the ReSource to a Wider Appalachian Collaboration
The ReSource became a template for larger public media collaboration in the region. Louisville Public Media went on to lead the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration of public radio and television stations across Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia launched in autumn 2024, which CPB supported in May 2025 with a grant of $649,703 for shared staff including a video journalist and project manager. Its stations include Louisville Public Media, WKU, WEKU, WKMS and West Virginia Public Broadcasting alongside Nashville Public Radio and WUOT in Knoxville. When flooding followed Hurricane Helene, the newsroom and nine partner stations deployed reporters quickly across state lines — the kind of response the collaborative model was built to make possible.
More recently, Louisville Public Media has also developed the Appalachia News Exchange, a story-sharing arrangement intended to let participating newsrooms, including newspaper and digital outlets, exchange reporting they already produce at no additional staff cost, deepening the network of relationships among regional newsrooms and creating routes for local stories to reach national NPR audiences.
Why the ReSource Matters
The Ohio Valley ReSource matters because it demonstrated, early and at regional scale, that public media collaboration could sustain serious accountability journalism in places the commercial media economy was abandoning. Its investigations changed national understanding of black lung's return and of coal ash contamination; its everyday coverage gave three states a shared lens on their common economic and environmental future. Managed from Louisville but reported from across Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia, it remains a working example of the principle its founding funder cited in 2015: that for regional journalism, the sum can be greater than the parts.
