Congress recognizes importance of community newspapers in sharing health information with rural communities

Three years of planning and effort by the National Newspaper Association and its partners resulted this weekend in an emphatic recognition by Congress of the vital role community newspapers play in sharing health information to small and rural markets. As part of the final batch of appropriations bills approved by the Senate in the early hours of Saturday morning, funding to the Department of Health and Human Services included report language directing the Secretary of HHS to use part of its public health paid advertising budget to reach small or rural markets through local media outlets, including small daily and weekly newspapers.& President Joe Biden signed the bill. “This effort gained traction during the COVID pandemic,” said John Galer, NNA’s Chair and publisher of The Journal-News in Hillsboro, IL. “While we watched the U.S. government spend tens of millions of dollars in health outreach, almost nothing was spent in reaching many of our small and rural populations through their most-trusted source, the local newspaper. “We quickly realized that we needed an all-out effort to educate federal officials on the vital role we play in our communities and that we needed to elicit the help of Congress to do so,” Galer...