KyForward

OPEN LETTER TO KYFORWARD READERS: A sad, last day for this publication. Time to pull the plug It is my sad duty to tell you that May 3 was the final day of publication for KyForward, which is concluding at the end of its 10th year of the very weekend it was launched. We remember that Kentucky Derby well, just as we will remember that Billy Reed was... our reporter on the scene for his 53rd Run for the Roses this year -- and writing for us. It's a good send-off, Billy. We've had a bit of a wild ride over the 10 years of this grand experiment in an attempt to create a newspaper of the future for Kentucky, a place we love and a place that needs what we had hoped to accomplish. Perhaps one day, someone will figure it out. Maybe what we've done will pave the way. Along the way, we lost two of our founders, Mike Farrell and Gene Clabes, and that certainly diminished a team that ran mostly on passion and grit and pure determination. We trudged on through the early years, through the terrible fake news noise and even through the worst of the pandemic. But while our readership continued to grow and we built an impressive network of columnists and experienced freelancers and partners statewide, we have not been able to build the revenues to sustain the work or to advance the content as we had hoped. The sobering non-response from readers to our 2020 year end NewsMatch campaign was too disappointing for words. We made the match for the national funding, but it came from readers of our sister publication, the NKyTribune.com, with very little support from KyForward readers. As a nonprofit public service newspaper, voluntary reader support is critical. Over the years, we just never got traction with sponsors from the business community or the area's universities either (that includes UK Athletics too and we certainly invested enough in coverage there). We also invested in interns, (yes, we paid them) providing opportunity for student journalists to get practical experience and jump-start their careers. We spent too much time ...Read More