The Mountain Citizen of Inez, Ky., wins the 2025 Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism

A scrappy little newspaper that has fought for more than 30 years for clean water and open government in its Appalachian county is the winner of the 2025 Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism. 

The Mountain Citizen is a weekly paper serving the 11,000 people of Martin County, 231 square miles along Kentucky’s northeastern border with West Virginia. For decades, the Citizen has been the key watchdog on the local water district, which has long had problems providing clean and adequate supply, and on coal companies and local government. 

Tap water in Martin County often runs brown, and the Citizen’s efforts prompted state Public Service Commission investigations of the Martin County Water District in 2002, 2006 and 2016. This year, the paper revealed that a state agency had failed to correctly calculate Martin County’s scores in a water-funding competition for poor and underserved counties, and that in 2018 the county’s water was some of the most corrosive in the nation, more so than in Flint, Michigan, in 2015. 

“The Mountain Citizen has spent decades overcoming obstacles and opposition to inform its community about serious problems with its water supply and other important issues,” said Benjy Hamm, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism. “Its work represents the best of rural journalism and everything the Gish Award was established to honor – courage, integrity and tenacity.” 

In recounting the paper’s water work, owner Lisa Stayton wrote, “When you live here and see your neighbors carrying bottled water into their kitchens, you understand this is about survival. And you worry because you know that many of your neighbors can’t afford to buy bottled water and are drinking tap water that you wouldn’t drink yourself.” 

The paper’s water reporting began in 1993, when it revealed that a coal company had so badly cracked the bed of a creek that it had to put a plastic liner in the creek to keep its water out of an underground mine. The paper reported several coal-slurry spills, then got an important scoop in 2000 when it obtained and published maps of a defunct mine that was the conduit for a massive spill from a surface-mine pond, which polluted streams and valleys with an estimated 250 million tons of waste. 

When the Citizen forgot to renew its corporate charter in 2000, its corporate name was legally claimed by the water district’s board chairman, who had been the subject of critical reporting by the newspaper. The paper kept using its name, defying a court order, and was fined for contempt of court, but after two years the state Court of Appeals threw out the charge and the fine. 

Though the paper’s future was in jeopardy, then-Editor Gary Ball, a former coal miner, continued its strong stances. When the state attorney general’s office announced it would have investigators in the field for the 2002 general election, he told the Lexington Herald-Leader that they were “paper tigers” who were six weeks late, since the groundwork for vote fraud is laid well before an election. 

In 2003, the Citizen reported that the county schools spent nearly $250,000 on travel over four years, including airfare for spouses of board members, prompting the schools to refuse complimentary copies that the newspaper had sent to all classrooms. In 2012, the paper challenged the school board’s private discussion of the superintendent’s contract and was upheld by a binding opinion from the state attorney general. In the same year the attorney general ruled the paper was entitled to child-abuse records withheld by the state. 

The Citizen was founded in 1990 as a consolidation of the Martin County Mercury and The Martin Countian, a newspaper that had won national attention for the crusading reporting and editorial stances of owner-publisher Homer Marcum. The Citizen took similar approaches; when the school system was no longer required to publish the names and salaries of teachers, the paper did that on its own. It withstood competition from other newspapers and by 2001 was the county’s sole paper. 

The award is named for Tom and Pat Gish, who published The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Kentucky, for more than 50 years. Their son and successor, Ben Gish, is on the award selection committee. “I read The Mountain Citizen regularly (we trade subscriptions),” he wrote. “They do a really good job.” 

Stayton and the Citizen will receive the Gish Award Nov. 13 in Lexington, Ky., at the annual Al Smith Awards Dinner of the Institute for Rural Journalism. The dinner will also include presentation of the Al Smith Award for public service through community journalism by Kentuckians to Bill Estep, who recently retired from the Lexington Herald-Leader after chronicling the stories of Appalachian Kentucky for more than 40 years.