Inside the Block
We're shining a spotlight on the vibrant businesses and and unique history of the Warehouse Block in Lexington, Kentucky! Every first and third Sunday of the month we're serving up a fun blend of inspiring, behind-the-scenes stories of the Bluegrass region's most dynamic district!
Inside the Block
Chronicling Kentucky: Tom Eblen's Journey Through Journalism
"The easiest thing for a reader to do is to stop reading." This wisdom from veteran journalist Tom Eblen perfectly captures his approach to storytelling throughout a remarkable career that has spanned the golden age of print journalism to today's digital revolution.
Eblen's journey begins in his hometown of Lexington, where he discovered journalism at Lafayette High School before attending Western Kentucky University. His natural talent quickly propelled him through the Associated Press ranks, becoming their youngest bureau correspondent at age 21. During the newspaper industry's financial peak, he joined the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as part of their ambitious effort to cover the South comprehensively, which brought him into contact with fascinating stories including the bizarre beginning of the Bluegrass Conspiracy case – when a former Lexington police officer parachuted to his death in Tennessee wearing Gucci loafers and strapped with cocaine.
After returning to Lexington as the Herald-Leader's managing editor in 1998, Eblen witnessed firsthand the dramatic transformation of journalism as digital platforms began siphoning away advertising revenue. Rather than continuing as what he called a "budget cutter," he pivoted to become a local columnist, reconnecting with his passion for writing and storytelling. His columns covered everything from controversial downtown development projects to rappelling down the Fifth Third building at age 60 – an experience he undertook because, as he puts it, "I figured I can chicken out, but I probably won't die."
Today, Eblen remains deeply connected to Kentucky's literary and historical landscape. He manages the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame, teaches writing workshops, documents neighborhood histories, and contributes to the Mountain Workshops – a nationally recognized photojournalism program that descends upon a different Kentucky small town each October.
Explore this fascinating conversation about journalism's evolution, Lexington's rich history, and why supporting quality local news matters more than ever in an era when, as Eblen notes, "If there were a business model, this would be the golden age of journalism."
Okay, well, I've read a lot about you, so it's really dumb that I mispronounced your name.
Speaker 2:You're welcome to start over.
Speaker 1:I think you can do that, Okay sounds great we're back with Tom Eblen with the Inside the Block podcast and journalist extraordinaire of Lexington and other places. Yeah, I mean you have a really interesting and very storied career. Can you start from the very beginning? Tell us where you're from, how you got started, your connections to Lexington?
Speaker 2:everything. I was born and raised in Lexington. I was born in Good Samaritan Hospital and we lived right behind it, so I didn't have a long trip home and I grew up here. We lived right behind it, so I didn't have a long trip home and I grew up here. I went to Cardinal Valley, beaumont and Lafayette and got interested in journalism when I was at Lafayette and became was chosen to be editor of the school newspaper. So I went to a workshop at Western Kentucky University for people who were going to be school newspaper editors and really fell in love with journalism and ended up going to Western and I'm still friends with some of those people from that workshop One retired from the New York Times, one retired from Chicago Tribune.
Speaker 2:But after I got out of school there were a lot of jobs in journalism then and I lucked in.
Speaker 2:I had worked two summers for the Associated Press and usually you had to work for several years before they would hire you.
Speaker 2:But since I had worked for them a couple of summers, I got hired right out of college and was in the Nashville Bureau which is Nashville is a great city to live and work in and quickly got a lot of opportunities covering politics in the legislature and then was made the correspondent in charge of the Knoxville Bureau in 1981. I think I was then the youngest correspondent in the AP I think I was 21 at the time, but there was a two-person bureau that covered East Tennessee and did that for four years. And then when the Atlanta Journal Constitution this was in the mid-80s when newspapers had a lot of money, it was kind of the height of advertising and things for print journalism and they decided to be what they'd always claimed to be, which was the South's great newspaper, and so they hired five of us outside of Georgia to travel around and write about the rest of the South and I did that for four years. I covered Tennessee and Kentucky.
Speaker 1:What were you writing Like? What did it mean to cover the South?
Speaker 2:Well, so it was everything from. You know, if there was a big breaking news story, you would write about that, and when there wasn't a big breaking news story, you would look for interesting you know features, interesting investigative pieces. I did a real variety of things, you know. It was just involved a lot of travel, but pretty much in that region. So I ended up coming up here to cover several things, really interesting stories that time and the Queen's first visit to Lexington. I covered both of those.
Speaker 1:Oh, did you.
Speaker 2:And some of the bluegrass conspiracy stuff.
Speaker 1:Oh, we're talking about that. We're definitely talking about that, okay.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, actually when Drew Thornton who was that all kind of started when Drew Thornton, who was a former Lexington police officer, parachuted out of an airplane over Knoxville, strapped with a, the police reporter for the old Knoxville Journal calls me and says there's a story I think you might be interested in. And he says police just found this guy in South Knoxville. His parachute didn't open.
Speaker 1:He had all this cocaine on him, wearing Gucci loafers.
Speaker 2:So I, like you know, he gives me the address, so I. It was only about five miles from where I live, so I get over there. I get over there just as they are. The ambulance is taking the body away and it was. It was out in this rural area of South Knoxville and it was an old man who owned the house.
Speaker 2:It owned the house, an old man and his nephew was there. And I'm talking to the nephew and says, yeah, I look after my uncle. He says he, he's got some memory issues, but you know he can still live alone. But he called me this morning. He said, son, there's a dead guy in a parachute in the backyard. And the nephew said, well, I thought that was kind of weird. But I thought, well, maybe I better go check it out. And by golly, there was a dead guy in a parachute in his backyard.
Speaker 1:You didn't know, this is the end of old grandpa here, so anyway.
Speaker 2:So once that started unraveling so I came up to Lexington and wrote about that. So there, were you know there were a lot of interesting stories.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Did you write about any of the lead up to cause that was sort of like the beginning of the end for the bluegrass conspiracy. Did you write about any of it?
Speaker 2:No, I hadn't really well, that was really kind of, I think, when it first a lot of it first broke into the open and a lot of it unraveled, so I mean I did a few spot stories but there was also a lot of interest at part of that involved.
Speaker 2:There was a plane crash in in Georgia and so that kind of became the focus of their interest rather than the story up here. But anyway, I did that until 1988 and just kind of wanted to get off the road. So I moved into Atlanta and ended up covering the airline industry and the collapse of Eastern Airlines. So I didn't exactly get off the road. I spent the next two years shuttling between Miami and New York City where the bankruptcy case was.
Speaker 1:Oh, OK. So what was the collapse of the Eastern Airlines?
Speaker 2:Well, so Eastern Airlines was one of the major airlines.
Speaker 1:They were kind of the I've never even heard of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that's because they went under in the early 90s. But they were kind of a rival to Delta. They had 14,000 employees in Atlanta, they were based in Miami but they had been. You know, they were one of the old original airlines and Frank Lorenzo, who was a corporate raider, had bought Continental Airlines and kind of busted all the unions and made it.
Speaker 2:This was when airlines were being deregulated, so there was a lot of turmoil in the industry and he bought Eastern Airlines and it had a very strong and militant union outfit and they weren't going to let him mess them over. So it was pretty much a battle to the death and it kind of killed the airline. But Lorenzo was such a scoundrel that he got banned from the airline industry and was not able to look for safety issues because he was cutting a lot of corners. But anyway, that was a pretty epic struggle that lasted about a year and a half and most of the case was in New York. He had filed he'd used a technicality to file the bankruptcy case in New York City so that he could get a very debtor-friendly judge, but anyway. So I spent a lot of time in New York covering that and then I became- you wanted to stop traveling, but then the travel continued.
Speaker 2:I traveled a lot more because I had two daughters by then, so I didn't want to be on the road all the time. So after that I became an editor, so I wouldn't have to travel.
Speaker 1:Editor where.
Speaker 2:In Atlanta. So I became an assistant business editor and then later was the deputy business editor and kind of ran the business news operation, which back then was the business news staff was bigger than the entire Lexington Herald leader staff is now.
Speaker 2:It was a different time, but I did that for six years and we just got homesick for Kentucky. My wife's family lived in Bowling Green at the time and my family has been in Kentucky since the very beginning, and my sixth-grade grandmother was Daniel Boone's oldest sister, so, anyway, so my family had been, you know, in Kentucky really since about 1779, on both sides, since the 1700s, and so you know we had, we just really liked Kentucky and you know we loved, I mean, we liked, uh, atlanta, except for the summer heat, and the only thing I never liked about Atlanta was the summer heat and the traffic is just horrendous. But you know, it's just. This is a beautiful place and the Herald Leader, you know, when I'd been gone, it'd become a very good newspaper, and so, um, yeah, I didn't really know many people here, I didn't know the editor, I didn't really know many people here, I didn't know the editor, but I kind of reached out and one thing led to another and so I ended up here.
Speaker 1:Amazing.
Speaker 2:And so that was a lot of fun. It was a really great staff to work with, and I was the managing editor for 10 years.
Speaker 1:From what time to what time?
Speaker 2:From 98 until 2008. Okay, I was managing editor but really after kind of 9-11, we had kind of a recession in 2002. And after that is when the internet really started taking off and newspaper journalism was supported by print advertising and all of that money started being sucked up by internet conduits. So basically, facebook and Google get more than half of all the Internet advertising. So that's what. That's what really kind of dominated and newspapers just kept shrinking and shrinking and I didn't want to spend the rest of my career being a budget cutter and I really did miss writing and being out rather than, you know, being in the newsroom and and and dealing with those issues all the time. So I became the local columnist and did that for 11 years. And then when McClatchy, who now owns the Lexington Papers, was getting ready to go into bankruptcy, they made a lot of longtime employees a good deal to leave. So we did.
Speaker 1:You got out while the getting was good.
Speaker 2:I got out while the getting was good, but that was great. So since then I was kind of quickly recruited to the Carnegie Center. I do some work for them. I run the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame process, kind of organize all of that and do other special projects for them and do freelance writing as much as I want to. I basically just do projects I want to do and don't do projects I don't want to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what a what an incredible career. I mean I love that it's ended with like I'm doing everything that I wanted to. Yeah, it's great. So I'm about to ask you a really dumb question, which is what do you really do like as an editor? Do you still get to write, like somewhat as a columnist, or like as an editor?
Speaker 2:you're just overseeing all the other columns as an editor, you don't really get to write much. You're overseeing all the reporters and and deciding on the news cover and it was managing editor. You're basically running the newsroom, which when I first started was about 155 people and, uh, when I could be managing editor was still about 100. I think now they've got about 35 or 40. But you're basically everybody's boss. So you're kind of leading the news coverage and helping editors, help reporters and columns make their stories better and deciding back then when it was primarily a print product rather than an online product. So there was a lot involved in what goes on the front page and what the?
Speaker 2:headline says and what the photo shows and things like that, what does go on the front?
Speaker 1:Like what's the tried and true? I've always heard like if it bleeds, it leads. Not really, I mean it really back then.
Speaker 2:Most you know, newspapers were where people got most of their local but also a lot of their national and international news. So you wanted it to reflect really the importance and the interest of what was going on. It was always very subjective, but we spent a lot of time and effort. Now it's very different because most people get their news on their phone. So you're seeing, it's very much more oriented to your interest as opposed to just what's going on.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So you know it's really changed a lot. But I really enjoyed being a local columnist because part of it was having opinions about issues and things, but a lot of it was also just finding interesting people, interesting stories. So I tried to do a real variety of things and you know you attract different groups of readers. You know they may not agree with what you're writing about politics or local issues or development issues, but they are interested in things about history or interesting people or whatever. So yeah. So that was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:So in your as a columnist you were opinionated yeah.
Speaker 2:So reporters don't have opinions. They're just doing straight news reporting. But columnists are generally supposed to have opinions. That's kind of your more writing analysis and opinion pieces. So my successor at the Herald Leader, Linda Blackford, does a lot of opinions regarding local issues.
Speaker 1:Yeah, she's great. Yeah, I like the way she writes a lot. Yeah, so have you had pushback, obviously, with all of your opinions that you're writing. Of course, yeah, so how and in what ways is the typical Lexingtonian like right, I mean, does somebody like write a letter back to you, or how does Well, back then there were more letters or emails, but you know, there's no such thing as a typical Lexingtonian. Oh, I like that.
Speaker 2:Well, that's true. I mean, this is a very diverse city, you know, and people are all over the map, and so, you know, I got a lot of fan mail. I got, you know, a lot of criticism, and some of both. In fact, there was a for years. There was a well-known Republican politician who, about once every couple of months, would leave me an early morning voicemail, and it was always like hi, tom, I know we don't agree on politics, but I really like this column here.
Speaker 1:That had to have been a really nice compliment. Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the late Larry Forgey was a character. But yeah, so it was a really interesting job because you, you know you, as you see, with what Linda does, you know you become a voice on local issues.
Speaker 2:And some people agree with you and some people won't. But you know, sometimes you're trying to persuade people or just get people to think I mean, that's Sure. So you know now, like I said, I do a lot of work for the Carnegie Center. So I do a lot of you know work with Kentucky writers. So I interview Kentucky writers with new books and other for WKU's Eastern Standard Program. So that's a lot of fun. I do a few of those you know, maybe two or three a month.
Speaker 1:So you're mentoring really.
Speaker 2:Well, no, I mean I'm interviewing writers for, you know, for the radio, I also teach some writing classes at. Carnegie Center. So I teach an opinion writing class and I'm going to be actually teaching that at the Appalachian Writers Workshop in eastern Kentucky again this year. I did that several years ago Because a lot of writers are interested in writing opinion pieces, speaking out on issues and things and things.
Speaker 1:So when they come to you in those classes, can you condense down maybe a couple of major tips that you give like an aspiring?
Speaker 2:opinion call. Yeah Well, I always say that the easiest thing for a reader to do is to stop reading. So you've got to make it interesting from the beginning and you've got to make sure your facts are straight. And you've got to really think through, decide who are you writing this, this for, and what are you trying to accomplish with it? And and then what? If you're trying to persuade someone around your way of thinking, how do you, how do you structure that? How do you engage them? How do you present facts? And then how do you acknowledge the other side and try to show that you know why you think your view is?
Speaker 1:better than the other side. You're not, so one sided.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Intended audience. I like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great.
Speaker 2:But so I'm also been. I've always been really interested particularly in Kentucky history but in history, and so I've been kind of slowly writing on, working on some history related books. I've written a couple of chapters for Kentucky history books and other things. So but it's it's a it's. I've discovered it's very different writing trying to write a book than writing, you know, newspaper or magazine articles. How so? Well, they're a lot longer a lot more involved and you don't have a firm deadline.
Speaker 1:That's right. So, and especially with historical books.
Speaker 2:it's easier, you know the research is so much fun. That's right. So, and and especially with historical books, it's easier, you know the research is so much fun.
Speaker 1:It's hard sometimes to know when to stop.
Speaker 2:Yeah, to know when to stop, because every time you answer one question it raises three others. And so, um, you know, for, for instance, I, um, I set up a website, the the neighborhood and mental neighborhood, which I'm now the association president. But I got involved with the neighborhood Mintel neighborhood, which I'm now the association president, but I got involved with the neighborhood association about 10 years ago and they had like a periodic newsletter and I said, you know, this is kind of crazy. We just need a website and an email list to let people know what's going on. And as part of that, I thought, well, I'll do like a history page of the neighborhood.
Speaker 2:And it kept growing longer and longer and longer. So I've been trying, researching, trying to turn that into a book and it's. The challenge is like keeping it short and to the point, because you know a neighborhood history, you know, has an audience of dozens. So it's not, you know. So it's like you know, nobody wants to read but it. But this neighborhood, in particular in this part of Lexington, the east side of Lexington is just a fascinating story Tell us.
Speaker 2:Well, some of the earliest land grants were, in fact, the area that's now the warehouse block was kind of the focus of one of the earliest Lexington land grants by a guy named John May, who Maysville is named after. But he actually did not end up filing the land grant. It was actually filed by a guy named John Todd, who was an early leader. He was one of the three Todd brothers who were very influential early Lexingtonians. Unfortunately, he died at the Battle of Blue Licks in 1782. And so in fact he was Mary Todd Lincoln's great uncle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I figure.
Speaker 2:But anyway his daughter inherited all this land and she quickly became the wealthiest woman in Kentucky. But later there was a lot of litigation. John May's heirs kind of sued her, claiming that they should have had this land and it was a big court case. They should have had this land and it was a big court case, but the land ended up a lot of it she ended up owning, and then early on James Masterson, who was another Lexington founder, masterson Station. He bought 100 acres and this was his farm from basically from Forest Avenue to Mintel Park. So all of the Belcourt neighborhood and Mintel neighborhood, most of the Mintel neighborhood, were James Masterson's farm from 1790 until he died in the 1830s. In fact his house is actually still on Bullock Avenue. It looks like any of the other 1920 houses but if you look really closely under the stucco it's a 1790 house.
Speaker 2:And then the other half of Mintel neighborhood, from Kramer Avenue to Winchester Road, was part of what was called Fowler's Garden and it was owned by a guy named John Fowler who was an early. He was Lexington area's first congressman and he was a land speculator not very successful one. He was always short of money and owing people money and he would lose a lot of his claims. But he ran something called fowler's garden, which was a private park where you know locals would go to. They had he had a restaurant there and locals would go to for entertainment. There were a lot of big public events um andrew jackson, when he was president he was um celebrated of the with a picnic. I guess it when he was president he was celebrated with a picnic. I guess it was before he was president A big picnic there. And Henry Clay spoke there many times. But one of the centerpieces of Fowler's Garden was the pond where a lot of the springs that are the source for Town Branch Creek are located, and that pond is now covered over by National Avenue are located.
Speaker 1:And that pond is now covered over by National Avenue.
Speaker 2:So if Chad wonders why his parking lots flood, there's a reason for that.
Speaker 1:I never knew that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was called. In later years it was called Scott's.
Speaker 1:Pond and it was filled in in the early 1900s. Interesting I didn't think Town Branch ran quite close to National.
Speaker 2:Actually it's where it begins. There are a number of springs kind of scattered around this neighborhood, which is why everybody gets water in their basements when it rains a lot. But there are a number of springs and they kind of coalesced in the pond there. If you look on old maps, there's an 1818 map of kind of central Kentucky, fayette County. It shows you see Lexington as a small city or small town and there's there's two springs to the east noted.
Speaker 2:One of them is Fowler Spring, which is where the warehouse block is now was the Mansfield Spring, which was where John Todd had his main claim, which is it's in a wooded lot where there's a mansion, right by the old Shriners Hospital. If you notice, sometime driving down Richmond Road, all of a sudden a creek appears beside the road, just all of a sudden. Well, that's the Mansfield Spring, which is still throwing off a lot of water, oh man, and that flows into the reservoir which is it was kind of one of the main sources of West Hickman Creek, which is what the reservoir is West Hickman Creek that's dammed up, but that was one of the reasons a lot of people came. No-transcript.
Speaker 1:So how did Mintel? I mean this is a pretty, I mean it's Mintel Park so it's a very unique looking street and also has a lot of history as well. I mean, is it considered a boulevard because it?
Speaker 2:has the, and they left France during the French Revolution and immigrated to America and ended up coming here. And Madame Charlotte Mantel she was a very well-educated woman for her age and her husband was the son of a geographer to the king of France and they come here and kind of quickly became kind of enmeshed, you know, added a lot of European flair to Lexington society. They became good friends of Henry Clay and John Todd's daughter gave them the lifetime use of five or six acres and they lived what's now Lincoln Avenue. In fact there's a house there that we think was not their original house, but their house burned in the 1840s about the time that Voldemort Mintel died His wife. The house was rebuilt and that's probably where she lived the last few years of her life.
Speaker 2:But it's kind of like on the hill there at Lincoln Avenue. So that's where Mary Todd Lincoln went to school and she was a real mentor for Mary Todd Lincoln, who was one of the most educated first ladies of the 19th century. But their son ended up buying 14 acres that's now Mintel Park and he had a house kind of in the middle of it and after he died passed to his sister and after she died some Lexington businessmen bought it and it was kind of one of the first modern developments where you have a company and they create a street and they divide up lots and when they couldn't sell the lots they built a few spec houses, including this one, and then they ran into financial problems and it kind of all got sold off and so the neighborhood it was planned with that park down the center. Unfortunately the street could be about two feet wider because there were probably five cars in Lexington when they laid out that street in 1905.
Speaker 2:And they were a lot narrower than our cars are now. But it's nice to have that small strip of green space down the middle, which is an official city park and has been since about 1910.
Speaker 1:So the city maintains it.
Speaker 2:The city does an excellent job of mowing our grass and the city arborists take really good care of the trees and so that's a city park. It's a very popular place to walk. I love sitting on my front porch because everybody you know is walking down the street. It's a lot of fun. But this neighborhood neighborhood was like I said, it was kind of organized between about 1905 and 1907. And then you had a lot of the. The other part of Mintel neighborhood, which is from Walton Avenue and up to to North Ashland Avenue, was the Bullock estate. So that was originally kind of Masterson's heirs. That was where his widow lived, and then the Bullock family, which was a prominent family of Robert Bullock was the county judge when they built the old courthouse in the early 1900s.
Speaker 1:Related to like the Bodley Bullock house.
Speaker 2:There's a connection.
Speaker 2:It's the same I think it's the same family Cool think it's the same family, but the Bullocks and then they divided, they subdivided that. You know Lexington is kind of a history of subdivisions. You know, from the beginning a lot of the original lots in town were subdivided and so the Bullock family subdivided that lot. And then you had the development along Walton Avenue, beginning in the 1880s, and then North Hanover was actually developed before Mentel Park. There are several houses there from the 1880s and 90s. And then on the other side of Kramer, the kind of the housing neighborhood beside the warehouse block in the late 1800s, early 1900s was the Lexington Brick Company. And so you know, anyone who lives on that side of Kramer knows that if they dig very much in their yard they're going to hit a lot of brick.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because I love that. Yeah, I love that so much. And you can still find the bricks from the Lexington Brick Company which I think is really neat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that was, and then that was developed as a neighborhood in beginning in 1913.
Speaker 1:And then it started to become pretty industrial right. It was a good spot for that.
Speaker 2:Well, the neighborhood was there. And then because so one of Lexington's first you know, not really one of its first railroad east kind of, began at the pond there, right at the warehouse block, it began going east of Lexington, didn't even go into downtown, but the railroad started there in 1877. What became the C&O line? Yeah, chesapeake, ohio, right Right, chesapeake and Ohio, and so Lexington was a pretty major railroad town in the late 18, early 1900s. So you had a lot of industrial development through the middle of town where railroad tracks ran through, where Vine Street and all that area was all railroad tracks.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And up Midland Avenue kind of where the, where the Herrleider building was. It's now the hill for the. It's called the hill for the Fayette County Public Schools, technical schools.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:All of that was railroad tracks and also the Combs Lumber Company which developed Mintel Park, but so you had a lot of the area. The warehouse block was a really industrial area, you know, for railroad businesses and you know, and the walkers have done a you know a great job of really turning it into a really, you know, great trendy neighborhood and a destination for people and they're very good neighbors for the people around here. We appreciate that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm glad to hear that. So do you have some businesses that you frequent in the warehouse block that you like going down there for?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah Well, Mirror Twin is a favorite and Sav's Ice Cream. Of course, it doesn't get any better than Sav's.
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 2:Sav's one of the great, one of great Lexington's great personalities. I completely agree, and Blue Door Smokehouse is the best barbecue in town or anywhere near town, absolutely. So yeah, there are a lot of places I go down there.
Speaker 1:Well, you're so spoiled I'll just say it just to be able to walk down there.
Speaker 2:Well, even the interviews I do for WKU.
Speaker 1:You're like, let's always meet there.
Speaker 2:They're recorded at Dynamic Studio, which is in the Warehouse Block area.
Speaker 1:Oh cool, I didn't realize there was a dynamic studio.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, neil Kesterson, who's been an audio engineer here for years. He does a lot of audio books and all kinds of radio productions and things out of that studio there.
Speaker 1:Cool, very cool. Well, I'd love to go back and talk more about you as a columnist, really. So any um, any major cases, stories, things that you have covered that stick out to you now and you're looking back on your career is that?
Speaker 2:well as a columnist. Um, I became a columnist about the time there was the whole controversy over city center point, which became the city center development.
Speaker 1:You walk me through that Because I came to Lexington right at the tail end. So tell me about CityPoint.
Speaker 2:Yes, it was originally called CenterPoint.
Speaker 2:And it was developed by the web companies which had been longtime downtown developers with a bit of a controversial history, and they ended up demolishing an entire city block which included a lot of nice older buildings, some of which were in bad repair, but some of them dated to the 1830s, and they were demolished and they had a design that a lot of people criticized. It was a very kind of monolithic tower design and a number of Jim Gray, who was then on the city council, was very highly critical of it and a number of other people, and then it turned out they didn't have the financing to do it, so it sat vacant for a while and then they got some financing and they, they dug the uh, a big pit for the yes for the parking garage and and then that got delayed for several years so we had a big pit in the center of lexington, um, which was, uh, was kind of interesting and kind of embarrassing for the city, right, yeah, yeah, yeah so center point became center pit and.
Speaker 1:I never heard that.
Speaker 2:So anyway, I wrote a lot about that and it was kind of a good exercise, I found, in trying to educate Lexingtonians about, you know, with architects and developers, about how I could do better development than some of the stuff that had been done in the 80s and 90s.
Speaker 2:You know, glass boxes, and that was always a challenge. I mean a lot of the you know Lexington's got a lot of beautiful older architecture, not so much beautiful newer architecture, even though we have a very good architecture school here and a number of great architects. It's always been a challenge to get Lexington developers to do really high quality architecture. So that kind of you know has been changing, thankfully, in recent years. Jim Gray kind of convinced the webs to bring in Jeannie Gang, who's a MacArthur Genius Grant winner of Chicago Architect, who's won numerous awards all over the world for her work, and she came up with a really innovative site plan and development and the final plan did not end up being her plan but it was very close to her site plan. So City Center, you know, turned out to be a pretty nice development, thanks in large part to Jeanne Gang's work early on and kind of breaking up this monolithic thing into a larger development into a you know more human scale development.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, is that my wife? Okay, okay, okay.
Speaker 1:Speaking of downtown architecture, I read somewhere that you have repelled off the side of the fifth third building you have to tell me about that. That was interesting. I bet yeah.
Speaker 2:So in 2013, the Boy Scouts the local Boy Scouts sponsored a fundraiser where people could pay to rappel off.
Speaker 1:Were you trying to get a badge of some sort?
Speaker 2:No, I was not trying to get a badge, but the Boy Scouts knew I had been a Boy Scout here and was an Eagle Scout. So they thought and I was a columnist. So they thought you know, the newspaper was a sponsor of the event. So they said, well, why?
Speaker 2:don't you have him do it and write about it. So my boss sends me an email want to jump off the blue building was the subject line, and I figured, well, I can chicken out, but I probably won't die, so I'll do it. So I not only did it and wrote about that, but also the younger sister of a longtime Herald Leader columnist, Betty Lee Mastin, who, betty Lee, had for many years had written about historic homes, she became a real authority on Lexington history and Lexington architecture, especially the old architecture. But her younger sister had actually done rappelling since she was a young woman and so at age 77, she wanted to do it. So I did it, and then I wrote about Winnie Yunker doing it, and so that made an interesting column. But it also kind of immunized me for all kinds of scary things that, like you know, when Burgess Carey wanted me to come out and do the Boone Creek zip line, it's like piece of cake, Like this old thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which was an enormous amount of fun that's another great resource. I think that people don't know I love boone creek yeah, I think burgess does such a great job out there.
Speaker 1:So so you went up to the top of fifth. Third, and is there like a roof out there?
Speaker 2:and there's a, there's a, uh a terrace out there okay, between the executive offices. Yeah, okay um, and and you're putting on.
Speaker 1:And you're putting on a harness.
Speaker 2:You're putting on a harness. So yeah, you're, you know, and you've got a safety line, and then you have a have a very have a rope, and you're kind of easing yourself down on that rope. And you're walking down the side of the building.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so did you go all the way down to the bottom?
Speaker 2:All the way to the bottom and you know how. Sometimes you see repel, you know rappelling, which they're really not supposed to do, which is you kind of bounce down the side. Yes, Well, you don't do that on a glass building.
Speaker 1:I would hope not.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that would not be a smart idea Very smart, tom.
Speaker 1:So they said don't do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the hardest part was keeping the. The building is something like 420 feet high, and so a rope that's 400 feet gets really heavy. So by the time I got down to the bottom my right arm was really sore from just like controlling the line.
Speaker 1:And was it just you or did you have like somebody? Next there were a bunch of people.
Speaker 2:So you know, there were a bunch of people that paid to do it, but it was you have to be one of the only people in Lexington who scaled the side of the fifth third.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so so it was. It was a trip. I bet the worst part was was when you get up and and you kind of, you basically just kind of have to lean over the side and start going down, and you know, before you lean over, you look down and Rupp Arena is way down there and St Paul's Church is way down there. So it's, but it'll. It'll get you over your fear of heights, that's for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the stress of that, or the stress of being an editor for a major newspaper, which which is, which is worse?
Speaker 2:Well, one is short term and one is long term.
Speaker 1:One is like a daily, daily thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know the daily thing. Yeah, you know the yeah it's. Yeah, I mean. Yeah, being a newspaper editor is a lot of stress, but it was mostly. You know I always enjoyed the people I worked with and and you know readers, readers would get upset about things and you just wanted to make sure that you know that you A, we were right and not and and accurate. But you know it was just the business. Pressures just weren't any fun there for a while.
Speaker 1:Yeah, of course.
Speaker 2:But yeah, working with working with other journalists is always a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:It was it was always so great to work in a newsroom. Yeah, what's your, what's the typical journalist's like? Personality, like, do you think, or is it? Is it pretty?
Speaker 2:What's the typical journalist's like personality, like manager? You know it can be pretty demanding because they expect their managers to be very, you know, honest and straightforward and efficient and so it. But it's always a really interesting mix of personalities and probably some of the best teamwork I've ever seen. I mean, you know, when a major story happens.
Speaker 1:everybody comes into the office and you know I love journalism or like newspaper themed movies where you really see everybody coming together for one story.
Speaker 2:That's pretty accurate, is it? Most of them? Oh yeah, is there?
Speaker 1:a certain movie that you think is pretty, like the most that sticks out to you as being one.
Speaker 2:Spotlight is really well. Yeah, I was just about to say spotlight, spotlight was is really a very accurate portrayal of kind of investigative work. Um, but yeah, that was really where newsrooms came, you know when, like in atlanta, uh, when you know we covered they had the olympics down there and the olympic park bombing and other big stories that you know where everybody came together. And here are things like I mean, the biggest news story you know was the 5191 crash when I was managing editor and that was, you know, that was a very challenging, you know, just a very heartbreaking story for everybody.
Speaker 2:At the Lexington Airport, yeah yeah, at the Lexington Airport in 2006.
Speaker 1:Yeah at the Lexington Airport in 2006.
Speaker 2:And so that was really, you know, the Herald Leader staff at its best in terms of, you know, teamwork and quality journalism.
Speaker 1:I covered that recently on my own podcast, the Lexington podcast, and my brother and I were really talking because it was before we had come to Lexington and there's so much to that case and so much of it didn't make sense to us and maybe it's because it just doesn't make sense. Still Is there a lot of what can you for those of us that don't know or are listening it was a commuter.
Speaker 2:It was a commuter flight. It was just one of those things where everything went wrong. It was an early morning flight. At that time Lexington had two runways One of them was for longer planes, one was just for general aviation. It was a much shorter runway and, through a series of mix-ups, a commuter plane that was, I believe. They were headed to Atlanta with early morning flight and they went off the general aviation runway and they ran out of runway before they could lift off and they crashed at the end of the runway and I think the only survivor was a copilot who was very badly injured. But it was just a really traumatic, traumatic event for Lexington and I had I had covered several plane crashes as an AP reporter an Atlanta reporter as an AP reporter, an Atlanta reporter, but you know.
Speaker 2:But when what happens in your own town and kind of overseeing that coverage, you know and you know we tried to be as accurate and sensitive as we could but at the same time you know, to really find out what went on and tell the story. You know the people who were lost in that. So it was a really outstanding effort. That you know that coverage was led by Peter Baniak, who was then the city editor and later became the editor and publisher of the Herald Leader and is now the vice president over the small newspapers in McClatchy who lives in the neighborhood.
Speaker 1:Oh, very good. Well, you just got everybody good around here, that's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we used to call this neighborhood the Herald Leader ghetto, but there are a lot of current and former Herald Leader people.
Speaker 1:Well, you were so close to the building.
Speaker 2:Exactly yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, I understand why, but it's still so sad to me that that's not the Herald Leader building because all the operations are now in Louisville. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:No, the Herald Leader still has an office here for the journalists.
Speaker 2:Hair Leader still has an office here for the journalists. It's just they didn't need a much smaller office because when the business moved really online, you know, the print is a very secondary thing and the press is the Hair Leader building it was built in, it opened in 1980 and they had they had been in a very old building downtown and so they they bought new presses and over the years, you know, the presses have been upgraded and renovated. But they were just wearing out and with the business changing it made no sense to buy new presses. So you know, we thought, well, the Louisville paper invested in new presses in the early 2000s and so we can print in Louisville as we transition online. And so the presses were shut down and you didn't need that big a building anymore. And then Louisville decided Gannett decided to shut down the Louisville presses. So now the Herald-Leader, the print version for the people who still get it I think it's three times a week is printed in Knoxville. So they have super early deadlines and it's trucked up here from Knoxville.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but most people, you know, read it online. But no, all the Herald-Eater News staff is all in Lexington. They've got about 35 or 40 people, you know, and plus they have a. There's a reporter in Somerset and, although I think he's getting ready to retire, so I don't know if they'll have anybody outside of Lexington and Frankfurt. They have people in Frankfurt who cover state government. So it's, you know, but it's more of an online focus because that's that's a, you know. An online is really a better way to deliver news. It's more immediate, you can do a lot more with it. You've got photo and video. It's just there's no money in it. So if, if there were, if there were a business model, this would be the golden age of journalism, but it's, it's just really hard to you know, to get the money to support them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know some of my friends get frustrated like I'm trying to read this article in New York Times or whatever, and they always there's always a paywall and I'm like, well, that's how we're paying our journalists, exactly.
Speaker 2:So you know if you want, you know if you like great news if you. You know you get what you pay for, and so if you like quality news, you need to be willing to subscribe. And that's why I think, especially for local newspapers like the Herald-Leader, where nobody else is going to cover Lexington City Council or Lexington school system or local businesses and local media, you need to support the Herald-Leader and the NPR stations, wku and WKY, who cover local news and publications. Like you know, chevy Chaser and those yeah, yeah, south Sider, absolutely.
Speaker 1:So besides journalism, of course, changing in terms of the business side of it, how do you think has it changed at all in terms of, like, the more artistic side of it and how, and in what ways we're informing the public?
Speaker 2:Well, I think there's a lot more creative forms. I mean, for instance, podcasts are a fairly new thing and you know I'm a big fan of podcasts. I listen to a bunch of them all the time and I think, because you know, they're a good way to get deeper information, if they're particularly interview podcasts and storytelling podcasts, and you can listen to it on your own time. You know, with print you would have, you know, you had the option of putting in a few photographs and a written narrative, and now, with online, you can do photo galleries and you can do video and you can do all kinds of things. Story length, you know, can be longer and you can add supplemental material. If you're, you know, writing about something, you can link to the original source documents. I mean, it's just a much richer format, you know, for people who are interested in getting more than headlines. But you know the important thing is that readers have to be you know than headlines.
Speaker 1:But you know the important thing is that readers have to be you know take more responsibility for actually reading it and not just taking what's given to them. Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point.
Speaker 2:Any advice for somebody who's just now getting into journalism. It's a really tough business out there.
Speaker 1:Sounds like it.
Speaker 2:You know, and it's a very different job market, but for people who are really committed to it, there are a lot more opportunities for entrepreneurial type efforts. There's a lot of good nonprofit journalism. I mean, some of the best investigative reporting now is being done by organizations like ProPublica, which does a lot. It's a, it's a national nonprofit that of journalists. And then there are also new publications like the Kentucky Lantern. A lot of longtime newspaper journalists you know who still want to do that are are working for the Kentucky Lantern, which is a really good online site that covers politics and public affairs. So there are a lot of good news sources. But uh, it's. You know if, if you still want to do that kind of work, you can probably find a way to do it, but it's going to take a lot of creativity and a lot more flexibility than than it used to yeah, there's um, there's smaller towns where their their papers are kind of going bankrupt or there's not readership, and a lot of that is because of access.
Speaker 1:And there's this new sort of phenomenon where coffee shops where we were just talking about Kenwick Table and how popular they are, so a local coffee shop will buy the newspaper and then people can just read it within the coffee shop. So they're employing reporters, et cetera.
Speaker 2:And so there's like more of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that that's a really great, like we were talking about how we've got to get creative to make sure that you know the print doesn't yeah, so it's a neat.
Speaker 2:But you know, the most important thing is that is that, yeah, there's a lot of free information out there, but but you really need to be discriminated in terms of what is accurate, what is thorough and and good journalism. You got to pay for it because you know it. It uh, somebody is paying for creating that content and if it's not you, you've got to wonder who else it is.
Speaker 1:Definitely yeah, yeah. So that's your best advice about like looking at critically, critically, consider the source. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you know, look for, look for news organizations that are interested in in honest, truthful journalism and not trying to appeal to your preconceived, you know, beliefs or opinions or prejudices.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and probably read as many as you can yeah, yeah, both sides of everything, for sure, ok, well, this has been great. Well, one thing I wanted to tell you before we leave, or I wanted to ask you about, is that you are just as accomplished in photography as you are in writing. So tell us about your photography.
Speaker 2:Still, some of my best friends are photojournalists so I'd always been interested in that and as a reporter for the AP and the Atlanta paper, I would shoot a lot of my own photos for my own stories if the deadlines permitted. And it's been a lot easier in digital. As a columnist, I shot all the photos for my columns because I enjoyed doing it and it's just something. It's really been a hobby that's helped morph into that, but digital photography has made it so much easier. I've also been involved in something for 30 years now.
Speaker 2:That started when I was a freshman at Western. It started out as a class project and evolved into something called the Mountain Workshops. That's now a nationally known annual photojournalism workshop. It'll be its 50th year is actually this year but each year they go to a different small town in Kentucky and they get instructors from all over the country and these are people from you know, the New York Times, the Washington Post, usa Today, national Geographic. You know some of the best photographers to donate their time and I've been involved with it as a writing coach, and so I run a staff of writing coaches who are all journalists or former journalists. You know print journalists, writers and editors, and they work with photographers. So this year it will be in Maysville.
Speaker 1:Oh cool, Love Maysville.
Speaker 2:Excuse me, which will be a great town for it because there's so many interesting stories there and I'm in charge of coming up with about 100 story ideas. I'll be working with some.
Speaker 1:Is that all? Yeah, that's all.
Speaker 2:But I'm working with some great people in Maysville and one of our writing coaches is Jack Brammer this year who is a retired Herald leader, frankfurt reporter, who's from Maysville, and so we come up with kind of leads for really good, interesting people who are willing to be. You know, have a photographer hang out with them all week and then the participants who paid some of them are students, a lot of them are kind of young professionals, freelance photographers around the country, and they literally will draw a story idea out of a hat and then figure out what is the real story here and they'll spend several days with people and within a week it's a very intense week We'll produce a book, we'll produce a website. There's also a video track. So you know, there'll be about 20 video participants who will end the week with about a three to five minute video story about their subject. If you want to see this, it's online, it's mountainworkshopsorg.
Speaker 1:I'm very interested actually mountainworkshopsorg.
Speaker 2:And then each year they publish about 120 page book that has book that has a selection of those stories and photographs and all of that's done in a week and it's an all-volunteer effort.
Speaker 1:But it's all based on it's a different place each time. Different place each time. It's a different place each time, very cool.
Speaker 2:Last year it was Williamsburg and Whitley County, the year before it was Paris and Bourbon County, so they're kind of moving.
Speaker 1:They started out more because it's based in bowling green and they've been kind of moving east, so cool I like that.
Speaker 2:It's smaller towns, yeah, I mean, yeah, that makes complete sense, that's great. Yeah, it's got to be. It's funny. It's got to be a smaller town. It's got to be big enough to um, to kind of house the workshop, because it's about 150 people.
Speaker 1:So we gotta have places to stay.
Speaker 2:but but basically we set up shop in a convention center or a school or somewhere you know and bring about 100 computers and network the whole place and it's quite an operation.
Speaker 1:Incredible. That's every October, every October, okay, great yeah, wow, awesome.
Speaker 2:So anyway, for me has been also kind of uh, a 30-year master class and yeah photojournalism, because just sitting around listening to all these people and getting and getting to know a lot of for a retired guy.
Speaker 1:You're definitely like keeping busy, that's right that's right. Every time I'm asking what you're up to. There's like you have like so many different projects. I love it. Yeah, it's great. Well, thank you so much and thank you for letting us film in your writing room, your study.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you.
Speaker 1:It just feels really cool to be here.
Speaker 2:I would have cleaned it up if I knew you were going to do that.
Speaker 1:We just like barged in on you. Thanks again, Tom.
Speaker 2:All right, Thank you yeah appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Yay, that was so great. I'm so sorry I, my mom, would be so mad at me. Actually, you know my mom.