A newspaper with a large Amish audience points the way to the future

Couple programming notes:

Lancaster Farming is one of my favorite newspapers—and I say this as someone who sits on the board of one of its competitors.

There are several reasons I hold Lancaster Farming in high regard. First, to my knowledge, it is profitable. This paper is impressively thick, which is how most people still gauge whether a newspaper is doing well (whether true or not).

Second, I admire Lancaster Farming because it offers real utility to its audience. When you page through it, you find practical reminders about pesticide permits, information on the pros and cons of no-till farming, guidance on woodlot restoration, and articles on livestock awards. You’ll find recipes and locally written columns about rural life and faith. You’ll also find tons of ads for livestock and equipment. (Of the columns, “On Being a Farm Wife” by Joyce Bupp is my favorite.)

A big reason for the newspaper’s success is undoubtedly its audience: many subscribers are Amish and Mennonites who do not use the internet. There is no escaping the fact that the place where I live—and this paper—exists at the intersection of past, present, and future. Intriguingly, this seems to work well for Lancaster Farming.

The past is in the old-fashioned columns, recipes, and livestock ads. (There’s another great feature called “You Ask, You Answer,” where the paper publishes mailed-in requests and other readers across the country mail back answers.)

The present shows up in the paper’s coverage of sustainable agriculture, often in partnership with Penn State University.

And the future appears in articles about the implications of the AI buildout on rural life.

This week’s edition offered a stunning example of that right on the front page: Mervin Raudabaugh Jr., a farmer from Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, walked away from $13 million offered by data center developers—roughly 12 times the appraised value of his land—in favor of permanently preserving his farm. Raudabaugh said did this partly because of his history ("My mother died in my arms [in the barn] up there") and partly because of tactics he found disrespectful: "These people have hounded the living daylights out of me." In Silver Spring Township, data center development has become a high-stakes issue due to the area's proximity to power and fiber infrastructure.

This is where Lancaster Farming stops being an outlier and starts looking like a model for others. In Central Pennsylvania, as in many rural areas, AI has become a major local issue. It’s about both job creation and loss, development and resource management, and the tension between locals and slick outsiders. Sometimes the coverage focuses on practical matters, like how to safely use chatbots; other times, it focuses on the brute-force tactics of companies with more money than many municipal budgets combined. Public meetings are packed.

Local news organizations can prove their worth by covering these tensions seriously and speaking to both residents' opportunities and their concerns; ideology doesn’t need to have anything to do with it.

As you may know, I’ve been reading The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Moses, for some time now. One instructive story in the book isn’t about Moses, but about how Mayor Fiorello La Guardia broke Tammany Hall’s grip on New York City’s government. La Guardia won on a Fusion Party ticket—an unlikely coalition of Republicans, Reform Democrats, and Socialists. They weren’t united by ideology; rather, they united around a shared emergency.

I think about fusion a lot in light of today’s national politics, but local news organizations could also take note of this approach to coalition-building. Rather than being “non-partisan” or even party-agnostic, maybe the path forward is to be radically inclusive—at least while we weather the emergency of information collapse.

Coverage of rural life and the impact of development by global corporations—companies willing to offer 12 times the appraised value of land—is a deeply unifying story. Nobody needs to agree on every issue, but everyone’s paying attention, and we all have questions.

And this is fueling demand for good journalism.

Each month, I put together a Spotify playlist of the songs that caught my ear. Some are familiar to me, some aren’t. Some are old, some are new. The playlist tends to span eras, genres, and sounds. It’s probably not for everyone but here it is!

2025

2024