55 million people live in the rural U.S. ­ Maybe you're one of them, or used to be, or want to be. As mainstream TV and newspapers retreat from small towns, the Daily Yonder is coming on strong.

We're your daily multi-media buffet of news, commentary, research, and features.

Check us throughout the day for breaking news, updates from the best rural bloggers and pointers to streaming live radio from the coast of Maine and to the wilds of Montana.

How about those presidential candidates? The Daily Yonder is your source for news of all the campaigns -- how they're reaching (or ignoring) rural communities.

Please Send Us photos, tips, observations, links to stories about rural America. Send us stories about what you've seen, heard or witnessed. Make it meaningful, make it cool, make it good, make it Yonder.

The Daily Yonder is published on the web by the Center for Rural Strategies. Editors Julie Ardery and Bill Bishop have written for national magazines, for newspapers in Kentucky and Texas and authored books on American politics, art and culture. In the 1980s, they owned and ran the award-winning Bastrop County Times, the weekly newspaper in Smithville, Texas.

The Daily Yonder was developed with the support of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Media Democracy Fund (a project of the Proteus Fund).