Two important rural journalism news stories: First, W. Horace Carter (above) died. Carter, 88, was editor and publisher of The Tabor City Tribune in North Carolina. In 1950, four years after he founded the paper, Carter began a series of stories and editorials about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in southeastern North Carolina. "The Klan, despite its Americanism plea, is the personification of Fascism and Nazism," the World War II veteran wrote. 

Carter and his family were threatened constantly over the years. "He was a God-and-country kind of guy," said his son, Russell Carter. "But he was committed to social justice, and he was not prepared for the fact that other people didn't see it that way." Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1953 for his anti-Klan articles and editorials.

Also, this week the MacArthur Foundation named Jerry Mitchell of Jackson, Mississippi, as one of its two dozen fellows. Mitchell is a reporter at the Clarion-Ledger newspaper and has been unrelenting in reporting on civil rights-era crimes. He will use his "genius grant" of $500,000 (paid over five years) to complete a book. "There are a lot of rabbit trails I want to run down," Jerry said. We here at the Yonder couldn't be prouder of both of these guys. 

Tony Wernimont was the starting guard on his high school basketball team. It was the November of his senior year, and then he lost part of his arm in a farm accident.

Elmer Kelton wrote The Time It Never Rained to "give urban people a better understanding of hazards the rancher and the farmer face in trying to feed and clothe them."

Chuck Offenburger, a well-known Iowa journalist and rural advocate who has chronicled Hawkeye State events, history and people for nearly a half-century, is now fighting advanced cancer. After telling friends, family and close colleagues about his diagnosis in recent days Offenburger posted a detailed column on his popular Web site about facing down the cancer doctors first discovered in his abdomen. "Believe me, I am far from defeated," Offenburger, 62, said. "I go into this challenge with robust optimism, pretty strong spirituality, my acceptance and actually some serenity." 

Offenburger has long been a champion of rural issues, serving on a number of boards related to economic development and progress in Iowa's small towns. He arguably knows rural Iowa as well as anyone ever has. Offenburger and his wife, Carla, live in a renovated farmhouse in rural Cooper, outside the Greene County seat city of Jefferson. Offenburger  became a household name in Iowa with his “Iowa Boy” column in The Des Moines Register, a featured piece that ran up to four times weekly from the 1970s to 1998. Offenburger recently authored a book featured on The Daily Yonder about Iowa State University basketball star Gary Thompson. 

For a generation of younger Iowa journalists -- myself at the top of the list -- Offenburger is a much loved and valued mentor who not only offers regular encouragement and promotion of our work but detailed emails on possible new angles, story ideas and ways to make our next contributions better. We are, needless to say, praying for him.

--Douglas Burns