KPNS hits the 10-year celebration with more than 64,000 stories and 9,000 editorials


Tuesday, October 1, marked the 10th anniversary of the Kentucky Press News Service, a product that grew out of an extensive two-year Strategic Planning process. The idea actually took more than a year to develop with initial discussions starting August 20, 2008.

It began as the Kentucky News Content Service and early thoughts were to have newspapers upload their top stories of the day or week and then a newspaper participating in the network could go to the service’s URL and pick and choose stories it wanted to use.

Soon, we realized requiring newspapers to upload stories probably was not the best idea and that newspapers would likely want to get stories from the service but would not take time or staff to upload.

When it launched 10/1/09, KNCS had 21 newspapers under agreement. That number grew quickly as more and more newspapers came on board. Today, 99 Kentucky newspapers are under signed agreement, a number that has been steady for several years.

But it wasn’t long before we renamed it Kentucky Press News Service, representing more of what it is than just news content.

By the time it was launched, we had named David Greer as administrator, keeping his duties with the Kentucky High School Journalism Association and helping with the KPA News Editorial Division but allowing him to give up any lobbying assistance.

He soon developed it into a twice daily news service, scraping stories from the participating newspapers mid-morning and early afternoon and posting those for us. Then came a separate editorial budget with four to six editorials from participating newspapers shared each day. David expanded it to include a Sunday budget, giving KPNS newspapers six days of stories per week.

About a year ago, because of budget cutbacks last year, KPNS went to news story and editorials postings once a day. And the Sunday KPNS budget was cut out. Today, the service is offering 15 to 20 stories per day plus a few editorials.

If you want to get involved as a participating newspaper, contact David Greer at dgreer@kypress.com. You can also go to the KPA website — http://kypress.com/site/index.php?id=22 — for more information including an explanation of the service, a list of participating newspapers, the agreement form that has to be signed and submitted and a KPNS user’s guide.

 

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