Rural Media in the Rearview: 2025 End-of-Year Roundup

We're prepping for the new year by celebrating the 100th edition of the Good, the Bad, and the Elegy newsletter. Thank you to the readers who have been with us since the beginning, and to all those who have joined us along the way. After four years of covering rural media representation, we believe this analysis is more important than ever, and speaks directly to the mission, and origin story, of the Daily Yonder and Center for Rural Strategies. Examining the ways rural communities are portrayed, from idyllic utopias to ravaged hellscapes (and the more complicated, nuanced, and accurate representations in between) help us understand how our society thinks and feels about the diverse communities that 60 million Americans call home...