Appreciate Kentucky Health News? Please help support our work.

This is National Public Health Week, and if Kentucky Health News is dedicated to anything, it’s public health, so it’s a natural time to ask our readers to support our work.

We are made possible by grants from the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky, but that doesn’t cover the cost of the time and effort devoted to us by our publisher, the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky — now more than ever, due to the pandemic. To make an online donation to the Institute, go here, or send a check to 343 S. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Lexington KY 40506-0012.

Through our reporting and aggregation of others’ reporting, we try to make Kentucky a healthier place by giving Kentuckians the information they need to make good lifestyle and health-care decisions. If you think we’re doing a good job, let us know; if you think there are things we could do better, let us know that, too.

Our partners in this effort are the local news media that publish our stories or use them as foundation for their own reports. They need your support, too, because social media have eroded their audiences and advertising bases. They provide journalism, which practices a discipline of verification; journalists tell you how they know something, or attribute it, and they’re mainly about facts, not opinion. Social media are more about opinion, and have hardly any discipline or verification. Who will you trust?