If you live in Northern Kentucky, you’ll soon be getting the results of months of work by a small team of journalists who live in NKY, cover NKY, and care deeply about what happens here.
Our latest Super Issue is our primary election voter guide — and we sent it to every single household in NKY. All 176,000 of them. Not just subscribers. Not just people who already follow local news. Everyone.
Find our digital Election Headquarters, with our voter guide plus profiles on all the candidates that will be on the primary ballots in May, here.
We did that because we think everyone deserves to be prepared to vote on May 19.
Here’s what went into making this happen: our reporters have spent months building candidate profiles, gathering voter information, and doing the kind of unglamorous but essential work that good election coverage requires. That means attending forums, making calls that don’t always get returned, reading through filings, and pushing candidates to give you more than a talking point. It means showing up over and over again, for every competitive race, in every county.
And printing and mailing 176,000 copies of a newspaper is not cheap. Each Super Issue costs more than $50,000 to print and mail. Super Issues like this one are both our most expensive product and our largest revenue stream — advertisers love the reach, and we’re grateful for that support.
But advertising alone doesn’t cover everything. The reporting — the actual journalism — is funded in large part by donations to the NKY Community Journalism Fund.
I want to be clear about what that fund does, because I believe in being transparent about our finances: money donated to the NKY Community Journalism Fund stays in Northern Kentucky. It pays for reporters’ salaries, for the time they spend covering your school board and your city hall and your elections. It doesn’t go to Cincinnati. It doesn’t go to a corporate parent. It stays here.
We started LINK in 2021 because Northern Kentucky wasn’t being served by the news ecosystem that existed — a combination of large newsrooms across the river that mostly showed up when there was a crisis, and smaller local outlets that didn’t have the scale to cover a community of 400,000 people the way it deserved to be covered.
Four years later, we’re still here, still covering absolutely as much as we possibly can, from high school sports to the complex local elections that actually shape your day-to-day life. Absolutely no one else covers Northern Kentucky elections as comprehensively as we do.
But we can’t do it without your help.
If our voter guide is useful to you — if you find yourself better prepared to vote because of something you read — please consider making a donation to the NKY Community Journalism Fund. Our average recurring monthly donation is $11.82. That’s it. A lot of people giving a small amount adds up to a newsroom that can keep showing up.
You can donate here, or send checks to the NKY Community Journalism Fund, 209 Greenup St. Suite 410, Covington, KY 41011. And as always, if you have questions about how we operate or how your money gets used, feel free to email me directly at lacy@linknky.com. Transparency is kind of our thing.
Thanks for reading. Now go vote.
