A storied career
Estep honored for impactful reporting
SOMERSET
Back in the 1970s, student Bill Estep worked on the school newspaper at Pulaski County High School. It had an impact on him. “I kind of fell in love with asking people questions and writing stories and stuff,” he says. And it would be “the right stuff” for him, because he later took his journalism degree from Western Kentucky University in 1983 and crafted a sterling reporting career over four decades, focusing largely on stories from his beloved Appalachian Kentucky.
He recently retired and, for his work, received the coveted Al Smith Award, a tribute to his work in community journalism in Kentucky.
Estep, a consumer-member of South Kentucky RECC, grew up on a small farm in the community of Welborn. There, he learned about hard work, and rubbed shoulders with those he calls “good people,” the ones in the region he later covered.
His journalistic baptism came with the weekly Tri-City News in Cumberland. “I was called ‘managing editor’ but that really meant (doing) everything. I loved it,” he says. He soon returned to Pulaski County and briefly worked for the daily Commonwealth-Journal in Somerset. In 1985, he began his monumental 40-year career reporting for The Lexington Herald-Leader.
Estep, fueled by his love for the people and land of southern and eastern Kentucky, wrote countless articles that spurred positive change in the region. Subjects included child welfare, Kentucky’s school deficiencies, drug abuse and a historical look at the area since Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands, was released in 1963.
Chasing such stories, Estep accumulated thousands of road miles, made countless phone booth stops before cellphones existed, and frequented local courthouses to research records. Often challenging vested interests, he felt a bit threatened on occasion, but persevered. “If you approach people respectfully in a straightforward and honest way,” he says, “they’re going to respond to that (positively). Most of them were welcoming.”
Former Kentucky Post managing editor Mark Neikirk called Estep “the kind of reporter who could cover a governor, but he’d rather be covering the people and communities impacted by the governor’s decisions.”
Journalist Al Cross, retired professor emeritus of journalism at University of Kentucky and director emeritus of its Institute for Rural Journalism, notes Estep’s demonstration of “relationship journalism,” with its ties to local communities. “Bill,” he says, “is the best I’ve ever known at that.”
STEVE FLAIRTY is an author, columnist, speaker and former public school teacher.
