An Interview with Matt Gunterman
by Alexander R. Meier, September 12, 2009

Rural leaders often complain of the debilitating effects of ‘brain drain’ on their communities, but how realistic is it to stem that tide, one that has been going on for generations? We live in a national economy and culture, and rural youths benefit greatly from having access to the opportunities available to them on that national stage. And, moreover, in a world of dwindling resources, how possible or wise is it to try and make each and every one of these isolated communities into pockets of prosperity, ones capable of retaining their best and brightest? I believe the time is ripe for rural communities to reassess how they perceive these expatriate youths. Rather than look upon them as lost resources, rural communities should see them, collectively, as an untapped resource, one that emerging tools of this Information Age make accessible and valuable as never before.
-Matt Gunterman, 2009

I. Transforming Rural Media (2002)

Matt Gunterman dates his career as a rural activist from his founding of the McLean County New Millennium News (MCNMN) in January 2002, when he was a student at the University of Glasgow.

“Scotland in January is very, very dark,” he said. “I needed something outside my studies to occupy the time and decided that creating a web site of some sort would be a constructive outlet because it would provide me with an opportunity to hone my graphic and web design skills, while keeping in touch with friends and family in Kentucky.”

The idea for the web site to serve as a source for local news seemed natural to Gunterman.

“I was hungry for news back home myself since local county elections were coming up in 2002,” he said, “and the print edition of the county weekly newspaper took weeks to reach me in Scotland.”

Gunterman felt the name New Millennium News was appropriate, and he set about building the side from scratch.

“At that time, I knew that content-management systems (CMS) existed, but I felt it was easier for me to build the site from scratch rather than learn the nuts and bolts of one CMS and then build a web-site template for it,” he recalled.

Gunterman also had no little idea how large his potential readership might be. McLean County is an agricultural community of some 10,000 people in western Kentucky, where many homes then and still today rely on dial-up connections to access the Internet, and getting local news from online sources simply wasn’t something people were accustomed to.

“There really weren’t many independent, stand-alone news sites at all in the early 2000s,” Gunterman noted. “News websites were generally maintained as online presences of traditional media outlets, like newspapers and broadcast television networks. There was, in other words, no Huffington Post or Politico, and the content on non-commercial, personal websites was fairly static and self-promotional in nature. They were essentially digital resumes. Thus, the New Millennium News, being an independent news web site that was an individual initiative, represented an early effort of rural citizen journalism.”

The project quickly blossomed.

“The interest from back home was tremendous,” Gunterman said. “With the local elections fast approaching, my ability to offer daily coverage of the political races and in-depth interviews by email and phone with candidates gave me a captive audience of the county’s politically engaged population. I also designed a community forum section for the web site which proved very popular among candidates and voters.”

In February, regional daily newspapers and television stations began reporting on the MCNMN. Soon the Associated Press picked up the story, and from there it received national coverage. By March, the MCNMN was receiving over 150,000 page views per month.

II. Forging a Digital Community (2004)

In 2004, while a graduate student at Yale University, Gunterman founded Progress on the Green, Inc., a non-profit dedicated to offering mentoring services to promising young rural youths.

The organization’s activities were centered in the Green River Valley area of Kentucky. Joining Gunterman in the project were other Yale graduate students from rural communities and other young adults still living in Kentucky. The group framed itself as a “digital community,” one made possible by then-emerging social networking tools and consisting of people from rural areas to succeed at the highest levels of their chosen fields. The idea behind harnessing the power of this new type of community was to provide high school students in the Green River area advice on how to plan their own paths to success, wherever that path may lead.

“If you listen to the rhetoric coming from rural leaders,” said Gunterman, “you hear a lot about the need to stop the brain drain, the need to provide opportunity to keep the best and brightest at home. That’s not a realistic goal, from my perspective, and that’s not what our organization was about. We live in a national economy and culture, and Progress on the Green sought to position rural youths to succeed at the highest levels of both.”

The success of those young people, argued Gunterman, could be translated into a measure of success for the home community, as well. Social networking tools make it much easier for expatriates of rural areas to stay involved with life back home, to function as a digital community that exerts an important influence by way of a more global perspective and access to a wider range of financial and social resources.

The group’s efforts started an important conversation throughout western Kentucky. Gunterman and his partners spoke to civic organizations throughout the region and presented in front of Kentucky’s Speaker of the House.

Today, the successor organization to Progress on the Green is called Ruralution.

III. Revolutionizing Rural Politics (2006)

In 2006, Gunterman took leave from Yale University to run for the office of judge/executive of his native McLean County. One of his biggest motivations in doing so was the repeated obstructionism that he and the other organizers of Progress on the Green met from local officials in organizing their programs for young people.

“We did not anticipate,” said Gunterman, “that we’d encounter substantial resistance on the ground from local forces who saw what we were doing as a threat to their personal fiefdoms. They did not want to work with people like us, and they did not understand how a group of twenty-somethings, each of whom was highly educated, multilingual, and well-traveled, might have some insight to offer on the future of rural communities in a globalizing culture.”

Gunterman’s frustration with this culture of obstinacy led him to declare his candidacy as a Democrat for the highest elected office in the county.

“I was going to show them what a twenty-something armed with nothing more than his social network and ideas could do to their tired old good-old-boy machine,” he said. Gunterman would be going up against one of the most corrupt courthouses in Kentucky.

Gunterman mobilized a small army of fundraisers nationally and began organizing volunteers in the county, precinct by precinct. In the Democratic primary, Gunterman faced two opponents, the former mayor of the county seat and an industrial chicken farmer.

As Gunterman’s momentum built, the dirty tricks escalated and reached their height with a lawsuit filed the Thursday before the Tuesday primary election challenging Gunterman’s residency because he maintained a post office box in New Haven. Gunterman won the lawsuit, and went on to win the three-way Democratic primary with 53-percent of the vote, a clear majority. He would now face the three-term Republican incumbent in the November general election.

After the primary, Gunterman launched a new phase of the campaign, one he called “Ruralution,” which outlined his progressive vision for the county. That vision, however, was not enough to overcome the blunt force of the existing political machine. Gunterman lost the November general election by a mere 48 votes, but he carried five of the county’s eight precincts in the process.

In January, he returned to Yale, but left behind in McLean County a well-organized network of progressive activists.

IV. Empowering Rural Progressives (2008)

After returning full time to Yale in 2007, Gunterman sought to maintain a connection to the growing progressive movement in Kentucky, which was coalescing around growing anti-war sentiments.

“The anger towards the Bush administration’s deception and its wars in Kentucky got progressives talking to one another and organizing protests,” said Gunterman, “but I felt that this energy needed a more lo

cal focus. It was draining of the movement’s resources to haul participants to Washington every few months for a protest march, and it’s not terribly effective to hold anti-war rallies in Kentucky.”

Gunterman decided that a worthy target for the state’s progressives was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) who was up for reelection in 2008.

“The response of most of the political class in Kentucky was to laugh at the notion that we could successfully take on McConnell,” Gunterman said, “but my goal wasn’t necessarily so much to defeat McConnell as to use the campaign against him to weave together the community of progressives throughout the state.”

Gunterman, however, was a thousand miles away in Connecticut, but to get around that problem he used lessons learned from the digital community-building programs of Progress on the Green.

“Most of my time was occupied by fulfilling my research and teaching duties at Yale, but I could dedicate several hours a week to the cause,” he said. “So, I rounded up a handful of extremely capable activists, who were also established bloggers, and launched DitchMitchKY.com.”

Most political blogs, notes Gunterman, frame themselves as permanent fixtures on the Internet, and they attempt to turn a profit off advertising revenue.

“Our approach was different,” Gunterman said, “We were simply passionate about a cause, and our goal was to share the work among the six of us so that we could contribute without it dominating our lives. We didn’t want to do this full-time, but we did want to produce a portal that had the quality of a full-time endeavor.”

Gunterman believes that ad hoc political blogs of this nature will be a model that proves its worth and staying power at the state and local level.

“There’s simply not enough money flowing at anything below the national level to make political blogging about state issues a full-time job,” he said, “but there’s still a hunger for activism at that level.”

Gunterman foresees that progressive activists in places like Kentucky will in the future organize themselves for brief periods of time around specific issues.

Although the campaign to oust Sen. Mitch McConnell failed in the end, the unique nature and structure of the Ditch Mitch movement of rural progressive activists was widely noted by national media, from Politico (1, 2), The Nation, The American Prospect, and international outlets like Le Journal du dimanche and The Guardian. Bob Moser’s 2008 Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority offers an in-depth analysis of the work of Gunterman and his fellow activists in the Ditch Mitch effort.