The Northern Kentucky Port Authority (NKPA) was created in 1967. Its mission, determined by Kentucky statutes, was simple: operating facilities related to river commerce and navigational facilities in Boone, Campbell and Kenton counties. In recent years, the NKPA has drifted well outside its narrowly defined channel.
In the late 1970s, the Northern Kentucky Port Authority had big plans for this land near Wilder, south of Newport, near a newly completed I-275 interchange. The NKPA proposed building a coal dock and industrial park here and abandoned the project. Photo courtesy of the Kenton County Public Library.
After being mostly dormant for its first 54 years, the NKPA roared back to life in 2022 with a new mission and new people at the helm. Now, four years later, the authority has completed several high-profile projects that some observers say go well beyond its original mandate. Rep. Matthew Lehman (D-Campbell County) introduced a bill in the 2026 legislative session to legalize the NKPA’s new activities by expanding its mandate. Northern Kentucky — along with Cincinnati — has a port authority because its three counties occupy valuable and strategic riverfront property. The Ohio River is an inland waterway that connects the region to the world through international shipping.
Not long after I told the Northern Kentucky Tribune that I could no longer write for the site, the publisher deleted all of the 32 stories that I wrote between Jan. 5 and March 4, 2026. I had mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I was relieved that the blog had erased my affiliation with it. On the other, I worried about the ethical implications of deleting news stories in a community that lacks reliable news sources.
Because the internet makes everything evergreen, there’s really no such thing as complete erasure. The site’s curious editing and content management will survive as long as Google and the Internet Archive, I suppose.
The embarrassment is something I can embrace, though, like my look back on the stint I had in graduate school as a columnist for the Atlantic City Press. Casino lounge acts comprised my beat and my stories were published in the “Loungin’ Around” column. Yes readers, I was a paid lounge lizard.
The Atlantic City Press, March 5, 1993.
I doubt that I’ll ever laugh much about the Northern Kentucky site’s struggle to correctly spell my name or its prioritization of press releases over reporting the news. But, its losing battle with WordPress tags may be the saving grace. Website tags are intended to facilitate easy indexing for search engines. They are a lot like library catalog subjects — well-conceived terms to make content easy to find for everyone from consumers to academic researchers.
Some of the more memorable and hilarious tags that the Northern Kentucky Tribune attached to my stories included:
part two of series
investment in crafting the local ordinance
larger location
water in the underground tunnels
business as usual
long history
new chapter
And, there were the many spelling errors included among the tags. Among them, my last name (spelled Rottenstein), “transperency,” and “walkour.” Unless someone is researching misspelled words and the people who produce them, the tags are completely useless.
A couple of my favorites deserved screenshots:
A category created just for folks researching laws that are different in Kentucky and “Oho” — wherever that is.
One of my favorites, the Shrouded in Secrecy Archives.
The “History Sidebar” is more than a decade old. Perhaps I should change the title to the “Shrouded in Secrecy Archives.”
Roger Berger had a simple question for the Florence, Kentucky, City Council at its Feb. 10 meeting. “I want to know if the council has taken a position if ICE or Homeland Security wants to build or acquire a concentration facility within the city limits?”
Roger Berger makes his way to the front of the Florence City Council chambers March 3, 2026. Photo by David Rotenstein.
Berger’s question came as local jurisdictions around the nation are struggling with real estate transactions by businesses and individuals transferring land and large warehouse-like buildings to the Department of Homeland Security. The properties are slated to be used as mass detention facilities.
Some people critical of the trend compare the facilities to concentration camps.
In deeply conservative Mississippi, residents of Byhalia protested against the conversion of a large warehouse into a detention facility for 8,500 immigrants. GOP Sen. Roger Wicker then went on the record opposing the facility.
I recently cut the cord with a local newsroom I had been writing for since January. It’s a small family-run newsroom that covers Northern Kentucky. The publication’s entrepreneurial model both attracted and scared me. I recognize the importance of entrepreneurial journalism and I’ve written about how its disappearance can be harmful.
But, I also recognize that small newsrooms have fewer resources to ensure a quality product and to protect their journalists. The Northern Kentucky newsroom had — has — both of those deficiencies. As more communities have become news deserts when newspapers and broadcasters cut coverage or disappear, online newsrooms have filled essential gaps. Sometimes for the better, oftentimes not.
The low-hanging fruit in a tall tree growing in Northern Kentucky includes typos and sloppy editing. The examples where the editor misspelled my name occupy space on those branches.
Screenshot with misspelled name in photo caption.
Inept and unsophisticated indexing (article tagging) occupies a branch a little higher up the tree.
Screenshot with examples of tags, including my misspelled name, applied to my published stories.
The site’s dedication to privileging press release churns over actual reporting was an ethical lump that I couldn’t swallow. The press releases, sometimes categorized as “government” or “business,” frequently were indistinguishable from the news published in the site.
I also missed the thoughtful and professional constructive collaborations I have with other editors, along with the contracts binding me to ethical and professional conduct and memorializing our mutual obligations. The site’s editing was far from thoughtful or collaborative. One hint should have been comments by a Kentucky source I interviewed for a story I wrote for a Pittsburgh newsroom last year. My Kentucky source, in a discussion about his documentation of local history, told me how the newsroom’s editor had mangled his work.
A huge red flag should have been the Kentucky newsroom’s refusal to execute a contract. It was the first and last time in more than 35 years of journalism experience that I’ve worked without a contract.
Too often, the online newsrooms that replace established (legacy) ones cannot provide the communities they serve with the news that they need. I saw this in the Atlanta area with the rise of “reporterishes” and it’s pervasive here in Northern Kentucky. Newsrooms are either vulnerable to allegations of bias and conflicts of interest or their products are more like the “Hooterville World Guardian” than the UK’s Guardian newspaper.
As I told a Pittsburgh college journalist who interviewed me earlier this year after the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announced that it would be going out of print in May, I worry that the decimation of local news may be the death knell for our democracy. That’s a thought that occupies one of the higher branches in the metaphorical tree I’ve constructed here. A lower branch is more personal: a writer’s product is only as good as his/her last editor. If I want to produce work without the benefit of an editor, I can stick to posting in this blog. At least here, I take full responsibility for content, transparency, spelling, grammar, and tagging.
Before my byline landed at a Northern Kentucky newspaper, I had worked as a freelance writer for some of the nation’s largest and smallest newsrooms, from the Philadelphia Inquirer to the “Chestnut Hill Local.” I have worked in and around journalism since 1990.
Along the way, I’ve had a front-row seat to lots of changes in journalism, many of them for the worse.
1992 story about a Pittsburgh newspaper strike published in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The first alt-weekly I wrote for folded in 1991 after less than a year in print. Then, a year later, the New York Times Company sold many of its local newspapers, including the Atlanta Daily News, a paper I contributed to after the alt-weekly shut down.
When we moved to Covington, Kentucky, last summer, I had freelance contracts with two Pittsburgh newsrooms and I expected to continue contributing to those publications long after the move. I also had an assignment to write for Cincinnati City Beat weeks before movers packed up our household.
Those plans quickly evaporated as City Beat cut its freelance budget, NEXTpittsburgh put my work on hiatus until March and Pittsburgh City Paper went out of print on New Year’s Eve, a few days before another former employer, the “Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,” announced its 240-year run would end later this year.
The rapid contraction in journalism concerns me on multiple levels. The most obvious one is how it impacts me professionally and financially. Journalism is how I make my living.
Another way that it impacts me is as a citizen. Fewer newspapers and newsrooms means there will be even less information about the world around me. There will be less robust coverage of local government, the arts and social conditions.
Many local newsrooms already struggle to spread precious resources — a small number of reporters and small budgets — adequately to fulfill their missions to readers. Back in Pittsburgh, there was very little coverage of how a broken historic preservation regulatory regime adversely affects the city’s history and impacts local development. One editor with whom I worked confessed that they simply didn’t have the bandwidth to learn about the issues and assign reporters to cover them.
Finally, the loss of so many newsrooms and the stories they produced will impact the field where I spent more time than journalism in the past 40 years: history. As a public historian and teacher, newspaper archives were essential research tools. It’s true that journalism produces history’s first draft.
That first draft provides a roadmap for scholarly research and provides windows into events that happened long ago. The events and voices captured in news reporting are not accessible anywhere else because no one thought to save important papers or write personal accounts.
Those personal accounts range from details about major events in a community, like a catastrophic flood or heinous crime. Or, they may be about more mundane things like the decisions made by city leaders that helped to shape growth and development.
Our democracy and our society need journalism to survive. The closure or contraction of each newsroom is like a single brain cell dying. At some point, after so many brain cells die, the organism also dies.
After the Post-Gazette announced that it would be going out of print, a student reporter for Carnegie Mellon University’s newspaper interviewed me about the state of journalism and my experiences.
I laid out my concerns for how the Pittsburgh newsroom closures would impact the city and its people.
“Oftentimes, historically marginalized communities [couldn’t] get their events publicized in the mainstream press and relied upon things like alt-weeklies to get their news out,” I said about City Paper’s demise. “The only documented record that may be available for [marginalized communities] is in the archives of these alt-weeklies. If the alt-weeklies disappear, and their physical archives and digital archives also disappear, that’s going to leave historians at a great disadvantage.”
Closer to home, I wonder what’s going to happen to Cincinnati City Beat’s archives. The paper, which was struggling to stay afloat by the time we moved to Covington, ended up being purchased by another regional media company.
I also wonder about all the news that I don’t see locally, whether it’s because of slim budgets, reporters stretched too thin or corporate gatekeepers who seem to have forgotten that the news should be reported without fear or favor.
Note: A shorter version of this post was previously published.
[Originally published at datelinedecatur.com, Sept. 2011. I recently learned that Decatur, Ga., attorney and tireless safe cycling advocate Ken Rosskopf died in a bike accident. Ken was a source for subsequent reporting and a beloved Decatur resident and he commented on the original post. May his memory be a blessing.]
I had my first contact with Decatur’s law enforcement community this morning. I wasn’t working on a story; I was cited for violating §40-6-72 of the Georgia Code: I failed to stop at a stop sign.
Stop sign at Oakview Road and Adams Street.
Under Georgia law, bicycles are considered vehicles and bicyclists must adhere to the same rules of the road as drivers. When police officers observe violations, like my failure to stop at the intersection of Oakview Road and Adams Street, they are required to enforce the code. It doesn’t matter that I was wearing a helmet or that I am a Decatur resident who pays Decatur taxes. I broke the law in Decatur and I am now $212.50 poorer because of it.
I am a strong advocate of multi-modal transportation options and I avoid driving my car when walking or biking will get me where I need to go. Before this morning I knew that bicyclists are subject to the same laws and enforcement actions as drivers but I irregularly applied that knowledge while biking.
R. Lindsey, the traffic officer who saw me run the stop sign and who issued the moving violation, agreed to be interviewed after he finished generating my citation. “I can understand their frustration but also they also have to look at it’s a state law,” he said as he tore the ticket from the thermal printer mounted on the back of his motorcycle.
Decatur police officer R. Lindsey completes the citation he issued me for running the stop sign on Oakview Road.
In his decade on the Decatur force Lindsey has witnessed a lot of cyclists riding unsafely, as I was this morning. “I’ve seen bicyclists running red lights, running stop signs,” he said. There are ways around that in the sense that when it comes to taking different routes or just taking the time to stop and make sure you are looking.”
I asked Lindsey what my take away from our encounter should be. “That’s really up to you. That’s not for me to decide,” he replied. “We know what we are supposed to do and not supposed to do. I wouldn’t want to put my life in jeopardy — Just because a bicyclist is not seeing anything, it doesn’t mean there’s not something there. Just the same with a car driver.”
He added, “Even if you go through a stop sign or a red light, you don’t think it’s horrible but if a car does hit you, when you committed the violation, that person’s never going to forget that.”
After discussing my infraction and bike safety in general, Lindsey told me that Decatur police officers will be getting some training on bike safety issues. I contacted his supervisor, Sgt. Tim Karolyi, who said that Decatur officers will be attending sessions where they will discuss some of the common violations cyclists make and where experts will clarify gray areas in older laws as well as the new law requiring motorists to pass cyclists at a safe distance.
Karolyi was unable to identify the advocacy group working with the city and he referred me to Lt. Maddox, the force’s training officer.A call to Maddox was not returned in time for this post. Stay tuned for a follow-up on the Decatur Police bicycle safety training.
Updated (9/21/2011): Read the follow-up to this post on the October 11, 2011, Decatur Police Department cycling training session.
For Charlotte Coffield, Black history wasn’t something she would pull from a closet shelf and dust off for one month each year and talk about it to White audiences. Every month was Black History Month. Charlotte didn’t need to open a book or go to a museum to see the faces of the Black men and women who changed their communities and our nation for the better. All Charlotte had to do was find the nearest object where she could see her own reflection. Charlotte Annieperry Coffield died September 11, 2024. She was 91.
Charlotte Coffield speaks during the 2018 Talbot Avenue Bridge centennial celebration. Photo by David S. Rotenstein.
Charlotte lived her entire life in a suburban Washington, D.C., community called Lyttonsville. For most of its history, Lyttonsville was Silver Spring, Maryland’s, other side of the tracks. Founded in 1853 when a free Black man, Samuel Lytton, bought a four-acre farm, the community became one of more than 40 rural all-Black enclaves or hamlets in segregated Montgomery County, Maryland. Lyttonsville is a liminal space in-betwixt and between Black and White, suburban and rural, North and South. Charlotte Coffield’s story parallels the community’s history and then became an indelible part of Lyttonsville’s history as she dedicated the last years of her life to preserving it.
Growing up in Lyttonsville, Charlotte lived in a home without running water and in a neighborhood with no paved streets. She attended a two-room “colored school” and like many Black people in Washington and its suburbs, she found a career in the federal workforce.
Charlotte worked as an assistant to Dr. Boyce Williams in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Williams was hearing impaired and Charlotte learned sign language to communicate with him. Charlotte became the first American Sign Language interpreter in the federal government and she pioneered new workplace tools for hearing impaired people. Charlotte’s work earned wide acclaim and Gallaudet University awarded her an honorary doctorate.
August 1960 “The Maryland C&P Call” clipping from an article featuring Charlotte Coffield’s pioneering interpretive tools for hearing impaired people in the workplace. Courtesy of Charlotte Coffield.
After she retired, Charlotte dedicated her life to activism and to undoing decades of erasure of Lyttonsville’s history and people by local historians, historic preservationists, and government agencies. The final chapter in Coffield’s life involved uplifting the story of the Talbot Avenue Bridge, an old railroad bridge that connected Lyttonsville with Silver Spring, a sundown suburb where Black people couldn’t buy homes, see movies, or eat in restaurants.
That’s the abridged version of Charlotte’s story, one that might have been suitable for a Washington Post obituary, had the newspaper that had no qualms extracting her knowledge of Black history for its readers bothered to write one. There was much more to Coffield’s story and her immersion in Black history as a subject and a way of life. I first met Charlotte Coffield in 2016 when I interviewed her for my research into gentrification and erasure. We exchanged information in dialogues about history and public policy. In 2018, we became collaborators to celebrate the Talbot Avenue Bridge’s centennial and efforts to ensure its commemoration after its demolition. What follows draws from my interviews and collaborations with Charlotte, my friend and my teacher.
Louis Arnett Sargent Bellinger was Pittsburgh’s only Black licensed and practicing professional architect for more than 25 years. The Hill District resident designed and contributed to the construction of some of the city’s most historically significant buildings, including the Central Amusement Park, Greenlee Field, and the Pythian Temple (New Grenada Theater).
Few photos of Louis A.S. Bellinger have survived. They are grainy copies preserved in microfilmed newspaper articles, like this one published in the Pittsburgh Courier in 1927.
Bellinger was a South Carolina native who came from a family of builders and entrepreneurs. He was born in 1891 in Sumter, South Carolina, a city about 50 miles east of Columbia, the state capital. The Bellingers had deep ties to the Low Country and the Charleston area. That’s where Louis was raised and went to school.
He was one of 10 children of carpenter and self-employed contractor George Bellinger and his wife, Florence. Many Bellingers, by blood and marriage, worked in the building trades as carpenters and masons.
Before the Civil War, some Bellingers had been enslaved by the Middleton family. Their Charleston plantation is now a National Historic Landmark and some Bellingers use the Middleton name. Their ranks in South Carolina include religious and civic leaders, entrepreneurs, educators and at least one politician (and former Tuskegee Airman) — Earl M. Middleton, who was a state legislator in South Carolina.
Last week, Decaturish, the blog parked at decaturish.com, announced a new newsroom hire: Jim Bass, a recent University of Georgia graduate. He joined founder Dan Whisenhunt and assistant editor Zoe Seiler as the 10-year-old blog’s third full-time staff member. Decaturish takes its name from the suburban city where it was founded, Decatur.
Decatur is the seat of DeKalb County, Georgia, one of five counties that form the historic core of Atlanta’s sprawling metropolitan area. Atlanta itself has long been called a Black Mecca for its substantial Black population and African American institutions, from successful Black business empires to the arts and some of the nation’s most prestigious HBCUs. DeKalb County itself has a significant Black history and Black residents comprise 53% of the county’s current population.
Commemorative marker adjacent to Decatur City Hall. The plaque contains a condensed version of the city’s origin story and its first motto: “A city of homes, schools, and churches.”
Earlier this week I attended a Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission hearing to cover the proposed designation of a landmark gay bar, Donny’s Place, as a city historic site. One of the regulatory agenda items ahead of the designation case involved a property owner’s proposal to rework the facade of a building in the Mexican War Streets Historic District.
Proposed facade alterations for the former Caruso beer distributorship building shown to the Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission February 5, 2025.
Located on the corner of Taylor Avenue and Wolfrum Way, the one-story commercial building has a long history. In the 1919, Angelo Lascher opened an auto repair shop there. Its facade with multiple garage doors reflected the business done inside. Lascher sold the property in 1966 to Sam Caruso, who owned a nearby beer distributor.
Caruso’s beer distributorship photographed in 2021 before it closed. Photo by David Rotenstein.
1925 real estate atlas showing the location of Angelo Lascher’s garage.
Angelo Lascher’s auto repair business regularly appeared in auto parts manufacturers’ ads published in Pittsburgh newspapers. This ad was published July 17, 1930, in the Pittsburgh Press.
Sam Caruso placed this help wanted ad in the Pittsburgh Press on June 15, 1969.
After moving into the former Lascher auto repair shop, Caruso followed a familiar and historically significant pattern in Pennsylvania by converting a garage into a beer distributorship. There are several notable Pittsburgh examples, including the former Tito brothers bootlegging site that became the first place where Rolling Rock beer was sold in the 1930s.
Former Tito brothers bootlegging garage turned beer distributorship. The Pittsburgh City Council designated the building as a historic site, along with the neighboring house where Joe Tito lived. In 2023, the Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission voted to allow the garage’s demolition. Photo by David Rotenstein.
Sam Caruso’s heirs closed the beer distributorship in 2021 and the current owner bought the property in 2024. John Francona, who represented the LLC that bought the property, told the HRC:
It’s kind of been an eyesore since I moved in the neighborhood 26 years ago, but it was a beer distributor so everyone liked it. I’m not exactly sure what it was built as. It could have been built as garages, but it’s a lot of garages for a single-family house. So, it may have been retail. I’m not sure when it became the beer distributor but it’s been there for a long time.
Pittsburgh historic preservation planner Sarah Quinn didn’t have much to offer in the way of the building’s history or the potential impacts posed by the proposed facade work. “The scope of work is restoration of [a] commercial façade along North Taylor Avenue,” Quinn told commissioners. “Staff comments are the proposal is very appropriate and will bring [the] storefront into accordance with the guidelines. Recommended motion is approval.”
The HRC unanimously approved the project.
It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in history or architectural history to uncover the former beer distributorship’s history and architectural significance. All it would have required is a little bit of curiosity and research.
