Last night, the University of Kentucky’s Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues gave the inaugural Al Smith award, appropriately enough, to Al Smith. http://uknow.uky.edu/content/rural-journalism-institute-founder-given-fi...

As one of the founders of the institute, the Kentucky hall-of-fame journalist has spent some six decades chronicling the lives of the Commonwealth’s powerful and elite as well as the the daily happenings of life in rural Kentucky — from Russellville to London.

Al Smith blazed his own trail, virtually defining what it means to be an engaged journalist – the notion that journalists are more than simply the chroniclers of stories and narratives, but that they use those narratives to fundamentally shape and influence change in a community and state.

I’ll leave it to others to discuss the ethical considerations associated with more engaged community journalists.

However, what I think is undeniable, is how important journalism is — in whatever form it takes — to promoting substantive civic dialogue and democracy.

We live in a word where billions of bits of information and content can be, and are, transmitted instantaneously across the globe. We are all publishers, now, in an important sense. And while that has great democratizing potential, what often is lost in the rush of arguments and yelling are forces that create content to help explain, provide clarity and mediate conflicts … with the goal serving the bests interests of a community.

In spite of the real and very concerning economic challenges facing entities like The Herald-Leader and The Courier-Journal, and thousands of traditional mainstream media outlets like them, we need — now more than ever — the creation of thoughtful content, designed to provoke conversation and, yes, solutions.

That’s what good journalism, engaged journalism still means today. And it’s why Al Cross and Al Smith are doing such profoundly important at the institute. http://www.ruraljournalism.org/ Rural journalism, like that practiced by Al Smith for so long, literally is the connective tissue that binds a community together.

We may be able to communicate and talk to one another faster — and with more information — than ever before. But that doesn’t always mean we really hear each other.

The work that Cross and Smith are doing helps ensure that we do.