Q&A with Lyndy Berryhill
Editor’s note: This interview was conducted on March 12, 2025 and has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Lyndy Berryhill is an award-winning journalist from Franklin County, Mississippi. She earned her bachelor's degree in investigative journalism and history from the University of Mississippi. She has reported for over 10 community newspapers, and she has also worked as an investigative reporter for multiple television productions. Berryhill is a general manager of the Stone County Enterprise. Stone County is in the Gulfport-Biloxi metropolitan statistical area.
Berryhill wrote freelance for three years and contributed to various regional, statewide, and nationwide publications. She started working for the Enterprise in 2019. In 2021, she was named general manager. She is married to Brett. They have one daughter, two blue heelers, one rat terrier-mix, and one cat.
In an exclusive Q&A with the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics, Lyndy Berryhill shares her insights on the future of journalism, the hurdles she has faced, and the future Artificial Intelligence.
Q1: Thank you for joining me today for the Overby Center Q & A. What are the biggest hurdles your news organization is currently facing, and what strategies are in place to overcome them?
A: That's a big one right out of the gate. I would say, first of all, like the background of where I'm at right now. I'm at a small weekly. We're a family-owned company. It's called Lancaster LMI. So they own about 20 to 25 newspapers, very small. Our budget is well under a million dollars if you wanted to scale it compared to other revenues. We're in a town of 5,000 and it's a rural county of less than 22,000. So you have some main industries but the population is rural. The county is not totally poverty- stricken and there is some development in the economy. But that’s a problem that is very much here with us. So I would say the biggest challenge is revenue and resources.
You know when I went to journalism school I was told maybe you would have to take your own pictures and maybe shoot your own videos. Now, I'm to the point where I'm the general manager. I manage one of the reporters and one of the salespeople, but at one point I was doing all the reporting, all the sales, most of the layout and just the day-to-day management.
So we've had to really adapt to stay with it through COVID, and recovering from COVID is still a challenge. So, to help revenue I became a salesperson.
I would say that our philosophy is trying to define what our community newspaper means to people and try to ask what value we add to people's lives. I'm not trying to compete with social media. I want to set myself apart from social media and the chitchat and back and forth and endless comments and reactions. How can I set myself apart from that and be a resource to the community?
Q2: Could you talk about some initiatives or practices that your organization has implemented to strengthen the credibility and transparency toward your audience?
A: Transparency is a big thing, and I believe in running corrections on the front page and even running clarifications. I think that builds accountability, but I think it's addressing that stigma with the public that “you're the media.”
We're residents here when we report on the schools. We're employees here, and I've tried to tell our advertisers we're only doing well as a newspaper if you're doing well as our advertising client. It's in our best interest to make sure your ads are working, and the coverage that we give you is credible and useful. Because if it's not, then what are we here for?
Another thing is our digital content. We're trying to have as much digital content as we possibly can but it's behind a paywall and people do have to log in with a username even if you are not a paid subscriber. We take the privacy of our community very seriously, and that is why we do not publish everything online on our e-edition.
Q3: Could you talk about some of the guidelines that you have in your organization for your team on the professional and personal use of social media?
A: I try to be as “off of” social media as I can. When your job is responding to things that are going on in the public, scrolling Facebook is like a part-time job. My personal page is very private and limited. In general, and for years before I had this management role, I chose not to share a lot of personal information, specifically of my daughter, because I was really concerned about children's privacy in the digital age.
Q4: Could you talk about artificial intelligence? Have you tried to incorporate it in your practices? How do you view the relationship between artificial intelligence and journalism?
A: So far as having artificial intelligence just write a story for me, no. But there have been several AI tools that I have used for the past several years that have greatly improved my productivity and my work-life balance because of the workload that I'm facing. I encourage other journalists to use these tools as well. One such tool is Grammarly which is basically a word processor. It helps in refining our first rough draft, but we do the heavy edits on that story ourselves.
What's really great is my reporter can be covering a meeting and I can follow up on that same transcription service and be typing out things and putting things from the online agenda that I think would be great footnotes for that story. So it allows us to collaborate to a point that we wouldn't be able to before.
AI has probably allowed me to write twice as much in the same timeframe. I can get information summarized quickly.
Q5: Could you talk about one of the successful things that your organization has done that you're proud of and that you think has had a good impact on your audience?
A: One thing that we have done every year since I've been here is devote a lot of time and energy to the local history. And we do a series of Black history articles every year for February, and we spend a lot of time on those. Stacey Abrams (political activist and former member of the Georgia House of Representatives) had a connection here. We published her once for the Black history month.
I hope that our reporting is something that society can look back on and feel proud of.
Q6: What would you say about journalism schools introducing new skills for the coming journalists of the future?
A: I think being published should be a bigger part of journalism education. Journalists should learn about how the government functions. When you can cover meetings and pull something from it, that's interesting to the public and gets their attention, that adds value to the story. I think that's the goal.
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Ahmer Khan is a graduate student assistant in the Overby Center. He is studying law and journalism.