Editor's Notebook: Where's the Goodman story?

May 14, 2026 · Source: The Lexington Times

By Paul Oliva, Web Editor · The Lexington Times · May 14, 2026

The Editor's Notebook is an occasional column from The Lexington Times about local coverage choices — ours, and other newsrooms'. This one is about a story the Herald-Leader has the sources, the precedent, and the institutional knowledge to write, and so far hasn't.

Composite photo: Greg Goodman of Mt. Brilliant Farm, in a Mt. Brilliant cap, smiling outdoors on the left; Mayor Linda Gorton at a Lexington council podium in a blue blouse on the right — Greg Goodman (left) of Mt. Brilliant Farm and Mayor Linda Gorton (right). Eight checks from the Goodman and Rosenstein families totaling $15,200 landed in Gorton's campaign account on May 4. *(Photos: Keeneland / LexTV; composite by The Lexington Times)*

On Monday, the Lexington Herald-Leader's city-hall reporter, Adrian Bryant, posted a thread on r/lexington under his own handle. The post inventoried the paper's coverage of the May 19 mayoral primary — the annual State of the City speech, Raquel Carter's launch, the candidate forum, the city-hall debate, the partisanship sidebar, and a four-part series on housing, snow response, traffic safety, and economic development. The framing was unambiguous: my… final story about the upcoming mayoral primary election just went up.

What's missing from that inventory is what I want to talk about.

Three days earlier, on Friday, May 9, candidates filed their 15-day pre-primary campaign-finance reports with the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance. It's the last public look at fundraising before the May 19 vote. Mayor Linda Gorton's report shows that on May 4, her campaign deposited eight checks from members of the Goodman and Rosenstein families totaling $15,200 — part of a $17,200 single-day haul that, by itself, exceeded any monthly total she had reported before April. Six Goodman family members each gave the $2,200 individual maximum.

The bundle is on a public document. It has been on a public document for five days. It is not, as best I can tell, mentioned in any Herald-Leader story.

By the paper's own standard

Here is the part that especially stings.

The Herald-Leader did publish, on April 30, one piece this cycle that took up the question of where a candidate's money is coming from — a story headlined Lexington mayor candidate labels herself a Democrat. Why it matters in nonpartisan race. The piece's central voice was Tom Eblen: the paper's former managing editor (1998–2008), its longtime metro/state columnist (2008–2019), and, as of February 3, 2026, Mayor Gorton's appointee to fill the vacant 3rd District council seat after Hannah LeGris's resignation. Eblen had posted a Facebook comment on Carter's partisan-mailer flap. The Herald-Leader chose to elevate it in print.

Eblen's argument, as the Herald-Leader reported it, was that Lexington's nonpartisan system forces voters to weigh records and merits over party labels. He listed what he thought they should weigh: a candidate's experience, qualifications, specific ideas and plans, and — in the clause the Herald-Leader chose to put on the page — perhaps most importantly, where their campaign money is coming from.

That is the standard. It is the Herald-Leader's standard, on the Herald-Leader's page, sourced to the Herald-Leader's own former managing editor — who happens also to be the appointee of the mayor whose 15-day report is the subject of this column. On April 30 the paper used that standard to frame a story about Carter. Five days into the post-Goodman-bundle window, it has not used it to frame one about Gorton.

This is a story the paper has written before

I went looking through the kentucky.com archive to make sure I wasn't missing something. I wasn't. But I did find this:

On November 3, 2022, Herald-Leader political reporter Beth Musgrave published a story headlined Mayor Gorton raises campaign cash from farmers and developers. The lede named Greg Goodman and Mt. Brilliant Farm and identified the family as one of Gorton's biggest donors. The piece noted that Goodman family members had given $10,000 to Gorton's 2022 reelection — almost exactly the same scale of bundle as the 2026 deposit. It quoted Gorton's then-opponent, David Kloiber, tying the Goodman money directly to a Gorton policy decision on agricultural land.

Same paper. Same reporter (Musgrave is still on staff — she co-bylined an April 23, 2026 story with Bryant on this same race). Same family. Same farm. Same dollar tier. Same urban-service-boundary subtext. The institutional knowledge to write the 2026 version of this story is sitting in the building.

The asymmetry

The April 23 Musgrave-and-Bryant story did extend a critical lens to one candidate's donor base — just not Gorton's. The piece quoted Gorton campaign manager Calvin Penn at length on Carter's contributions, including the framing that Carter's money came from a large loan from the candidate herself, and the rest from big developers, realtors, and bankers.

That is a perfectly legitimate angle. Carter's loans and her real-estate-industry support are matters of public record and deserve scrutiny. What is harder to explain is why the paper has reported on the where-did-Carter's-money-come-from story and not, in the same window, the where-did-Gorton's-new-money-come-from story — especially when the latter happens to feature an organized, single-day, six-member family bundle from a politically prominent horse-farm dynasty.

Why the Goodman bundle matters

Greg Goodman owns the 1,200-acre Mt. Brilliant Farm on Russell Cave Road and co-founded the rural-land-preservation group Fayette Alliance. The single most contested policy issue of Lexington's 2026 cycle is the Urban Service Boundary. Carter has campaigned, in her own words, on the city's 22,000-unit housing shortage and on giving the boundary a serious look. Gorton's record on the boundary is one of defending the status quo — a position with which Fayette Alliance has long, publicly, and effectively aligned itself.

The same Goodman family that gave $15,200 to Gorton on May 4 gave $10,000 to Vice Mayor Dan Wu during his first run for council in 2022. Wu has gotten nothing from the family this cycle. The redirect is not subtle. It is exactly the kind of organized donor realignment that a campaign-finance reporter ought to want to write about.

And the endorsement is doing strange work, too

On May 12, the Herald-Leader's editorial board endorsed both Gorton and Carter in a single opinion piece headlined Reliable leadership, new ideas give us 2 good choices for Lexington mayor. Voters can choose only one.

That is not how the paper has handled this race before.

In May 2022, when Gorton faced a similar four-way primary against David Kloiber, Adrian Wallace, and William Weyman, the editorial board ran a clean, single-name primary endorsement: Linda Gorton. The editorial described her as an easy pick whose challengers lack the track record, the temperament and the solid plans — language nobody could read as hedging. (As a courtesy, the same editorial identified Adrian Wallace as their second choice in case Gorton failed to make the top two. Wallace finished third by 414 votes; the second-choice line never had to be cashed.)

Four years later, with the same incumbent now facing a challenger who has out-raised her two-to-one in cycle receipts, the editorial board declined to make a single pick. Both candidates got the nod.

Reasonable people can argue about whether a dual primary endorsement is good editorial-board practice in a single-choice election. The narrower point is that the Herald-Leader had a clear, recently used template for endorsing in a contested mayoral primary — and chose not to use it this time. That choice, combined with the absence of any 15-day-report follow-up that names the Goodman family, produces a posture that, intentional or not, reads as remarkably easy on the incumbent.

I asked, in good faith

On the morning of May 13, I emailed Bryant and Herald-Leader executive editor Jeremy Chisenhall and asked, plainly: was there a story in the works, was there an editorial reason for the omission I should be aware of, or had I simply missed something on the site. I made clear I would much rather link to their reporting than write a column about its absence, and offered them on-the-record, off-the-record, or on-background — their preference. As of the publication of this column, neither had responded. I will update this piece if they do.

Why this is worth saying out loud

An endorsement is a newspaper's affirmative statement about the candidates' fitness. A money story is its structural statement about the system in which those candidates have to operate. The two are not substitutes. The Herald-Leader has now done the first — twice over, in a way that calls back to nothing in its own recent history — and not the second.

Here is what makes this worth saying in 2026, and not, say, in 2006. The Kentucky Registry of Election Finance publishes every Lexington candidate's contribution-level filing as a downloadable dataset. A working journalist with access to any of the modern general-purpose AI assistants can pull that CSV, ask for a summary of donor clusters by candidate, and have the bones of a publishable story in roughly the time it takes to drink a coffee. The labor excuse for not writing this piece — the one that might have applied a decade ago, when the same exercise meant manually keying entries off paper filings — no longer exists. Beth Musgrave wrote the 2022 version of this story on her own. The 2026 version, mechanically, requires less of her, not more.

So let me say what I am very deliberately not saying. This column is not an accusation. I am not claiming that Adrian Bryant or Beth Musgrave or Jeremy Chisenhall or anyone else in the Herald-Leader's newsroom is choosing to suppress the Goodman bundle. We don't know why this story isn't getting written. We have no evidence — none — that the omission is malicious or corrupt, and nothing in this piece should be read as suggesting it is. We simply, genuinely, don't know.

What we do know is that the paper isn't talking about it. With six days to go before a primary in which the urban-service-boundary question is on the ballot in everything but name, the city's paper of record has not put the words Greg Goodman and Linda Gorton into the same 2026 story, its city-hall reporter has publicly indicated that he is done filing on this race, and a good-faith inquiry from a peer outlet has gone unanswered. Whether you call that silence or stonewalling, it is a choice — and the choice raises a question that I wish did not need to be asked: is Lexington's paper of record still equipped to do the basic structural reporting on the people who hold power here? Is legacy local journalism, more broadly, asleep at the wheel? On May 19, when Lexington voters open their primary ballots, the answer to those questions matters more for the city's civic future than any single dollar figure on any single report.

We'd rather link to the Herald-Leader's reporting on this than continue to do our own. Until that piece exists, ours is at feeds.lexingtonky.news/article/15-day-pre-primary-filings-gorton-leaps-goodmans-bundle, with the underlying contribution-level data on the Lexington Times Donors Dashboard.

Got a tip about local coverage choices — ours, or anyone else's? editor@lexingtonky.news.

References and sources

This editor's notebook column was drafted with AI assistance (claude-opus-4-7) at the direction of Lexington Times web editor Paul Oliva, who reviewed and finalized the published text. Reporting is grounded in the May 4, 2026 deposit on Mayor Gorton's 15-day pre-primary campaign-finance report (KREF), the November 3, 2022 Beth Musgrave Herald-Leader piece, the April 23, 2026 Musgrave-Bryant Herald-Leader piece, and Adrian Bryant's May 12, 2026 r/lexington post. Outreach to abryant@herald-leader.com and jchisenhall@herald-leader.com was made the morning of May 13, 2026; this column will be updated if a response is received. How we make these.