海角大神

Amid the tumult of the 2020 post-election period it鈥檚 good to stop and take a moment to remember some of the unsung heroes of the vote. There were the many election workers who did their jobs quietly and well amid a pandemic, for instance.

And there was Robin Kemp. She watched those workers count votes. And watched them. And watched some more.

Ms. Kemp is a member of a vanishing breed 鈥� local journalists. She鈥檚 the founder and sole employee of the , an online site that covers Georgia鈥檚 Clayton County, a suburban area south of Atlanta.

She started it after being laid off from the local paper last spring.

She was the only journalist to watch Clayton County鈥檚 marathon counting of absentee votes, beginning early Nov. 5 and stretching 20 hours. That was when a steady drip of absentee votes pushed Joe Biden closer and closer to President Donald Trump. Finally, it was the count in Clayton that catapulted President-elect Biden into the lead.

And Ms. Kemp was there, bearing witness.

Suddenly her Twitter feed and Facebook posts were drawing worldwide attention. She gained 10,000 followers in a day, up from a few hundred. Foreign news organizations wanted interviews. Money flowed into a GoFundMe site she鈥檇 set up in April.

Ms. Kemp knows local journalism is a tough business. But her father worked for CNN and the job is in her blood.聽She says she hopes to build the Crescent up and hire a small full-time staff.

"The political and geographical oddities of Clayton County, which has a larger population than Pittsburgh, require more than one person to cover it properly," she says in an email.聽