The reporter who covered every step of Honesdale’s playground story is paid by the partner of a PPP committee member. Readers learned about it on the eighth article — in a sentence at the bottom of the page.
Read Pocono Review’s full investigation: Keenan Gruver: The Bookstore Soil Scientist (Part 1) and Lisa Glover & Derek Williams: Same Bed, Same Board, Same Foundation (Part 2).
For six months, the only newspaper covering the removal of a children’s playground in Honesdale Borough did not tell its readers that the reporter writing every article had a personal financial relationship with someone working on the project he was covering.
Then, on April 28, in the eighth article in the series, the River Reporter added a single sentence at the bottom of the page:
Editor’s note: The reporter on this story works part time at a business owned by the partner of Luke Green, who served as a committee member with the PPP.
That’s the entire disclosure. Below the photo captions. Below the related-stories list. Twelve words.
The reporter is Liam Mayo, the River Reporter’s editor. The People’s Playground Project is the group that proposed the $400,000 replacement for the Central Park playground, fundraises through the Wayne County Community Foundation, and was named the borough’s “authorized community planning partner” in November 2025. Luke Green has not appeared in any of the seven prior River Reporter pieces about PPP. He is not listed as a committee member on the PPP’s website. He has not been mentioned in publicly available borough meeting minutes from October 2025 through April 2026 reviewed by Pocono Review. The April 28 disclosure is the first public confirmation that he was on a PPP committee at all.
What the seven articles built
The first piece ran on October 26, 2025, the day after the borough finished tearing the playground out. It introduced Keenan Gruver as “Known Grove Sacred Land Stewardship Executive Director” and reported, as fact, that “tire mulch attributed to the trees dying in the park.” It did not mention that Gruver’s report was incomplete, that he had no environmental credentials, that he was a paid consultant invoicing the borough through Known Grove, or that the woman managing his stump art project sat on his board and was the mayor’s domestic partner.
The October 28 piece reported Councilman Jim Hamill’s removal from his committees without mentioning that the meeting Hamill was being punished over had been documented in minutes never posted to the borough’s public records system. The November 24 piece covered the meeting where Hamill was censured 5-1 — and where a Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection letter confirming the soil did not exceed state safety standards was buried in correspondence. The article did not mention the DEP letter. The December 15 piece introduced the People’s Playground Project as a “grassroots placemaking effort” and quoted Lisa Glover and Kendra Nelson at length, without mentioning that Glover was the mayor’s domestic partner, had been working on Central Park since 2020, sat on the board of the consultant whose report had triggered the removal, or that the PPP would fundraise through the foundation that employed her partner.
By April 27, 2026 — when the council voted 5-2 to commit the borough to a $400,000 PPP plan with no awarded grant funding — the public had read seven River Reporter articles defining the story for them. Hamill was the obstacle. Gruver was the credible expert. PPP was grassroots. The contamination was real. The DEP had not weighed in. Lead had not been found. The mayor’s domestic partner had no relationship to any of it. None of those framings survives the documents.
What the disclosure says — and doesn’t
Twelve words is not enough to assess a conflict. The disclosure does not name the business. It does not say when Mayo started working there. It does not say what Luke Green’s role on the PPP committee was, or which committee, or when he served, or whether his service overlapped in time with the six months of coverage that did not disclose the relationship. The single word “served” — past tense — is the only temporal marker. A disclosure that does not name the business, the dates, the roles, or the relationship in concrete terms is a notice that something exists. It is not a tool readers can use to assess the depth of the conflict.
The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics calls for journalists to “avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived” and, when a conflict is unavoidable, to “disclose unavoidable conflicts.” Standard practice for material financial relationships is disclosure that is prominent, specific, prompt, and retrospective. The April 28 disclosure is none of those things. It is at the bottom of the article. It is indirect — the reader must trace four steps to understand the relationship. It is eight articles late. And it is not retrospective: the seven articles published before April 28 remain on the River Reporter’s website without the disclosure attached.
What the disclosure is silent on
The April 28 note addresses one relationship: between the reporter and a committee member through the partner who employs the reporter. It does not address any of the other documented connections between the newspaper and the institutions it covers. Mayor Derek Williams himself wrote a column for the River Reporter before becoming mayor. Wayne County Community Foundation CEO Ryanne Jennings writes for the paper. The borough’s official website hosts a River Reporter “News Ambassador” recruitment ad. WJFF Radio Catskill, in its November 2025 segment on the Hamill censure, sourced its account entirely from Mayo’s own writing. The April 28 disclosure addresses none of these.
Open questions
What is the name of the business at which the reporter is employed, and what does it do? When did he begin working there? When did Luke Green join, and when did he leave, the PPP committee? When was editorial leadership informed of the relationship, and why was the disclosure first made on April 28 rather than October 26? Will the seven prior articles be annotated to include the same disclosure? Does the River Reporter have a written conflict-of-interest policy, and will it be made public? Does the paper consider the relationships between its writers and the WCCF, the Greater Honesdale Partnership, or borough leadership to require disclosure under the same standard applied to the April 28 piece?
The thing that doesn’t go away
The seven articles are still on the River Reporter’s website.
A parent of a young child in Honesdale who, today, in May 2026, searches for the story of why the Central Park playground was removed will land on the October 26 piece. They will read about the contamination. They will not read about the DEP letter, because it is not there. They will read Gruver described as an executive director. They will not read that he was a paid consultant invoicing the borough. They will read that the mulch was killing trees. They will not read that the woman whose own statement seven weeks earlier described the same soil as healthy was sitting on the board of the consultant who reversed the diagnosis. They will not read the disclosure that the reporter who wrote what they are reading is paid by the partner of someone on the project.
That disclosure is in a different article, in a single sentence, at the bottom of the page.
A reporter shaped a public narrative for six months. The disclosure that should have accompanied that narrative arrived in piece eight. The pieces that came before it have not been updated.
That is the situation as of publication.
Read the full investigation: Keenan Gruver: The Bookstore Soil Scientist PPP: Pt.1 and Lisa Glover & Derek Williams: Same Bed, Same Board, Same Foundation.
Pocono Review covers Wayne, Monroe, Pike, Carbon, Lackawanna, and Luzerne counties. Tips, documents, and on-the-record accounts: tips@poconoreview.com. Anonymity respected.
Pocono Review is committed to accuracy. If you believe any fact in this report is incorrect, email tips@poconoreview.com with the specific claim and your supporting documentation. Verified corrections will be published promptly.