Sheesh, you go out of town for a weekend, and the media beat goes a little bit haywire. Lots to get to, so much so that we’ve entered the News You Should View Extended Cinematic Universe. The customary edition of NYSV will follow, but we have a couple of special editions to get to first.

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The Burlington Free Press needs to die.

I say this reluctantly, because it does still employ a handful of hard-working reporters. Nothing more than a handful, to judge by its Newsroom Directory, which lists six — count ’em and weep — SIX reporters laboring in the corporate-owned sweatshop of a formerly great newspaper.

Six. [Shakes head, mutters under breath]

Which means that in order to fill the Free Press’ greatly-reduced news hole, they have to rely heavily on “content” cranked out by Gannett functionaries spread far and wide. These pieces of Hamburger Helper “journalism” are disposable clickbait at best, an insult to the reader’s intelligence at worst. And boy howdy, I have rarely seen a piece as insulting as this one.

The story, if that’s the right word for it, sits atop today’s Free Press Daily Briefing, an email designed to entice people to click through to the Free Press’ website. The first story ought to be the most enticing piece in the entire paper. It’s entitled “Reader’s Digest says this dish defines comfort in Vermont. Do you agree?” The writer is Rin Velasco, a Gannett “trending reporter” (yes, that’s her official title) based on Boston who delivers canned content that’s supposed to fool Vermont readers into thinking it’s local when it’s not. In this case, let’s just say the fig leaf is tiny indeed.

Take the headline, which provides no actual information because its purpose is not to inform, but to entice those delicious, delicious clicks. I hate those kinds of headlines, and they seem to be spreading everywhere.

Velasco’s story is taken from a Reader’s Digest listicle called “America the Tasty 2025: Comfort Food from Every State.” Doubtless she produced a similar piece for every Gannett publication within her jurisdiction, and it doesn’t seem like she spent very much time or effort on the process.

Her prose is pure boilerplate. It reads like it was written by someone not especially familiar with Vermont. She didn’t interview anyone. Every quote but one is from Reader’s Digest itself. I wouldn’t say it’s lazy — although it reads like that — because I’m sure Velasco’s job is to produce maximum content all the time. You gotta keep cranking ’em out and moving on.

Let’s start with the first two paragraphs, which just suck the life out of the informed reader:

Who doesn’t love comfort food? Vermonters certainly do.

The Green Mountain State has a lot of local eats that just hit that special spot. An apple cider donut or a maple creemee on a cone mean so much more than just satisfying your hunger. Eating them can feel like home.

Hey, Vermonters, nudge nudge (says the outsider), you know how we are. We just love our local eats, Insert Local Eats Here.

Velaso then spins out five paragraphs of throat-clearing before actually delivering the goods: Vermont’s favorite comfort food, according to Reader’s Digest, is… maple apple pie.

Huh.

Have you ever had maple apple pie? I haven’t. Of course, I’ve only lived in Vermont for 16 years, so still a flatlander.

Anyway, fine, maple apple pie, even though it sounds more like something made up by a Reader’s Digest editor with a shallow understanding of Vermont — cows, covered bridges, maple syrup, Ben & Jerry’s — than something pulled from a survey of dessert menus.

Velasco then spits out Reader’s Digest’s mandatory reference to the Vermont state law naming apple pie — not maple apple pie — as the official state dessert. She follows it up with this paragraph, which made me puke in my mouth a little:

That law by the way, Act 15 of 1999… was signed into law by former Gov. Howard Dean, who would go on to be a presidential hopeful known for his famous yell.

Yeah, we had to mention the Dean Scream for no particular reason, didn’t we? After all, we gotta stretch out this one-sentence “story” into several column inches of content.

Velasco then pivots to the cheddar-cheese-on-apple-pie thing, including a quote from the America’s Test Kitchen website — the only quote from anywhere other than the Reader’s Digest listicle itself. (Which cites “Beanie Weenies & Brown Bread” as New Hampshire’s comfort food of choice, a much sadder prospect than a nice hot slice of apple pie, err, maple apple pie.)

And… that’s about it. A few paragraphs about apple pie with cheddar cheese — not, mind you, maple apple pie, which seems to have vanished from this article after the sixth paragraph. Maple apple pie is specifically mentioned only that one time.

Ecch. It makes me sad for the state of journalism. And it makes me wish the entire Gannett chain would disappear from the face of the Earth and free up the Burlington media market for new and creative enterprises. As it is, Gannett seems to have settled om a depressing formula for success: Invest as little as possible in the content, harvest as many advertising dollars as you can, and don’t worry about old-fashioned ideas like serving your readers or advancing democracy.

The teeny-tiny Newsroom Directory includes some very familiar names: Brent Hallenbeck, Dan D’Ambrosio, Alex Abrami. I don’t wish unemployment or personal disruption on any of them. It’s not their fault they work for a zombie newspaper. These days in journalism, a job is a job and you can’t be blamed for holding onto it. But the Free Press is doing nothing more than sucking revenue out of the Burlington market like a corporate-sized leech. It’s doing no one, besides Gannett shareholders, any good at all.