Apologies for skipping a week. Between Nicholas Deml and Sam Douglass, there was a lot going on. But here we are with another collection of news content worth your attention. Starting with a bit of sad news.

Remember when every newspaper had local columnists? They occupied a space between opinion and reportage. They were familiar figures to readers, and had their fingers on the pulse of community life. As a news consumer in southern Michigan, I got to know and appreciate Detroit Free Press columnists like Hugh McDiarmid (politics), Neal Rubin (entertainment, also penned the Gil Thorp syndicated comic for many years), and Bob Talbert (fluff and nonsense with a purpose). Those days are long gone, as newspapers have cut and cut and cut until there’s practically nothing left.

One survivor of the good old days: Jim Kenyon of The Valley News. I’ve been reading his stuff since I moved to this region in 2000. And now, at the age of 66, he’s retiring. I haven’t seen this reported in his own paper yet, but The Dartmouth has published an exit interview with him. I’m sorry to see Kenyon go, especially since I’m certain that he will not be replaced. He’s a luxury item in a bare-bones industry.

Nonprofit news brings new ethical issues. Nonprofit news operations earn revenue from a variety of sources, but donations from readers, major donors and foundations are a crucial part of the mix. Which raises questions about how a news outlet covers stories that might step on sensitive toes. A real-life example: In its October 7 issue, The Hardwick Gazette published a story by Paul Fixx about financial troubles at Circus Smirkus. Despite a lack of cooperation from the circus-arts nonprofit, the story was pretty thorough — actually more thorough than the Seven Days story published earlier.

Many donors, including deep-pocketed benefactors, support both entities. It would have been easy to downplay or ignore the story, or write it in a Smirkus-friendly way. But The Gazette played it straight. In a time when the journalism industry is shifting increasingly to nonprofit models, this could become a thornier issue.

Giving a voice to the rarely-heard. The Vermont Cynic did something you won’t see in The Burlington Free Press or Seven Days: it sent Co-features Editor Nora Sissenich to City Hall Park to talk with homeless people. She came back with a rich and textured account of people struggling to carve out a life on the streets. It wasn’t a bleeding-heart whitewash, but it was an important contribution to understanding a vital issue that’s often reduced to stereotypes ans scare stories.

Shawn Cunningham off the top rope. The Chester Telegraph reporter often covers local school board and select board meetings, and rarely shies away from the occasional outbreaks of absurdity that leaven official proceedings. A recent Cunningham piece on the Chester select board included “a narrow ask” from Kirk MacGinnis, a Florida resident and Chester landowner. This “narrow ask,” Cunningham reported, was “nine pages long with demands including the wording for six motions he wanted the board to vote on that evening.” MacGinnis sounds like a real piece of work, and good on Cunningham for getting that across within the strictures of journalistic practice.

You can’t fix stupid. The Waterbury Roundabout’s Lisa Scagliotti covered a hearing on a proposed 90-unit housing development, and there, buried deep within the account, was a name familiar for his habit of opening mouth and inserting foot: former select board member Chris Viens, who became “former” in 2020 after opining that the solution to racism in policing was to segregate police forces so white police could handle white people, and officers of color could handle people of color. Yikes. You won’t be surprised to learn that Viens doesn’t like the development proposal, nor that he sprang some tortured logic on those in attendance. He implied that the development would drive current Waterbury residents out of town, I think because it would attract outsiders of questionable or undesirable character.

Actually, he made his implication quite clear when he said the development would bring “more drug problems and outside crime problems” to Waterbury. I’m glad to see this guy is still a former public official.

A child’s garden of homegrown conspiracies. The redoubtable Burlington videographer Jonny Wanzer, whose offerings range from edgy reportage to the truly outlandish, has checked in with a really fun compilation of “Vermont conspiracy theories” gathered from man-on-the-street interviews, many outside of Burlington night spots and possibly fueled by ingestion of consciousness-altering substances. My favorite: The young man who claimed that “Bernie Sanders once had an affair with Champ. And Bernie was top.” Yeah, that’s the stuff.