I’ve been thinking for a while about BETA Technologies, a.k.a. The Great White Hope for jobs and economic growth in the post-IBM era. Those thoughts have crystallized around a recently-published story by VTDigger’s Theo Wells-Spackman entitled “An Inside Look at Beta (sic) Technologies’ Big Plans for Vermont.”

(I guess we need an AP Style Guide ruling on whether the name is all caps or not but it’s listed on the stock market as BETA, so I’ll go where the money is.)

The story was well done. But it was an example of how an article can be diligently executed but still compromised by its concept. The most frequent offender in this regard is the class of story about “Local Residents Oppose [insert development plan here].” The usual evils are renewable energy installations, cell towers, and proposals for new housing. By their very framing, these accounts give more weight to the opposition — who get the lion’s share of the quotes and the column inches. Supporters are less often heard from if at all, and developers tend to stay away from active engagement because they fear it will just make things worse.

In the case of Wells-Spackman’s piece, “An Inside Look” is fun and exciting, but no matter how hard the reporter tries, the final product is going to make BETA Technologies look good. The shiny factory, the face time with company leaders and supportive officials, all nice. If you begin with “a private tour” of the factory, and you’re kind of already in the host’s back pocket. Access journalism, I think they call it.

To his credit, Wells-Spackman does explore the very unforgiving business environment BETA is trying to navigate — but not until after he spends hundreds of words on a facility “bursting at the seams” and BETA executives promising to make it “a superpower” in its field and claiming to be “a 100-year company.” (Quick: How many companies last 100 years at the top of an industry? Not IBM, not Kodak, not Sears Roebuck or KMart, not U.S. Steel, not General Motors or Ford.) There’s also a bit of light fluffing from Commerce Secretary Lindsay Kurrle, who calls BETA “potentially another IBM success story.” Wise of her to hedge that bet.

After all of that, and after many readers will have already tuned out, Wells-Spackman hits us with “Yet the company faces stiff headwinds.” In paragraph 13.

Those headwinds, let me tell you, are hurricane force and arriving from all directions. Per Wells-Spackman, they include a lack of Federal Aviation Administration approval for its designs, competitors “racing to snap up major contracts first,” a net loss of nearly half a billion dollars in its most recent quarterly release, and a stock price that’s fallen by close to 50% since November.

Don’t get me wrong, BETA Technologies has some real strengths. And I’m not saying it can’t be an IBM-level force for northeastern Vermont. It could be. But it’s far, far more likely that it won’t be.

BETA might get sidelined by deeper-pocketed competitors. It might be forced to move and/or merge by its own investors, economic forces, better deals from more pliable state governments, or other factors beyond our imagining. It might lose out to firms with inferior ideas but better management or connections. Hell, it might fall victim to the caprices of the Trump administration when it comes to alternative fuel sources.

I claim no special insight on the aviation marketplace or BETA’s technology. I just look at the sweep of history and what it says about the company’s chances of (1) surviving, (2) thriving, and (3) doing so right here in Vermont. There is a path forward, but it’s exceedingly narrow and littered with land mines.

And that’s a story more relevant than “an inside look” at a shiny, high-tech facility. A better story would focus on the key question: Is BETA a real, tangible piece of Vermont’s future, or a vulnerable house of cards like, well, Keurig Green Mountain? Or IBM itself?

This is a big relevant question for VTDigger readers and the rest of us taxpayers because like Keurig Green Mountain, BETA has received millions in tax incentives from the state of Vermont and is likely to get even more. Through those incentives, we are all betting on BETA’s future success and continued presence in our B.L.S., so a thorough exploration of its real-world prospects would be useful indeed.

As would a revisit of the old “but for” clause. State incentives are supposed to be offered for investments that would not happen “but for” the incentive. Problem is, as Auditor Doug Hoffer has pointed out ad nauseam,“but for” is pretty much impossible to prove. BETA is a great example of the problem: It has received several million in state incentives — compared to several hundred million in capital investment. The state incentives are basically a rounding error in BETA’s bottom line.

The company’s fortunes depend on economic and regulatory forces that far outweigh Vermont’s little incentive programs. It might be useful to remind people of that little fact instead of gee-whizzing your way through a “private tour.”