Oh, looky here, we’ve got another billionaire with a plan to “save America’s newspapers.” Have we learned nothing from Jeff Bezos?

I mean, maybe Florida-based 73-year-old David Hoffmann is the real deal who will do what Bezos and Alden Capital and whatever Gannett brands its processed news-ish product these days have failed to deliver: A viable, profitable model for relevant journalism. But seriously, how many eggs am I willing to put in the billionaire savior basket? Especially since Hoffmann is a micromanager who daily pores over the 140 papers he’s invested in with a red felt-tip pen, thinks that the Associated Press leans “sometimes a little to the left,” and believes that ultra-local “boosterism” and “pivoting toward paywalls” are the keys to making money in the news business.

Oh, also, this is his “home.”

Just a regular guy. Puts on his pants one leg at a time. With the help of a valet, I’m sure.

But I digress, bigly. I’m here to spin a fantasy in honor of April 9, “Local News Day,” a “national day of action connecting communities with trusted local news.” (Maybe I’ll see you at the LND event at the Kellogg-Hubbard Library?)

I must declare a self-interest. As you may be aware, I’m on the board of the independent nonprofit Hardwick Gazette, which serves a section of the Northeast Kingdom that would otherwise be a news desert. My two years on the board and my exposure to the broader nonprofit news movement have given me some definite views on the subject.

First: Nonprofit news is the best and brightest hope for the future of written journalism.

Second: The entire enterprise is on shaky ground and no one has found a sure path to sustainability.

Case study: VTDigger, widely considered a model of nonprofit journalism for all others to follow, but currently struggling to balance the books and provide a good working environment for its reporters. I have to say, if Digger is still feeling its way through the Yorkshire Moors, we’re all in trouble.

That said, there are tons of creative, dedicated people across the country trying to make this thing work. There are success stories that can guide us through the bramble-ridden wilds. There is hope in significant quantity.

But we can’t count on the Big Boys of for-profit — or even nonprofit — journalism to lead the way.

I’m talking about Bezos and Hoffmann and the other boys with big toys, but I’m also talking about VTDIgger and Vermont Public and the University of Vermont Center for Community News, among others.

Some of the major players in the nonprofit world are doing good work; positive vibes for the Institute for Nonprofit News (see you in Pittsburgh) and Local Independent Online News among others, and the folks at Digger and Vermont Public are skilled people committed to their craft. But there’s a disconnect between the top and bottom rungs of journalism these days, and I believe the best solutions are going to come from below, not above. I see, in fact, the potential for a more robust news ecosystem built from the bottom up.

The building blocks of a better media environment, I believe, are our local small outlets. Like The Gazette and The Commons and The Chester Telegraph and The North Star Monthly and I could name a dozen others, plus for-profit entities like The News & Citizen and The Other Paper and The Manchester Journal. We are truly blessed to have such a wealth of talent at the local level.

And the larger outlets should take advantage of what the small fry can offer. The locals can identify stories and trends that larger entities could productively report on. Organizations like Digger and Vermont Public have the resources to stitch together narratives that could inform us all on the issues that resonate across Vermont, and there are a whole lot of them to cover.

Now, our local outlets are not out of the woods. We just lost The Brandon Reporter last fall, and many local entities depend on underpaid staff and unpaid volunteers.

Well, to be honest, all local entities are in that lifeboat.

They are trapped in a vicious cycle. They’re working as hard as they can to publish the news and keep their noses above water. They don’t have the time, energy and talent to fundraise and sell advertising, so they continue to limp along. They need a major lift.

And that’s where the larger institutions like the Center for Community News and the Vermont Community Foundation could play a decisive role.

The local outlets need two things: (1) a one-shot revenue infusion to give them the opportunity to hire fundraising staff who could eventually become self-sustaining, and (2) a pipeline of talented fundraising personnel.

Let’s use my own Hardwick Gazette as an example. This time last year, we were financially on the ropes. Survival was uncertain. But there was a way forward, and starting last fall we began to execute it.

Thanks to INN’s NewsMatch program, the generosity of some deep-pocketed local donors, and an astonishingly strong response from readers, The Gazette’s end-of-year fundraising campaign tripled the takings of the 2024 version — which had been our best fund drive ever by a dirt-road mile. We made good on past obligations and entered the new year with enough in the bank to keep us going for several lean months. (Ad sales and charitable giving are both heavily concentrated in the last couple months of the year.)

This allowed us time to take the next step: Hire someone to do fundraising and ad sales. Right now, we’re trying to put together a salary pool that would give the new staffer financial certainty while they build networks in the business and donor communities. After that, we’re confident that the position would more than pay for itself and fuel future growth in the news operation.

The startup salary guarantee should lead to a bigger and better applicant pool. And there’s the rub: This model only works if we hire a good, energetic, creative development person. If we hire a dud, the whole effort crashes and burns. And anyone in the nonprofit world will tell you there are a lot more bad development people than good ones.

It doesn’t take much, really. A good local paper can do well with 1 1/2 full-time equivalent staff in the newsroom, the same on the fundraising/development side, and a minimal office/design staff. It can be done, and it has been done.

And here I circle back to our larger institutions. In Vermont, that means the UVM Center for Community News and the Vermont Community Foundation, which has taken a significant position in fostering nonprofit news. The best thing UVM could do is train development personnel. The two things VCF could do is (1) underwrite such trainings, at UVM or elsewhere, and (2) provide startup grants for small nonprofit news outlets to hire sales/development staff.

(CCN, unfortunately, has trimmed its local activities in favor of networking (for the cynical, empire-building) nationally among academic institutions. They still train student reporters to write stories for Vermont outlets, but that does nothing to pull local journalism out of the ditch.)

The issue at small newspapers (digital or print) is not talent or energy or journalistic skill. It’s money, pure and simple. We don’t have enough money, and we lack the capacity to grow revenue even when our readers and advertisers clearly offer room for growth. The capacity shortage is by far the biggest obstacle to building sustainable local news operations.

Because if we have strong local outlets, they can shine a light on local issues and feed ideas and content up the chain. That’s how you build a vibrant news ecosystem, not by sharing stories, as Digger and Seven Days and the CCN are doing. That’s a Band-Aid on a broken arm.

The local outlets need a hand up. We all need to tend to our core missions. Together we can build something strong and lasting, without any billionaires in McMansions.