Last week’s VTDigger/Vermont Public joint report about the state of Vermont’s $789 million housing splurge and its disappointing impact was a true journalistic tour de force. It was a deep dive into an important story. It involved a ton of work, and it provided real insight into Vermont’s housing crisis. Kudos to both organizations and to co-authors Carly Berlin (Digger/VP shared housing reporter) and Erin Petenko (Digger data reporter extraordinaire).
Two thumbs up, ten out of ten, five stars on Yelp, no notes.
But there is a dark side to this, and it has to do with the ever-diminishing state of journalism in Vermont.
This week’s crop was looking a little thin until I visited The Manchester Journal’s website and found not one, not two, but three stories worthy of note. One of them was actually published on September 4, and I managed to miss it last time. But it remains relevant, and The Journal has since published a meaningful follow-up.
The Journal is one of three southern Vermont newspapers owned by Paul Belogour, an international financier type who originally hails from Belarus, one of the most corrupt and press-unfriendly dictatorships this side of Kim Jong Un. His 2021 acquisition of The Journal, The Bennington Banner and The Brattleboro Reformer raised many an eyebrow at the time, including mine. So far his stewardship seems to be fairly benign, at least by contemporary oligarchical standards. (Although I doubt that The Reformer will be doing any more overviews of Belogour’s wide-ranging acquisitions like it did before he bought the papers.) And this week, at least, one of his outlets occupies the top spot in Vermont’s incredible shrinking news pantheon.
ICE detainee whisked out of state.The Journal’s Cherise Forbes and Michael Albans were first to report that Davona Williams, the Manchester resident seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last month, had been secretly moved to the North Lake Processing Center in rural Michigan. This story ought to reverberate in Montpelier’s corridors of power; last spring, when leading lawmakers were looking to limit Vermont’s cooperation slash complicity in the ICE crackdown, the Scott administration successfully argued that people detained in Vermont were better off in Vermont prisons than elsewhere. Huh, turns out that ICE can move people around willy-nilly no matter where they live or where they were first detained. Which puts us back on the “complicity” side of the ledger.
There’s also a fascinating little Vermont connection with the North Lake facility itself, but that’s beyond the remit of this post.
The nonprofit’s Board cited multiple reasons, some familiar and some perhaps less so. Printing papers consumed three-quarters of its budget; more and more people are getting their news online; and delivery had become increasingly problematic due to the decline of the U.S. Postal Service: “Many residents get The Record 10 days to two weeks after it is supposed to arrive,” the Board wrote.
This decision illustrates one of the many unanswered questions facing local news outlets: To print… or not to print?
This feature, which was once published with plausible reliability once a week, continues to break its own schedule with distressing regularity. No excuses, not even a promise to get back to weekly status, I’ll just press forward and do the best I can.
Not to say there’s been a shortage of quality content worth your attention. Our local outlets (and a pair of podcasts) are still hard at work — despite the bad news about the Brandon Reporter and a setback for the Hinesburg Record, which merits a post of its own. Meanwhile, let’s get to the top-shelf offerings, shall we?
If you’re homeless, do you really deserve to own stuff? The usually big-hearted town of Brattleboro has been removing encampments of the unhoused on the ever-popular principle of “If you can’t see poverty, it doesn’t exist.” And in the process, as The Commons’ C.B. Hall reports, there are signs of a cavalier attitude toward the belongings of The Removed. Larry Barrows, survivor of three strokes, lost everything he had via official town action, including prescription medications and “My kid’s Bible, my kid’s photos. It’s devastating.”
Town Health Officer Charles Keir III, depicted in this story as a real piece of work, insisted that during the removals, “I don’t remember seeing any personal belongings that we deemed as salvageable.” He must have an interesting definition of “personal belongings” because he acknowledged that tents are not considered personal property. “We destroy them,” he told Hall. “They go to the landfill.” Well, isn’t that special.
I’ve been slow to the party regarding Compass Vermont, a not-so-new entry into our sadly depleted media ecosystem. I welcome its participation, because we can use all the help we can get on the journalism front. I hope it succeeds, although I have some serious reservations about its real merit.
Which brings me to its latest “scoop” and what it reveals about the limitations of Compass’ approach and the broad hints of serious ideological bent.
Compass’ big reveal? Attorney General Charity Clark sometimes exaggerates her accomplishments.
OH NO.
I clutch my pearls. I reach for the smelling salts. I search for the Captain Renault screenshot. I am shocked — shocked — to learn that a politician is acting like a politician.
When state Sen. Russ Ingalls, a conservative Republican, bought a bunch of Northeast Kingdom radio stations earlier this year, he indulged in some high-toned blather about emphasizing local information and keeping politics out of the product.
Well, now we know how thatturned out.
As VTDigger’s Shaun Robinson reports, Ingalls has raised some ire among liberal listeners by getting rid of newscasts from major network broadcasters and the Associated Press and replacing them with, you guessed it, Fox News.
And that’s the way our capitalist media system works, isn’t it? He who pays the piper calls the tune. Ingalls is well within his rights to air whatever kind of newscasts he wants. (Thanks, it must be said, to Ronald Reagan’s deep-sixing of the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to fairly represent all points of view from the birth of electronic media until its repeal in 1987.)
Actually, when I first scanned the headline, I thought he’d replaced the stations’ entire programming with far-right conservative talk. He hasn’t. He’s decided to air Fox News in the brief window devoted to news at the top of each hour. Which usually amounts to no more than a couple minutes of news along with plenty of advertisements.
Point being, if you depend on commercial radio newscasts to keep you informed, it’s kind of like making Lunchables the foundation of your diet.
So I don’t have much of a beef with Ingalls’ decision. I do have trouble, and plenty of it, with his comments about the situation. Which reveal him to be a tunnel-visioned ideologue with no patience for criticism of himself, the country, or its current (you should pardon the expression) leadership. Not to mention his open contempt for constituents who disagree with him.
We interrupt our somewhat-regularly-scheduled feature, News You Should View, to bring you some sad tidings on the local journalism front. As related in the above headline, the nonprofit Brandon Reporter has announced it will cease publication in early October. Ironically, its self-proclaimed last gasp will take place the day before the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News begins its first national conference on university-led efforts to foster and support local journalism.
A bit too late for The Reporter, as it turns out. Although really, the conference is aimed at a much higher level and, even if The Reporter still existed on October 2, would have had little relevance to the struggles of a small, local journalistic nonprofit. But more on that in a moment.
As described in Steven Jupiter’s story, The Reporter had been owned by The Addison Independent, but in 2022 it was sold (or given, it’s unclear) to a group of Brandon residents determined to reinvent The Reporter as a nonprofit. They did their level best, but have now decided to call a halt. Jupiter and his colleagues are painfully aware that, absent a local newspaper, the Brandon area will become a news desert — a place where there is effectively no real coverage of local events. So they’ve thrown a bit of a Hail Mary, hoping that The Reporter might continue in some form.
Apologies for the unannounced two-week absence of this feature. I’ve been out of town a lot lately. Had time to crank out the occasional blog, but not to do a survey of News Content from our state. But, just when you thought it was safe… I’m baaaaaack.
Most of our honorees this week hail from the Vermont Community News Group, which includes several weeklies in Chittenden and Lamoille Counties. Its newspapers routinely punch above their own weight in creating solid content on a shoestring budget.
It can’t happen here. Oh wait, it just did. The good folk of Manchester just discovered that Donald Trump’s unconstitutional ICE crackdown is no respecter of affluence. As the Manchester Journal‘s Michael Albans and Cherise Forbes report, ICE swooped down on a notorious den of iniquity, oh wait, “a small housing development in Manchester” and arrested two unrepentant criminals, oh wait, “Jamaican mothers of school-age children who worked as Home Health aides, as their families looked on.”
Right, a small housing development in frickin’ Manchester, the front line of America’s war on brown people. You know, the thing about the ICE crackdown — well, one of many things about the ICE crackdown — is that they’re not targeting the real criminals or gang members. Those people are too hard to find. ICE is going after people with jobs and responsibilities, people who keep a schedule and have a routine, people who may not have their papers in order but who are assets to our society and our economy.
A pair of coincidentally-timed events have sparked a crazy idea in my mind: There is room in Vermont’s news marketplace for a scrappy upstart operation focused on state politics and government.
You know, kinda-sorta exactly what VTDigger used to be.
And if I were a younger man, I’d be tempted to create something that might be called The Blackfly or simply Skeeter: A news operation designed to get under the thin skins of our political class, to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. I leave the idea in a wicket basket on the doorstep, in hopes that someone will raise it as their own.
I hate to unload on the same struggling media outlet twice in one week, in this case the formerly respected Burlington Free Press, but this is outrageous.
Notice anything funky about the byline?
Yeah, “Reporter Assisted by AI.”
It’s one of TWO articles on Tuesday’s front page attributed to Beth McDermott “assisted by AI.”
That’s two out of three stories on the front page, the third being a national story from the USA TODAY content farm.
I hadn’t noticed this before, because I can’t remember the last time I picked up a print copy of that rag. But apparently it’s been going on for a few months at least, and it’s deeply disturbing on two significant levels.
The Vermont Political Observer. 