Category Archives: The media

The Wheel Spins Again at VTDigger

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Last week, VTDigger announced a handful of “key hires and promotions.” Which sounds like progress, but these kinds of stories never mention that income also means outgo. Some people either left or were let go. It’s a familiar tale at Digger. But before I get to that, a necessary caveat.

VTDigger is a remarkable success story, and an absolutely indispensable outlet for news about Vermont policy and politics. Journalism jobs in Vermont have plummeted by more than 75% in the last quarter-century. With the demise of enterprises like the capital bureaus of the Burlington Free Press and the Times Argus/Rutland Herald, the near-demise of the Associated Press’ Vermont bureau, and the partial withdrawals of Vermont Public and Seven Days, VTDigger is the only outlet providing daily coverage of the Statehouse and state government. If you’re interested in Vermont news, you should be tossing ’em a few shekels as your resources allow.

That said, the organization is not without its flaws, and its financial future is not exactly secure. A July 2024 story in Seven Days reported that Digger’s corporate parent, the Vermont Journalism Trust, had lost a combined $1.7 million in the preceding two years, which led to staffing cuts and pressure to find even more savings. Its finances largely depend on reader support, which is still not a proven strategy in this brave new shrunken industry. A three-year, $900,000 grant from the American Journalism Trust was supposed to give Digger the resources to fully develop its business and fundraising operations. The grant award coincided with the onset of the Covid epidemic, which surely had a substantial effect on VJT’s development plans. But now the money is gone and financial development remains very much a work in progress.

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News You Should View (Or Listen To)

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The title of this weekly feature is never entirely accurate, since I often include audio content that you really can’t “view.”. But I’m amending the title this week because we have a really great audio piece in the leadoff spot. And, for those monitoring their Trump-related consumption, you’ll find a relatively moderate number of stories about That Manbaby in the White House.

A day in the life. From Vermont Public, a tremendous 20-minute audio documentary about a rare animal in modern times: the do-it-all rural primary care doctor. Producer Anna Van Dine’s voice only appears at the beginning and the end. In between, your narrator is the documentary’s subject: Dr. Bob Primeau, the only primary care doc in the Northeast Kingdom town of Island Pond. This must have taken a ton of time and effort, but it gives you a real sense of what it’s like to be a doctor, and a patient, in rural Vermont.

Also what it’s like to be a cog in a machine. “These days, it feels like the health care system has begun to disregard the most essential part of what it means to be a doctor,” Primeau says, citing ever-more-stringent demands for data entry that takes time away from stuff like talking to your patients. I spent many years working in public radio (never in Vermont), and the opportunity to produce this kind of content is what made the job so challenging and so rewarding.

Vermont’s health care system, teetering on the brink. VTDigger and Seven Days each delivered vital stories about financial troubles in our health care system. They spotlight different aspects of an issue, which is the kind of coverage we’ve largely lost in our teeny-tiny media ecosystem. We used to get a lot more of this when there were several strong outlets competing with each other, and we rarely get it anymore. Digger’s Peter D’Auria focused on Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont, which (a) insures roughly one-third of all Vermonters, (b) is the only in-state health insurer, and (c) has spent most of its financial reserves to cover a surge in claims.

Seven Days’ Colin Flanders, meanwhile, took a broader but equally sobering view of our health care landscape.

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News You Should View: Trump-Free Edition

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Well hey now, got us a bumper crop of content worth your time without mentioning the big ol’ manbaby in the White House. Yes, It Can Happen! And we’ll begin with not one, but two stories from VTDigger. It’s hard to imagine where we’d be without Digger, what with the decimation of the rest of our news media. So let’s celebrate the things Digger does well and encourage them to do more.

Official misconduct in the Fern Feather case. I mentioned this in an earlier post, but I want to shine a spotlight on Peter D’Auria’s deep dive into the prosecution of Seth Brunell for the murder of Fern Feather — a prosecution that ended with a defendant-friendly plea bargain triggered by police misconduct. D’Auria’s story chronicles all the ways in which this case was mishandled by police and prosecutors. You come away from it feeling mad as hell, and wondering if Feather’s gender identity played any role in how authorities screwed this thing up six ways from Sunday.

Exiting prison is a “bureaucratic morass.” In an example of the routine Statehouse coverage that no other media outlet provides, Digger’s Ethan Weinstein reported on a role-playing simulation of the process of exiting prison and re-entering society. The system “forces individuals to jump through hoops that many of us in this room would struggle through,” said none other than Corrections Commissioner Nicholas Deml, the person in charge of administering the system. I saw no other reports on this simulation which, in a just world, ought to trigger a thorough overhaul of a system that surely must contribute to high recidivism rates. Probably could also apply to social service programs designed without any input from those who have to jump through an obstacle course’s worth of officially-designed hoops to receive the help they need. “Lived experience,” anyone?

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News You Should View: Mostly About Trump Again, Sorry

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Well, I thought I had a nice varied collection of stories for this week’s Vermont media roundup. But heck, five of the eight nominees have something to do with how the excesses of Donald Trump are reverberating here in our B.L.S.

Apologies, but that’s the world we’re living in and my starship is on the fritz.

A stark warning about Trump from someone who’s been right more than most. Journalist David Goodman hosts “Vermont Conversation,” a blandly-named weekly show on Radio Vermont/WDEV available afterward as a podcast under the auspices of VTDigger. This week’s guest was author and Dartmouth prof Jeff Sharlet, who has spent years chronicling the dark corners of the far right. He has foreseen the persistence of the Trump phenomenon, its return to power, and its authoritarian intent. He told Goodman that he and his colleagues have “all been surprised by the speed with which it’s happening,” and said that the opposition has a lot of work to do.

Sharlet said he’s seen “a lot more people tuning out than in the first Trump administration. And I want to say to people, you don’t have that privilege.”

Echoes of fascism in a small rural library. In the latest installment of her podcast “Rumble Strip,” Erica Heilman takes us to the Haskell Free Library in Derby Line, VT and Stanstead, QC for an audio accounting of authoritarianism’s jackbooted footprint. The feds’ crackdown on the security-imperiling cross-border traffic at the library, announced after a deliberately provocative visit from dog-killer and Trump functionary Kristi Noem has left both communities shaken. For no reason whatsoever except that our federal government feels compelled to act like a bully.

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News You Should View: Podcasts & Chicken Soup

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This week’s edition of NYSV is a bit heavy on audio content and what we might call “human interest stories” — the inspiring features that are a staple of print journalism. Not the most earth-shattering content, but it’s an important aspect of a balanced news diet, especially when our plates are so often loaded down with heavy, indigestible fare.

There are quite a few podcasts in Vermont. The best are worth including in your regular rotation, and the others occasionally rise to that level. We’ve got some great examples this week, starting with (I think) the most gifted audio reporter in the state, Erica Heilman.

“Health Insurance is Hard.” That’s the title of Heilman’s latest “Rumble Strip” podcast. It’s more of an impressionist study in the frustrations of health care. And you can tell she’s an artist because she manages to get through an 18-minute story about bureaucratic hell without ever invoking the word “Kafkaesque.”

You could say this is about her friend Justin Lander’s effort to get health care without going bankrupt — or crazy. But it’s not a narrative. Heilman weaves together Justin’s words, exasperating voice mail, real live customer service staffers providing no actual customer service, and extensive use of the wallpaper “music” that serenades you while you’re on hold. It’s meant to be calming, but in Heilman’s piece it manages to be infuriating. Bernie was right: Medicare for all. (Bonus! The podcast opens with a rough-hewn but completely apropos “jingle” for her sponsor, East Hill Tree Farm.)

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News You Should View: Yeah, Most of It Is About Trump

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More and more of our Vermont news space is taken up with the local/state ramifications of Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy, the rule of law, and the government itself. So much so that unrelated stories are sometimes getting short shrift. More on that in my next post, or at least that’s the plan. In the meantime, please enjoy the panoply of bad news that Phil Scott thinks we should stop fretting about.

Counting the Trump damage done. Going to start with not a story, but an ongoing data collection effort. Vermont Public is tracking federal funding losses in our state in an easily digestible list. This is not the “rhetoric” that our governor insists we’re wasting time on; these are actual cutbacks with tangible effects. You’ve read about most of these if you follow the news, but it’s good to have them all in one place. The most recent entry is a lost federal grant for a local history training program, which was mentioned in a recent post and will make another appearance later in this missive.

Environmental Law Center “threatened on two fronts.” From the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News, a story about concern at the Vermont Law and Graduate School about potential Trump threats to the school’s Environmental Law Center. They’re feeling the heat, between Trump’s attacks on major law firms and educational institutions and his assault on anything that smacks of climate change or other inconvenient truths.

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Do Something.

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Like many disheartened liberals, I almost completely withdrew from following national politics after the November election. I just didn’t have the capacity to deal with a flood tide of bad news about what Donald Trump was going to do.

I still spend less time consuming national news than I used to. But I can no longer enjoy the luxury of abstinence. Things are just too bad and too consequential.

The above passage is from Chapter 24 of the Book of Proverbs. I came upon it while tracking down the famous quotation, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing.” It’s usually and wrongly attributed to Edmund Burke; as with many famous quotations, its actual origin is murky at best.

That sentence started rattling around my head as I was writing about the many ways in which Trump is already having a corrosive effect right here in Vermont, and about Gov. Phil Scott’s refusal to acknowledge the harm being done or speak out against it.

The last straw was the Friday, April 11 edition of the Rachel Maddow Show, in which she went deep on the crisis in the Social Security Administration the damage Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is doing at the Department of Health and Human Services.

So. I decided to do something.

Not just one thing. I decided to do one thing every day. Indefinitely.

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VTDigger Does Phil Scott a Big Fat Photographic Favor

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This is a social media post from VTDigger spotlighting the top story in Friday’s “Final Reading,” about Vermont politicians taking a stand against a U.S. House-passed voter ID bill that would make it harder, especially for women, to register to vote. Great, fine, a nice little space-filler on Friday afternoon.

The photo features Democratic Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas and Republican Gov. Phil Scott. (The photo also sits just below the headline of “Final Reading” itself.) Here’s the problem: Copeland Hanzas is quoted in the article, but Scott does not appear. At all. No quote, not even a passing mention. In fact, not a single Republican is quoted or mentioned, while Democratic U.S. Rep. Becca Balint is quoted and Democratic Attorney General Charity Clark is mentioned.

But you combine the photo with the headline’s reference to “Vermont Leaders” panning the bill, and you come away with the distinct impression that Phil Scott is on board with this effort.

He is not. At least not publicly. But you wouldn’t realize that unless you read the article carefully and kept track of who is actually quoted.

Most people don’t even click the link, they only see the social media post. Of those who do click the link, relatively few pay close enough attention to notice the presence or absence of one “Vermont Leader.”

By using this photo, VTDigger did Phil Scott a big fat favor in terms of bolstering his “moderate” bona fides, a favor he did nothing to earn.

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News You Should View: Echoes of Trump

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At the beginning of every week, I wonder if I’m going to find enough content to fill out this feature. So far, I get more than I can really include. Even in our sadly diminished media ecosystem, there’s still a lot of material worth checking out. And here we go…

“An enormously dangerous moment.” The latest edition of Mark Johnson’s “802 News” podcast is a short but brutally impactful interview with journalist and author Garrett Graff about the Trump administration so far. Graff outlines twin crises unfolding before our eyes: “A quick unraveling of many of the foundations of our smooth and functioning democracy and our smooth and functioning federal government.” Trump is undermining both, and either could lead us “toward a future catastrophe.” It’s well worth the 15 minutes. (Available on your podcast player of choice or via the WCAX-TV website.)

A Trump triple threat. The latest Montpelier Bridge contains not one, not two, but three articles describing the potentially devastating impacts of the Trump regime on the state and local levels. Matthew Thomas writes that Vermont is likely to see a two-thirds cut in flood relief funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Fiona Sullivan reports on federal cuts in child care and food aid for schools, and Phil Dodd has what should be a positive story about a plan to convert the Washington County Mental Health Services building in Montpelier into affordable apartments — but the whole plan depends on securing federal grant funds. Extra bonus: WCMHS is also worried about potential federal cuts. This all underscores Garrett Graff’s second big point: “Americans really don’t understand the myriad ways the federal government underpins the safety, security and stability of our daily lives.” Trump fucks around, we find out.

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News You Should View: There’s Some Good Stuff Out There

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Not much of a subtitle, sorry. More of a restatement of this weekly feature’s origin: Our media landscape may be vastly reduced from its former glory days, but there’s still some good stuff being produced that’s worth your time. This week’s haul…

Quite Literally Ripped from the Headlines. You won’t often find a summer theater company cited in this space, but one of the Weston Playhouse’s 2025 offerings is “A Distinct Society,” a new play set in the Haskell Free Library that centers around its unique straddle-the-border location. From the description: “When an Iranian father and his daughter, separated by the international border, start using the library as a meeting place, the denizens of this quiet sanctuary find their lives suddenly full of excitement and consequence.” Presumably the play was written before the recent crackdown at Haskell, but it seems all the more relevant right now. Excitement and consequence indeed. Performances from August 20-31.

Burlington Dems Get Fast and Loose with the Chats. For the second week in a row, Seven Days enters the honor roll for the kind of story that made its reputation: A public records request that uncovered extensive texts among Democratic members of City Council during 2024 meetings, including a lot of chatty, gossipy stuff and more than a few close brushes with open meetings law. The Dems, who have a working majority on Council, would often discuss tactics amongst themselves while taking part in a public meeting. Council President Ben Traverse says texting is “simply part of modern government,” but he also told his fellow Dems to cool their jets after Seven Days filed its public records request. Technically they’re not violating the law because there were only six Democrats on the 12-member Council but Independent Mark Barlow is a Dem in all but name, so if the letter of the law hasn’t been violated, the spirit of the law has gotten a damn good rogering.

Embezzlement in Hardwick? Really now. The Hardwick Gazette reports that a local woman embezzled thousands of dollars from three local nonprofit organizations. The victims included the East Hardwick Fire District (which has been reimbursed by the alleged thief), NEK Arts, and the Hardwick Downtown Partnership. The total involved was less than $20,000 all told, but you might expect that organizations in and around Hardwick would be a bit more careful after the infamous $1.6 million embezzlement case involving the Hardwick Electric Department. It’s been a while, but still. (Discloure: I serve on the board of Northeast Kingdom Public Journalism, which operates the Gazette. But I would have listed this story in any case.)

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