Tag Archives: Bennington Banner

Theme from “Jaws” heard in southern Vermont newsrooms

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Looks like the Vermont journalism scene is about to take another step into the abyss. Paul Heintz has a story on the Seven Days website, headlined by a bit of consolidation at the Brattleboro Reformer and Bennington Banner: both papers will now share a single managing editor, Michelle Karas. (When asked if she could handle both papers, her less than reassuring response was “I’m hoping so.”)

To me, though, the more important — and more worrying — news was several paragraphs down in Heintz’ piece: DigitalFirst Media, the corporate parent of both papers, wants to get out of the newspaper business. It’s in the process of selling its entire portfolio of more than 100 papers nationwide. It would prefer to unload the whole shebang in a single transaction, although it may wind up selling things piecemeal.

Newspaper Rd. Dead EndDFM’s stash includes such notable properties as the San Jose Mercury News, Salt Lake Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer Press, and Denver Post. Our southern Vermont dailies are afterthoughts by comparison.

And they are about to be thoroughly buffeted by the winds of corporate change.

Possible buyers include a passel of private equity firms, many of which have no experience in newspapers. That’s bad enough, but even worse are the experienced operators said to be in the running. They include Gannett, currently engaged in a slow strangulation of the Burlington Free Press; and GateHouse Media, whose name is poison in Massachusetts.

GateHouse is the creation of another private-equity firm, Fortress Investment Group. Fortress has seen its share of financial trouble in recent years; it nearly went bankrupt in the market crash of 2008. This caused it to default on a huge loan deal to fund construction of the athletes’ village for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. That forced the City of Vancouver to pony up $450 million (Cdn) to get the village built.

Oh well, you know what they say about eggs and omelets.

Even as it has struggled, Fortress has built a newspaper entity that seems to break all the rules of business. According to the Boston Globe, GateHouse “has never made an annual profit as a public company,” and in 2013 filed for bankruptcy “under the weight of nearly $1.2 billion in debt.”

Even so, Fortress finagled the finances in a way that allowed GateHouse to scoop up 33 more New England newspapers. After which, it immediately imposed draconian staff cuts. Poynter Institute media business analyst Rick Edmonds says GateHouse has a reputation as a “bottom-line, lean operator” that isn’t squeamish about making cuts. “In a case like this, they’ve probably looked at the numbers and said, ‘We can squeeze more [savings] out of this,’” he said.

Through its holding companies, Fortress controls “nearly every newspaper south of Boston,” and also “dominates Boston’s western suburbs.”

Brattleboro and Bennington, just a hop and a skip away. Looking at the two behemoths said to be in the running to buy DigitalFirst, I’d say GateHouse makes a lot more sense than Gannett. And if Gannett winds up buying all of DFM, I wouldn’t be surprised if it spun off the two Vermont dailies, which are teeny-tiny by Gannett standards but right in GateHouse’s comfort zone.

Either way, look for more slashing in southern Vermont’s already sad print-media scene. Which is a real shame; the healthier Vermont media properties, VTDigger, Seven Days, and VPR, all have a clear northern Vermont slash statewide focus. Very seldom does southern Vermont show up on their radar.

There is one thin ray of hope in Heintz’ story. As the Brattleboro Reformer has declined, he notes that an independent weekly, The Commons, has expanded its circulation in recent years.

This may be the next mutation of journalism: a Seven Days approach, including a single weekly print edition and a Web presence with more frequent postings. To be sure, there’s no sign that daily papers will do anything other than continue to diminish in size and quality.

A heapin’ helpin’ of credulity at the Bennington Banner

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The toughtest task for a daily newspaper — especially a small, cash-strapped one — is to fill the Monday morning news hole. Little or no staff over the weekend; a shortage of easy stories, like public meetings, official releases, and news conferences. So I can sympathize with the folks at the Bennington Banner for seizing on a story with a grabby header: Vermont ranks near the bottom in a national ranking of “parental input” into their children’s education.

Or, as the Banner ineptly put it:

Vermont recently ranked 45th out of the 51 states and Washington D.C. in a report designed to rank states based on how much power parents have over their childrens’ education.

Hey, congratulations to Puerto Rico! I guess they achieved statehood while nobody was looking.

There’s also the small matter of the double-plural form of “children.” But that’s not why I’m writing.

Why I’m writing is that the Banner swallowed, hook line and sinker, a bogus “study” from an ersatz “reform” group, the Center for Education Reform, which is part of the American Legislative Exchange Center (ALEC) web of innocuously-named astroturf organizations. And whose governing board is loaded with high-profile proponents of for-profit and charter schools.

If the Banner had spent two minutes on The Google, it could have uncovered that extremely relevant information, instead of regurgitating CER’s pregurgitated propaganda.

But really, you didn’t even need to go that far to realize that something was rotten in Denmark. Just take a gander at CER’s four — count ’em, four — criteria for evaluating parental input, thoughtfully entitled the Parent Power Index:

School choice, charter schools, online learning, and teacher quality.

Okay, the first two are gimmies. The only form of parental “input” recognized by CER is whether parents can choose their kids’ schools. Which kinda-sorta ignores the most important kinds of parental input available at every public school: teacher conferences, interactions with administrators, school board meetings, and school board elections.

See, public schools are, well, “public.” And members of the public can have just about as much input as they choose to have. Most teachers and administrators welcome parental involvement in their children’s education. And in my years covering school board meetings, I’ve seen countless examples of boards bending over backwards to accommodate the squeaky wheels among their constituencies.

If your idea of “parental input” is limited to one single act of choice, not unlike going to Walmart to buy a new microwave, then I feel sorry for your children. But that’s how CER sees it.

The other two criteria sound more benign, but not when you read the fine print.

“Teacher quality” isn’t a measurement of, oh, the actual quality of a state’s teachers. It amounts to this: Are there state-mandated annual teacher evaluations? Are tenure and retention tied to those evaluations?

In other words, have the teachers’ unions been whipped into subservience?

As for the fourth, “online learning,” CER advocates the availability of “a full-time online caseload.” Which is great, if you want your kid’s education supplied by the University of Phoenix or some other for-profit scam artist.

I’m not saying there’s no place for online learning in K-12 education. But is it really one of the four pillars of “parental input”? No freakin’ way.

In short, this CER report is pure ALEC-style horse hockey. And the Banner should be ashamed of itself for uncritically serving it up to its readers.