Tag Archives: Burlington Free Press

Return of the Ghost of Deals With the Devil Past

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When I was reading The Manchester Journal’s account of an ICE detainee being whisked away to a prison — oops, my mistake, a “processing center” — hundreds of miles away, it rang a faint bell in the back of my mind.

As The Journal reported, Davona Williams had been moved without notice to the North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, Michigan.

North Lake… Michigan… why does that sound familiar?

Well, it happens to be a repurposed version of the North Lake Correctional Facility, operated by GEO Group, the for-profit incarceration giant. When North Lake was operating as a prison, the state of Vermont contracted with it to house hundreds of Vermont inmates. It’s located in what can fairly be described as the middle of nowhere; Baldwin is a town of 863 located roughly halfway between Grand Rapids and Traverse City. I can tell you as a native Michigander, that’s deep in the Michigan countryside. Not exactly an easy trip for a family wanting to visit their incarcerated relative. (A 13-hour drive from Montpelier, in fact.)

And that’s where Davona Williams now finds herself. Wonderful.

But there’s more, much more, to tell about the grubby history of the North Lake Name Your Penitentiary.

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Back to the N.Y.S.V.E.C.U.: Dear Beth McDermott, Blink Twice if You Need Help

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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.

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Welcome to the N.Y.S.V.E.C.U., Part 1: I Don’t Know What This Is, But It Ain’t Journalism

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Sheesh, you go out of town for a weekend, and the media beat goes a little bit haywire. Lots to get to, so much so that we’ve entered the News You Should View Extended Cinematic Universe. The customary edition of NYSV will follow, but we have a couple of special editions to get to first.

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The Burlington Free Press needs to die.

I say this reluctantly, because it does still employ a handful of hard-working reporters. Nothing more than a handful, to judge by its Newsroom Directory, which lists six — count ’em and weep — SIX reporters laboring in the corporate-owned sweatshop of a formerly great newspaper.

Six. [Shakes head, mutters under breath]

Which means that in order to fill the Free Press’ greatly-reduced news hole, they have to rely heavily on “content” cranked out by Gannett functionaries spread far and wide. These pieces of Hamburger Helper “journalism” are disposable clickbait at best, an insult to the reader’s intelligence at worst. And boy howdy, I have rarely seen a piece as insulting as this one.

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News You Should Have Been Able to View But Weren’t Given the Chance

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My weekly roundup of the best of Vermont journalism will again be posted late, most likely Wednesday. The delay in posting is because of the Legislature holding its final vote on H.454, the education reform bill, on Monday. Had to leave the decks cleared for that. And before I can get to the best of Vermont journalism, I have to begin with a massive media fail that reflects our sadly depleted news ecosystem.

Last week, a House-Senate conference committee was meeting to try to hash out a compromise education reform bill. The six conferees (three Senate, three House) met multiple times. Every meeting was warned in advance and was open to the public. And we got virtually no coverage at all of their highly impactful deliberations.

Now, I know legislative hearings can be a big fat drag. You can spend hours on an uncomfortable chair, sharing a tiny room with too many people, and wind up with nothing at all to report.

But this wasn’t your average legislative hearing, not at all.

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Hey, We’ve Got an Unrepentant White Nationalist Running for… Get This… Justice of the Peace (UPDATED)

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This is a screenshot from the ballot in Berkshire, Vermont, a small, rural community in Franklin County near the Canadian border. There are a total of six candidates listed for six openings for Justice of the Peace so, absenting a vigorous write-in campaign, all six are going to win.

And that’s a damn shame for the good folks of Berkshire, because the last name on the list should be familiar for some unpleasant reasons. Republican nominee Ryan Roy has a past that would make him appear uniquely unqualified for any position that involves “justice” or “peace.”

*UPDATE. Roy appears on the Secretary of State’s 2023-24 list of Justices of the Peace for Berkshire, so apparently he’s running for… re-election? I’m seeking confirmation of 2022 election results. If he’s a sitting J.P., this is even worse.

Roy has received extensive coverage in the press for, among other things, being identified as a member of the neo-Nazi Patriot Front and having been an active participant in the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Here he is holding a torch and lookin’ big mad in a Vice News documentary about the rally.

Yeah, well, okay then. Justice of the Peace, got it.

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The Free Press Isn’t Even a Newspaper Anymore

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I moved to Vermont just in time to catch the tail end of the Burlington Free Press‘ long reign as the state’s leading newspaper. It was a full-sized daily with a deep and wide-ranging pool of journalists including three experienced reporters covering state politics and policy, which made the Freeps an indispensable resource for anyone interested in such things.

That institution is long gone, and things have just gotten worse and worse, sadder and sadder. The latest nail in the Free Press’ coffin is its coverage of the Burlington Police Department’s “roll-playing scenario” in which a bunch of high school students were terrified by someone pretending to be a masked gunman.

Or should I say the paper’s disgraceful non-coverage. Because so far, the Free Press’ only mention of the incident, which has been the talk of the town ever since, was a story written by a USA TODAY reporter phoning it in from some other part of the country.

That’s it. The Burlington Free Press is dead.

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There’s Probably a Humanitarian Disaster Happening, But the Judge Said It Was Okay

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Truly bizarre happenings over the last 24 hours, even by the bizarre standards of this seemingly never-ending crisis of housing and homelessness. We’ll get to the judge’s decision allowing Gov. Phil Scott’s ridiculous policy to go forward, but first a note from an official in the city of Burlington, timestamped 4:45 p.m. yesterday:

There are 192+ folks outside in Chittenden County; 0-5 motel rooms available.

This was after the Scott administration had decided to close its four temporary shelters on schedule Friday morning. And almost four hours before the administration reversed course, announcing at around 8:30 p.m. that the Burlington shelter would reopen at least for Friday and Saturday night.

I guess they decided it was a bad look to close a shelter in the face of a severe winter storm with close to 200 people known to be unsheltered in Vermont’s most prosperous county. Too often, it seems as though administration policy is designed to be cruel until the optics get too bad, and then they change course just enough to limit the damage. So they opened the shelter unexpectedly at 8:30 p.m. How many more people could have accessed the shelter if it had never closed in the first place? How many didn’t find out the shelter was available at all or couldn’t make their way to Cherry Street that late in the evening? Or, God have mercy on our souls, how many had already found a refrigerator box or an overpass or other makeshift shelter and didn’t want to lose their spot?

The good thing, from the administration’s point of view, is that this is all happening on a weekend when our news media are essentially unstaffed. As of Saturday afternoon I’d seen no coverage from VTDigger, Vermont Public or Seven Days. Don’t even ask about the Free Press, whose top story right now is “Chittenden County Irish Pub Closes.” There’s a brief item on WCAX-TV’s website announcing the shelter’s reopening, but that’s about all.

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The Free Press Takes Another Step Away from Tangibility

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A sad but inevitable day for the dwindling cadre of Burlington Free Press readers, whoever they are. The “newspaper,” if that is indeed the proper term by now, has announced that as of April 1 (no foolin’), it will no longer deliver paper editions to subscribers’ homes, instead depending on the tender mercies of Louis DeJoy’s US Postal Service to get the papers to your doorstep mailbox within probably mere days of publication.

(As a subscriber to a paper that went to mail delivery a few years ago, I can tell you that this is a road to newspaper irrelevance. We hardly ever get the Times Argus on the day of printing. There’s often a gap of two or three — or four or six or more — days between publication and delivery.)

The announcement of the change, penned by the Freeps’ Dinosaur-in-Chief Aki Soga, contained a goodly quantity of desperate word salad meant to obscure the harsh reality of the business and make this seem like a good thing.

The reality is this: Free Press readership is cratering. I doubt that there are enough print subscribers to justify anyone’s time covering ever-longer delivery routes with ever-fewer paying customers.

I hadn’t realized how bad the carnage was until I read Seven Days’ writeup, which includes some extinction-level statistics:

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The Free Press Did Not Censor Doonesbury. The Truth is Much Sadder.

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A couple Sundays ago, the Doonesbury comic strip took us to an imaginary Florida high school classroom where a teacher was sharing some uncomfortable truths about the Civil War as some of her students pondered reporting her apostasy to the authorities.

The strip did not appear in Gannett newspapers across the country, including the Burlington Free Press. Which raised a kerfuffle about censorship: Did our biggest national newspaper chain remove the strip out of concern for the tender sensibilities of southern readers? Were Free Press editors on board with the decision or were they forced to go along with a corporate kill order?

Well, no. The truth is a lot less scandalous, and a lot more depressing about the fallen state of print journalism in general and the comics in particular.

Truth is, Gannett canceled a whole bunch of comics including Doonesbury six months ago, almost certainly for budgetary reasons. The Free Press hadn’t run Doonesbury since last September. Nobody noticed. And that’s just sad.

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Adventures in Serial Journalism, Dirt Cheap Job Search Edition

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This post is about three very different attempts to cover the same story. But before we pick over the bones, let’s address the meat of the matter. For whatever reason, the Scott administration is not only rushing its search for a new education secretary, it’s spent a shockingly small amount of money on the task.

Seven Days’ Alison Novak got the goods, revealing that the administration has spent a measly $495 on a search now scheduled to close, um, tomorrow. By comparison, she noted, school districts routinely invest 20 times that much on a basic search for a superintendent, and often spend far more.

The only flaw in Novak’s story was the headline, written in the form of a question: Is Vermont Doing Enough to Find the Right Leader for Its Education Agency? Remarkably timid header for a story that clearly identifies the answer as “Fuck, no!”

I mean, they posted the opening on professional job sites and that’s about it. Maybe they also taped a photocopied listing to the agency’s front door (complete with little “Contact Us” tabs at the bottom), but whatever, it’s simply pathetic.

Okay, there’s the substance. Now let’s take a somewhat speculative walk down the Memory Lane of journalism.

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