Tag Archives: Center for Community News

A Tactical Retreat for a Local Paper

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Following rapidly on the heels of The Brandon Reporter’s suspension of activity comes word from The Hinesburg Record of a move designed to save it from extinction.The Record has announced it will discontinue its monthly print edition and pursue a digital-only strategy as a weekly.

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?

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News You Will No Longer Be Able to View

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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.

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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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