Tag Archives: Rutland Herald

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

1 Reply

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.

Continue reading →

News You Should View: Mostly About Trump Again, Sorry

3 Replies

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.

Continue reading →

Hey Wallingford, Your Trustee Is an Absentee

2 Replies

Back in March 2021, Bruce Moreton was elected to a three-year term on the Mill River Unified Union School Board (MRUUSD, pronounced exactly as spelled) as a representative of the town of Wallingford. Six months later, by all appearances, he moved to Rutland.

He has, again by all appearances, lived there ever since.

Ya like that, Wallingford?

This story comes to us by way of the Rutland Herald, which reported on February 16 that the Wallingford Board of Civil Authority had removed Moreton from the town’s voter checklist.

He’s ineligible to vote in Wallingford. Will he have to give up his seat on the school board?

The MRUUSD includes Clarendon, Shrewsbury, Tinmouth, and Wallingford. Each town gets to elect its own Board members. Clarendon and Wallingford have four seats apiece, Shrewsbury and Tinmouth each have one. Rutland is conspicuous by its absence.

Continue reading →

Well, Digger Has Belatedly Removed That Dwyer Essay

1 Reply

Three days after it posted a thinly-veiled endorsement of Molly Gray by an advisor to the Molly Gray campaign, VTDigger has thought better of it and taken it down.

Not sure why they did it, but to judge from the above Editor’s Note, lawyers may have been involved.

Ouch.

For those just joining us, on August 3 VTDigger posted a commentary by Carolyn Dwyer, longtime Pat Leahy consigliere and advisor to the Gray campaign, that laid out the attributes Dwyer wants to see in our next U.S. Representative. Those attributes closely tracked with Gray’s own biography. Dwyer also tried to posit Becca Balint as an “ideological warrior,” which is laughable considering that Balint has spent the past six years in Senate caucus leadership. In that position her first duty is to keep the caucus united, not impose her own policy vision. And the biographical note accompanying the essay failed to disclose Dwyer’s role in the Gray campaign.

I wrote up this adventure in journalistic carelessness soon after it happened. The next day, Digger rewrote the biographical note to include a reference to the Dwyer/Gray relationship.

Which only made posting the piece look worse, because it was a tacit admission that Dwyer was, in fact, promoting her candidate on Digger’s commentary page. That’s a no-no, and Digger has apparently realized that only three days late.

Continue reading →

What We’ve Lost

1 Reply

“Why doesn’t the press cover __________?” is a question I’m often asked. There are a few answers, depending on context. Sometimes the press has covered it, but not as extensively or impactfully as you’d like. Sometimes there’s no coverage because it’s not that much of a story. But the most accurate answer is, “WHAT press?”

We all know the media business has shrunk, but I don’t think we realize exactly how far the shrinkage has gone or how deeply it affects the quality and quantity of news.

Go back, say, ten years. Not that long ago. The Associated Press had three reporters. The Burlington Free Press had at least two reporters at the Statehouse and covering state politics. The Times Argus and Rutland Herald had a three-person Statehouse bureau. Seven Days had three, and they’d deploy more if the need arose. VPR had two. WCAX and WPTZ each had a deeply experienced Statehouse/politics reporter full-time, and WVNY/WFFF usually had a young reporter on the beat most of the time.

On the other hand, VTDigger was barely more than a glimmer in Anne Galloway’s eye.

Well, actually, it was Galloway by herself, working her ass off. No time for glimmering.

Now, Digger has three Statehouse reporters plus issue specialists who frequent the Statehouse when their beats are involved. So that’s an improvement over the good old days. But look at the rest of the landscape.

Continue reading →

A Gloomy Day for Vermont Newspapers

1 Reply

There were two pieces of bad news on the state’s media front today — one substantive, the other more symbolic.

The latter is the departure of Rob Mitchell from the Rutland Herald and Barre Montpelier Times Argus. The former is the fully-consummated merger of Burlington Free Press owner Gannett with GateHouse, forming the largest (by far) newspaper chain in the country. The combined entity, now saddled with $1.8 billion in debt and facing continued declines in circulation and ad revenue, is set to go on a cost-cutting spree that could eliminate more than 10 percent of its workforce.

Mitchell had continued to serve as general manager of the papers after their 2016 sale to Pennsylvania-based Sample Newspapers. His resignation marks the end of more than 80 years of Mitchell family involvement in the two papers.

If he’s being in any way forced out by the new owners, he’d doubtless keep that to himself. He did say that “I started to realize that I wasn’t growing in this role anymore,” which could be taken to mean that he didn’t see a future under outside ownership.

The Mitchells’ tenure wasn’t perfect, but they were at least local owners answerable to their own communities. Sample, whose properties include a few dailies and a lot of weeklies and free shoppers, has no such ties. So far, its tenure has not seen noticeable cuts — but neither has there been any tangible sign of strengthening the Herald and Times Argus, which have been bare-bones operations for years.

The Gannett/GateHouse deal creates a true industry monster that will control 18 percent of America’s dailies. Ken Doctor, news industry analyst who writes the Newsonomics column for the Nieman Foundation, expects that one in eight G/G employees will be out of a job by the end of 2020. And that’s on top of a fresh round of layoffs expected to come even before the GateHouse bloodletting begins.

Continue reading →

State business grant gets flushed down the crapper

5 Replies

Bad news from down Bennington way, courtesy of The Banner:

With a two-paragraph note Thursday afternoon, a major Bennington employer for decades — Energizer — confirmed that the local factory will close.

Well, there go some nice manufacturing jobs in a community that’s taken more than its share of body blows. How many jobs is apparently a mystery; Energizer didn’t say, and The Banner couldn’t immediately find out. In 2015, the factory was downsized to an undisclosed extent (companies have learned to conceal the grim details of cutbacks and closings); at the time, per VTDigger, it employed “between 100 and 250 people.”

Sen. Dick Sears of Bennington learned of the plant’s closure — after the fact — in an email from a corporate stooge who offered hollow words of praise for “the years of productive engagement we have had with you and your office.”

That “productive engagement,” by the way, included a Vermont Training Program grant issued in April 2018 — only a year and a half ago. VTP provides taxpayer funds to cover up to 50 percent of training new workers or teaching new skills to existing workers.

I’m not sure, but I’m gonna guess here that Vermont had something a little more… uh, permanent in mind when it gave Energizer those dollars. Instead, the company didn’t even bother to inform state government until after it had publicly announced the plant closure.

Nice.

Continue reading →

Minter gets media boost

Leave a reply

Didn’t see that coming.

The Burlington Free Press has endorsed Sue Minter.

As have the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus.

Both are surprising; the latter because the ex-Mitchell Family papers are published in (1) the heartland of Vermont Republicanism and (2) Phil Scott’s home turf respectively. I mean, c’mon, Thunder Road.

The former because, well, I thought the Free Press’ endorsement of David Zuckerman sent clear signals that the paper would split its ticket and go with Scott.

Instead, we have the state’s three biggest newspapers going with Minter.

Continue reading →

Arrivederci, Mitchells

5 Replies

Big splashy headline in my morning paper: “Mitchells Agree to Sell Times Argus.” Actually, they’re selling the whole megillah: the Times Argus, Rutland Herald and associated print and online media entities.

You see that headline and you fear the worst: a big national chain like Gannett that’d commodify and multiplatform the papers into mush, or a low-budget media outfit that would strip-mine the papers into irrelevance.

But no, the Mitchell Empire is being sold to a guy. One guy, not some faraway corporation. The guy is Reade Brower, who seemingly owns just about every newspaper in the state of Maine. From a 2015 account of his purchase of MaineToday Media, which cemented his dominant position in Maine journalism:

MaineToday Media publishes the print editions of the Maine Sunday Telegram, the Portland Press Herald, the Morning Sentinel in Waterville, the Kennebec Journal in Augusta, and The Coastal Journal in Bath. MaineToday Media also operates the news websites MaineToday.com, PressHerald.com, and CentralMaine.com.

Brower, a longtime resident of Camden, currently owns The Free Press and Courier Publications – which publishes the Courier-Gazette in Rockland, The Camden Herald, and The Republican Journal in Belfast.

That passage, you should know, appeared in The Free Press — owned by Reade Brower. And there’s the rub: when you do a Google search for “Reade Brower,” you get a whole lot of links to articles from Brower-owned media operations.

As far as I can tell, which isn’t far, Brower is no Sheldon Adelson. He didn’t wade into the newa business to further his own interests. He built his empire bit by bit, and his origins are in printing and marketing, not casinos or fossil fuels. He seems to have a legitimate desire to preserve print journalism and find ways for it to survive the modern era.

Continue reading →

At my daily paper, questions are many and answers few

8 Replies

You know what I think? I think daily newspapers, even in this era of shrinkage, have an obligation to their “consumers” and the communities they serve. It’s an obligation more honored in the breach than in the observance, as a smart guy once said.

In my opinion, daily papers have a duty to be as transparent in their own operations as they expect other institutions to be.

They aren’t, of course. Oh, they have an excuse: they are private entitles, not bound by the same standards as public organizations (plus whoever they choose to hunt down with their journalistic blunderbusses). But to my eye, daily papers are a different animal. They occupy a unique and valuable parcel in our public common. This is especially true of the daily paper, but it’s also true of, oh, say, VPR, for instance.

If you don’t like the way a retail store does business, you go down the street. But a daily paper, even a failing one, occupies an unassailable position in its community. It is a de facto monopoly. In the way it operates, it is more like the Burlington Electric Department than, say, Walmart.

Plus there’s the principle of the thing, that newspapers expect others to abide by standards they themselves ignore.

Which brings us to today’s Mitchell Family Runaround at the offices of the Rutland Herald.

Continue reading →