Tag Archives: Waterbury Roundabout

News You Should View: The Last of His Kind?

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Apologies for skipping a week. Between Nicholas Deml and Sam Douglass, there was a lot going on. But here we are with another collection of news content worth your attention. Starting with a bit of sad news.

Remember when every newspaper had local columnists? They occupied a space between opinion and reportage. They were familiar figures to readers, and had their fingers on the pulse of community life. As a news consumer in southern Michigan, I got to know and appreciate Detroit Free Press columnists like Hugh McDiarmid (politics), Neal Rubin (entertainment, also penned the Gil Thorp syndicated comic for many years), and Bob Talbert (fluff and nonsense with a purpose). Those days are long gone, as newspapers have cut and cut and cut until there’s practically nothing left.

One survivor of the good old days: Jim Kenyon of The Valley News. I’ve been reading his stuff since I moved to this region in 2000. And now, at the age of 66, he’s retiring. I haven’t seen this reported in his own paper yet, but The Dartmouth has published an exit interview with him. I’m sorry to see Kenyon go, especially since I’m certain that he will not be replaced. He’s a luxury item in a bare-bones industry.

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News You Should View: A Double Pair

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Well hey, not one but TWO of our local newspapers landed a pair of entries each in this week’s news roundup. Some serious stuff, some not so serious, a healthy serving of meat and potatoes. Kind of a well-rounded buffet.

Turns out, short-term rental registries are good for something. The Legislature has tried and failed to enact a registry of short-term rentals, mostly due to opposition from, you will be shocked to hear, the short-term rental industry itself. But the town of Stowe enacted a registry of its own, perhaps because there are roughly 1,000 short-term rental properties in a town of 5,000. Seems like a lot.

Reporters Aaron Calvin and Patrick Bilow of The Stowe Reporter used the registry as a research tool. Their story reveals that the vast majority of Stowe’s short-term rental properties are owned by people who don’t live in town — and more than half are owned by out-of-staters. The story is sure to feed into an ongoing discussion of short-term rentals as part of a broader examination of housing issues in the resort community.

“Internal wrangling” continues to plague southern Vermont school board. The eye-rolling continues for Shawn Cunningham of The Chester Telegraph, whose duties include covering the Green Mountain Union School Board. It has been a great source of unintentional humor of late, or tragedy if you prefer your governmental bodies to serve the interests of the people. The Board is deeply divided on appointing a new trustee to fill a vacancy. If you read between the lines, it seems obvious that there’s a partisan divide on the putatively nonpartisan board. The apparent conservatives are throwing out all kinds of entertaining objections to a nominee who seems to be of the liberal persuasion. The result is a lot of wasted time, and a portion of the district that doesn’t enjoy its full measure of representation.

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News You Should View: Pre-Summer Slump

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Not gonna lie, it’s a bit of a thin crop from our ever-diminishing media fields. Maybe it was the runup to the first big holiday weekend of the season? Maybe it was the amount of MSM attention lavished — rightly — on the education reform debate in Montpelier? Whatever the reason, I had less than usual to choose from. Still, there’s definitely stuff worth consuming. Also, apologies for posting this a bit late; I was out of town for nine days, and I’m still in catch-up mode.

Just like the good old days. We’ll start with the comprehensive coverage given to the education reform issue. It was front and center in the Statehouse, and our major outlets delivered solid, blow-by-blow reporting. If you followed my personal Big Three (VTDigger, Vermont Public, Seven Days), you got a very good sense of what was going on. It was like we were suddenly transported back to the year 2010, when multiple outlets competed for the big stories.

My only complaint: As a whole, the coverage didn’t much question the fundamental assumption of the debate: that the rising cost of public education is the result of shrinking student population and Balkanized governance. Not addressed, or not enough anyway: the fact that Our Betters are failing to address the real cost drivers in the system: (1) the skyrocketing cost of health insurance, (2) the slow-motion crisis sparked by the state withdrawing its traditional support for school infrastructure almost 20 years ago, and (3) social services for schoolchildren being paid for by schools instead of the Agency of Human Services. Our Betters aren’t trying to solve the problems with the cost of public education; they’re just shifting the burden onto the schools.

A new podcast from the Democratic mainstream. Former state senator Andy Julow and Chittenden County Democratic Committee chair Joanna Grossman have teamed up on a podcast whose title they may come to regret: “There’s No ‘A’ in Creemee.” Cutesy, kind of an inside joke, doesn’t roll off the tongue. But hey, whoever thought “Amazon” was a good name for an online bookstore? Well, Jeff Bezos did.

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