How Vermont’s Media Helps Keep the State Together

An extensive analysis conducted in 2020 by ProPublica and the Times Magazine ranked nearly all the United States’ more than three thousand counties on the basis of how much they are likely to suffer as the climate continues to change. The four that emerged least scathed are all in my home state of Vermont; in fact, all but one of the state’s fourteen counties wound up in the top fifty. Earlier in the summer, news came that Vermont’s decades of population decline had reversed: apparently, the fact that the state had the lowest COVID death rate in the nation—roughly a third of the average—sent people here. Similar demographic shifts elsewhere are imaginable: a McKinsey report found that “20 to 25 percent of the workforces in advanced economies could work from home between three and five days a week. This represents four to five times more remote work than before the pandemic and could prompt a large change in the geography of work.” But, should a rush of the climate-stricken, the precautionary, and the Zoom-enabled descend on other far-flung locations, it’s not at all clear that they’d be able to handle it. Vermont reportedly has, for instance, the lowest rental-vacancy rate in the country, a practical difficulty that might outweigh its clear lead in breweries per capita as people calculate their landing spots. There is an important piece of infrastructure, however, that’s working reasonably well in Vermont and that might offer an instructive example to other states: its media network. Thanks to some remarkable people, and some good luck, Vermont has new and legacy Web sites, radio stations, and newspapers that keep the state not just informed but knit together. That luck may not hold indefinitely, but for the moment it shows that the decline of serious local journalism is not as inevitable as some imagine—and that “serious” means several different things.

Vermont has been no more fortunate than other states when it comes to keeping its daily papers intact and healthy. It has one real city—Burlington is the hub of a metro area of two hundred and twenty thousand people, about a third of the state’s population—and the Burlington Free Press was long the state’s flagship paper. But that publication now sells fewer than six thousand copies on any given weekday, down from more than thirty thousand a decade ago, and it does not have a full-time reporter to cover the State House or the city hall. Owned by Gannett, the Free Press still produces most of the content itself, but it also cross-posts articles from its sibling publication USA Today. (Last month, Gannett, carrying $1.3 billion in debt from a 2019 merger, undertook another set of layoffs at papers across the country.) The dailies in towns such as Rutland and Montpelier have been shedding reporters for years, too, although the Valley News, covering the region along the Connecticut River, remains a lively presence.

But, fairly early in this process of decline, something interesting happened. Anne Galloway was editing a Sunday edition jointly published by the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and the Rutland Herald, each more than a century old. She told me, “In 2009, the company that owned them let go about twenty people, which for two small organizations was quite a bit.” She also felt ready to try something less regional and to concentrate, she said, on “investigative and iterative news stories about the most important issues in the state. So I gave it a shot.”

That year, with some sixteen thousand dollars in foundation grants, and using WordPress blogging software, she launched a nonprofit news Web site, VTDigger. At first, the site focussed almost entirely on covering the State House; a year later, it merged with the Vermont Journalism Trust, a nonprofit formed by local philanthropists, which became Digger’s publisher. The site now employs fourteen news reporters and eight editors, and it has become the go-to source for state and local news. (It got a bump of almost a million unique visitors a month during the pandemic, as Vermonters checked in each morning to see how many—really, how few—cases of COVID had appeared overnight.) In addition, many view VTDigger as a model for new journalism enterprises—it has won a steady stream of awards and, just as important, it has won an audience. The visitor count has declined since the height of the pandemic, but Galloway says that the site still gets six hundred thousand unique visitors a month, forty per cent of them from out of state. Richard Tofel, the former president of ProPublica, who has worked with nonprofit newsrooms around the country, told me that only the Texas Tribune may rival VTDigger when it comes to their standing in their respective home states.

VTDigger, which is based in Montpelier, the state capital, devotes considerable time and energy to investigative reporting; it established itself journalistically, in 2014, by uncovering and then relentlessly dogging (in more than two hundred and fifty stories over the following three years) a byzantine scandal that involved securing permanent-resident visas for foreigners in exchange for investments in a ski resort, an affair that has sent some of the perpetrators to jail. “It put us on the map,” Galloway said. It’s worth noting, though, that the story was not only wonderfully reported but also mind-numbingly complicated and somewhat anomalous, showing both the strengths and the limitations of that kind of journalism in a place like Vermont. The state is by no means perfect, but the crime rate is low and the number of scandals it produces is, from a hardcore reporter’s point of view, distressingly small. As I’m writing this, for instance, the lead story on the Digger site is “Questions Raised about Charlotte Selectboard’s Closed-Door Meetings,” detailing how a small town considered whether to replace its volunteer fire service with professionals.

Post-Woodward and Bernstein, investigative reporting garnered a lot of the glamour, but it’s not the only kind that matters, and Vermont has some remarkable legacy outlets that provide different and complementary ways of understanding the state. Seven Days, a free weekly based in Burlington, was started, in 1995, as an “alternative” rag in the tradition of the Village Voice. While most of its brethren across the country have struggled, Seven Days has flourished. It features some investigative journalism, but it also offers the most extensive and engaged arts coverage in the state and, in a place obsessed with what to eat next, its food pages are eagerly scanned. Its political coverage is gossipy, pointed, and nuanced, yet its true specialty is high-calibre long-form journalism, marked not just by careful reporting but by literary flair—as in a story this spring on what it’s like to be incarcerated during the COVID crisis. In an old state, the weekly covers young people; in a white state, it covers people who aren’t. If VTDigger is the meat and potatoes of Vermont news, Seven Days is the hoisin sauce, the charred brussels sprouts, the pint of highly hopped pale ale, the molten chocolate cake.

The state is also lucky in its broadcast journalism. Vermont Public provides excellent local news coverage on both television and radio; in per-capita terms, its radio station is among the most listened-to public stations in the country, and its weather forecast, “Eye on the Sky,” is legend. (Full disclosure: my son-in-law is a producer for the podcast “Brave Little State,” which offers abundant reporting on such topics as whether moose-crossing signs really reduce automobile accidents.) But there are deeper legacy operations that may do even more to build the state’s high level of social trust, because they cut across economic and cultural lines in profound ways. Vermont’s main independent radio station, WDEV, turned ninety last year, and it sounds the way that radio used to. Its days begin at 5 A.M., with local news, followed by the ever-popular “Trading Post” (“I have four snow tires, and I want a hundred and twenty dollars for them”) and a check on the current price for a hundredweight of milk. The station has its own bluegrass band, the Radio Rangers, which plays on Saturday mornings, right after WDEV’s signature program, “Music to Go to the Dump By.” It carries Red Sox games and stock-car races from Thunder Road (“the nation’s site of excitement”), and girls’ high-school basketball. But the core of the station’s programming is “Vermont Viewpoint,” which broadcasts weekday mornings from nine to eleven—it’s talk radio centered on information, not controversy. In recent weeks, the host, Ric Cengeri, has interviewed a birding expert about “properly identifying those confusing fall warblers”; caught up with a farmer who, six months earlier, had lost many of his cows in a barn fire; and broadcast live from an antique-car show. It’s not all sweetness and sentiment: “Vermont Viewpoint” covers elections and climate change and crime. But the show and the station itself are reminders that journalism, in addition to uncovering malfeasance, should also uncover the bonds that hold communities together.

A functioning community, almost by definition, is a place where people take an interest in things that don’t directly affect them, where they worry about the schools even if they don’t have kids. That interest can be shown in divisive fashion—attacking “woke” school librarians—or it can be done gently. If the former reduces community trust, the latter, right down to broadcasting high-school hoops, increases it. It’s true that Vermont’s partisan divisions are less shrill than in other parts of America—its Republican governor held the highest approval rating of any governor in the country for much of the pandemic, and its socialist senator is the third most popular Democrat in the country, trailing only Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, even though he’s officially an Independent—and that tradition of tolerance is reflected on WDEV. “Vermont Viewpoint” is followed for an hour every day by “Common Sense Radio,” a talk show presented by the conservative Ethan Allen Institute. WDEV used to carry Amy Goodman’s left-leaning show, “Democracy Now!,” and, although that arrangement has ended, her brother David, a Vermonter, hosts a weekly progressive interview show, sponsored by VTDigger.

Many Vermont media outlets have done something else that strengthens social ties—with the advent of the pandemic, they started shutting down online comment forums. (Seven Days and VTDigger cited a need to avoid medical misinformation.) They still run letters to the editor, but those tend to be constructive, not nihilistic; it’s a tough state in which to be a sorehead. You can see the focus on serving the community even more clearly in Vermont’s remaining local weekly newspapers. I live in Addison County, the heart of the Champlain Valley and the home of Middlebury College. It’s held together by the Addison Independent, founded in 1946, a paper of the kind that once appeared in most American towns but now is something of a rarity. The Addy Indy has a newsroom staff of seven, who manage to produce remarkable quantities of useful reporting. Want to read about the outcome of local elections? Or about where Snoop Hog and Justin Bieberque placed in the county-fair pig races? Or about how to remove invasive species, or about a festival for aspiring playwrights, or about a workshop on how to protect yourself in an active-shooter situation, or the story of an octogenarian who swam across Lake Dunmore, or the Vergennes police log (“a dog was locked in a car on Main Street in 85 degree weather at 9 p.m. The officer told the driver of the car to take the dog out of the vehicle”), or a guide to blueberry picking (“I looked up to see the rump of a black bear not 30 yards away”), or about a select-board decision to lower the speed limit, or about the drivers in the local demolition derby, or about the local little-league team that won three games in the state championship, or about the Taco Tuesday fund-raiser for the community center? If you live here, you should, because you get a constant sense of who your neighbors are (and were—the obituaries are long and detailed).

How Vermont’s Media Helps Keep the State Together
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