Michael Abadi, of Onion River Cable Access TV, interviewed Anne Galloway, the editor of Vtdigger.org, about how she launched the investigative news Web site. Here is a 10-minute clip from the segment, which runs on ORCA through the end of December.
Abadi posted the video and the following comment on Green Mountain Daily Dec. 7.
Randolph06 :: Mining the gaps at vtdigger.org
Vtdigger has only been online since September 2009, but already Anne Galloway’s journalistic venture has met its objective “to mine the gaps in Vermont news coverage.” Recently Vtdigger filled the void left by lack of newspaper focus in covering the governor’s race. As noted here, Seven Days, and Vermont News Guy, the Environmental Action Conference in Randolph acted as the kick-off to Democratic primary season, but most news organizations missed the obvious headline that all five pledged to shut down Vt Yankee. Since our interview, Anne has also started sorting candidates’ answers by topic with the League of Conservation Voters debate. This kind of video editing and uploading is an incredibly time consuming process but the result is a handy way to compare the candidates.
Not content to cover event-based stories, Vtdigger has gone deep on complicated issues as well. The quantity and quality of stories Vtdigger has posted on Vermont’s dairy crisis is amazing given the short period of time the site has been in existence. And just this week again, GMD frontpaged VTdigger’s work digging behind the headlines to give voice to Curtis Sinclair and discover the story behind the State Hospital’s canteen shutdown.
VTdigger is not a blog, but it complements VT’s blogosphere nicely. The site recently underwent a facelift and there are more changes in the works to make it more interactive. To that end, Anne has plans to structure citizen involvement in covering local and statewide political issues. And vtdigger is also practically engaging the question of how to make professional journalism economically viable in the 21st century. With underwriting, grant, subscriber, and donation support, and a whole lot of excellent journalism, Vtdigger will no doubt be a durable excavator on the VT media landscape.
