In chronicling headline-making the old-fashioned way — in print — Vermont Public Television tells the story of the newspaper industry through interviews, archival images and re-enactments in a new documentary that debuts on Dec. 1.
“Headline Vermont” chronicles the art of newspapering from the frontier era to the present and features interviews with historians and journalists, including Nick Monsarrat, who started his 40-year career in Vermont journalism at The Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and The Rutland Herald.
“Headline Vermont” also features historian Howard Coffin, who earned his writing chops as a reporter for The Herald as well. Coffin explains the state’s passion for newspapers this way: “There seems to be
something in Vermonters’ blood … maybe a little printer’s ink.”
That printer’s ink began to run from the time colonialists began to inhabit the Green Mountains.
Perhaps the most famous newspaperman from Vermont, Matthew Lyon, made his mark when he criticized the administration of John Adams in 1798. Under the Alien and Sedition Act, Lyon was imprisoned for seditious libel. He was elected to Congress from jail, and, after four months of incarceration, he emerged as a champion of the First Amendment. (Another editor from the colonial period, Anthony Haswell, who printed the Vermont Gazette, the state’s first weekly newspaper, also went to jail for publishing an article in support of Lyon.)
The producer of “Headline Vermont,” Daniel J. Lyons, said in a press release: “It may surprise viewers to find that the idea of newspapers as pillars of democracy is fairly recent. Early papers often sprang up to
advocate for causes, not to report objectively. They were packed margin to margin with advertisements, fiction and poetry. They included spicy stories of the rough-and-tumble young state that would never make it into today’s papers.”
Much of that “spicy” history is recounted by Monsarrat, who wrote an article charting the trajectory of newspapering for the Vermont Historical Society in 1991. A version of the article was published on VTdigger.org last year.
Read Part 1 of “Spreading the news: Newspaper reporting in Vermont”
Read Part 2 of “Spreading the news: Newspaper reporting in Vermont”
In the film, Monsarrat talks about the early history of Vermont newspapers and the hardships of Vermont life from the 1700s on; the rivalry between The Herald and The Rutland News involving “personals” news items in the 1920s as reported in a 1953 memoir “This Was My World,” by former News and then Herald editor Robert St. John; and his own early impressions of Vermont newspapers when he first arrived in the state in 1968.
Monsarrat had a front-row seat for much of Vermont’s recent history. He covered Barre and Montpelier city governments for The Times Argus from 1969-1970, then served as a reporter for the Vermont Press Bureau for both the 1971 and 1972 legislative sessions and 1972 elections. He was the editorial page editor of The Times Argus until 1985 when he became managing editor of The Herald. In 1988, he embarked on a 20-year teaching career as an adjunct professor of journalism at St. Michael’s College. Monsarrat was the editorial page editor of the Burlington Free Press from 1995 to 1996.
Recent changes in the world of newspapering, including the impact of Internet publishing on print, are also addressed in “Headline Vermont,” which highlights the continued success of community weeklies across the state, despite a marked decline in the news coverage provided by the state’s largest daily newspapers.
Jeff Potter, editor of The Commons in Brattleboro, a weekly newspaper founded in 2003, is featured in the film. “Vermont is unique in its sense of community,” Potter said in a press release. “It’s a very intimate state, and that gives us the opportunity for very intimate news.”
“Headline Vermont” premieres at 8 p.m., Wednesday, Dec.1, and will be rebroadcast at 8:30 p.m., Dec. 3 and 6 p.m., Dec. 5. The project was funded by Vermont Public Television, the Vermont Humanities Council and the Windham Foundation.
