South Burlington is getting a new local news source, with a catch: It will be run by the city’s government.
The inaugural issue of the South Burlington Times, a digital document set to be published bi-weekly by City Hall with updates on municipal affairs, hit residents’ email inboxes last week. Those involved in the project have at turns called it a newspaper and a newsletter, and paint it as a way to deliver government news directly from city officials to residents.
Two South Burlington residents who helped plan it are excited about the news source. But as it’s gotten off the ground, the South Burlington Times has criticized another local newspaper, sparking questions about the role of a news outlet run by city government entering the local media-sphere.
Those who helped kickstart the project say it’s a response to ways in which The Other Paper, the city’s longtime paper-of-record, has shifted its coverage style in recent months. In testimonials posted to the city website, two residents said they want more coverage of goings-on-about town — city meetings, the local library and columns by legislators — than they’ve seen of late.
The South Burlington Times presents a way to make up for local coverage that has faded, they say.
“I think The Other Paper traditionally had in-depth coverage of governmental proceedings and meetings,” said city manager Kevin Dorn, who is producing South Burlington Times. “They had provided what I would consider to be the very best local news coverage by a local newspaper that I’ve ever seen. … With that largely going away now, there is this void.”
However, in making their case for the South Burlington Times, two city residents who worked with Dorn to start the project have leveled public criticism towards The Other Paper’s coverage. In her comments on the city website, resident Barb Sirvis said her copies of The Other Paper will likely “end up unread in the recycle bin” in the future.
That approach raises questions about the ethics of a government-run news source and its impact on The Other Paper as a local business, according to that paper’s editors. They say criticism of The Other Paper’s coverage by the city is based more on a different understanding of journalistic standards than a change in coverage quality.
Greg Popa, the publisher for the Vermont Community Newspaper Group, which owns The Other Paper, said he’s “never seen anything like this.”
“I don’t think it’s unusual for a city or a town to have a newsletter that they send out to residents,” Popa said. “But they seem to take great delight in sort of trying to take us down at the same time. I can’t imagine what the reaction would be if the city waged that type of attack on any other type of business in South Burlington.”
First published in 1977, The Other Paper was owned and run by Judy Kearns for a decade prior to its purchase by the Stowe Reporter in 2018. Kearns, who did not respond to a request for comment from VTDigger, stayed on at the paper after the sale to manage advertising.
After the Stowe Reporter acquired three new papers between 2015 and 2018, the conglomerate rebranded as the Vermont Community Newspaper Group. That group now operates The Other Paper, the Stowe Reporter, the Morrisville News & Citizen, the Shelburne News and The Citizen of Hinesburg and Charlotte.
Sirvis and Jennifer Kochman, another city resident who wrote a letter in the South Burlington Times’ first issue in support of the venture, say they viewed Other Paper coverage of town affairs as more robust prior to the VCNG takeover. Kochman and Sirvis also questioned The Other Paper’s publication of a police blotter, suggesting that space could be better spent on City Council coverage.
“What they used to do under Judy Kearns, when it was independent and they hadn’t joined this group, they used to attend the city council meetings, the planning commission and the other committees if they were doing something newsworthy,” Kochman said.
While in past years The Other Paper had reported on city meetings by publishing long accounts of individual meeting proceedings that sometimes resembled minutes, Other Paper Managing Editor Jessie Forand said that the paper’s new approach has been different.
“We don’t attend every single subcommittee meeting as we have a very limited staff, and we just lost a bunch of our editorial staff because of coronavirus,” said Forand, who is also managing editor for the VCNG’s four other papers. “We are not minute-takers.”
“What we do is we either attend a meeting, watch it recorded or follow up after, and decide from a journalistic perspective what the stories are, and report them,” she said. Recent Other Paper coverage has included updates on police department funding and school district budgeting.
Popa also disputed that publishing a police blotter is a poor use of newspaper space.
“People appreciate being able to see what’s going on in their town, and, you know, I’m sad to say that that includes crime,” he said.
On Sept. 11, Kochman reached out in an email thread to Kearns, Popa and Forand to share concerns about how the paper was covering city meetings, writing that “the OP used to report on meetings even if they did not have large crowds of excited people or hot button issues.” Forand said she was surprised by the timing of the critique.
“We’ve been covering things relatively the same way since I came on board, and that’s been almost a year,” Forand said. “So I’m not sure, to be perfectly honest, where this is all coming from.”
Feeling unsatisfied with the answer she received, in which Forand iterated the paper’s editorial approach when it comes to meetings (“Sometimes meetings don’t rise to the level of a news story,” she wrote), Kochman reached out to Sirvis, a friend of hers. Sirvis then attended a Sept. 21 City Council meeting to share their frustrations with the city.
After that meeting, Dorn developed the plan to start the South Burlington Times. The first issue was sent to the emails of the city’s 8,000-resident mailing list on Sept. 29. Besides linking to the Sirvis and Kochman testimonies about why the new news source was important, it shared links to city meeting schedules, articles about municipal projects and local events.
“I was delighted,” Sirvis said. “I didn’t expect the city to turn on a dime … [and] within a week of my going to the City Council, we had this new publication.”
For the Other Paper’s staff, the timing of the city starting a competing news source raised eyebrows because of a public records case The Other Paper has been involved in with the city since August.
Though she declined to describe the case’s full scope, Forand said it in part involved questions of access from the South Burlington police to names of three South Burlington residents who recently died. The Other Paper obtained and published those names last week.
“Our take is that we find it to be convenient timing,” Forand said. “This just seems like it’s convenient to start a new news agency under the veil of transparency, while actively not being transparent with the media.”
Dorn, who is set to retire next year, said the public records case and the South Burlington Times are unrelated.
“Those are kind of the ongoing disagreements that municipalities or government have with the media over what’s subject to the Public Records Sct and what’s not, but as far as the decision to start the Times, it really had nothing to do with that — it was really a lack of content that did it,” he said.
Questions of public records access aside, Popa said he wonders how a news publication run by city government will hold the people it covers to account.
“The whole point of a newspaper is to keep public officials accountable,” he said. “It’s not the job of public officials to keep themselves accountable.”
Going forward, Dorn said he plans to refer to the South Burlington Times as a “newsletter” rather than a newspaper, saying that “the connotation there is wrong.” The inaugural South Burlington Times email referred to the project as a newspaper; so did the post on the city website introducing it.
The name, however — the South Burlington Times — will remain, Dorn said.
For its part, Forand said, The Other Paper plans to continue with business as usual.
“We’re still putting out five newspapers every week, which is no small feat,” she said. “I think that journalism has pretty much always been a thankless job, and we’re fine with that.”
