While local reporters rush to cover the decade’s most important stories, publishers have tried to find their financial footing in Covid-19’s “new normal.”
Last spring, as the pandemic arrived in the United States and spread, local journalists — largely from home offices — wrote about closing businesses, town-by-town testing procedures and community resilience. As health experts and public officials attempted to plan for the virus, journalists attempted to quell metastasizing uncertainty.
In a column, John Flowers, senior reporter at the Addison County Independent, describes the rush to cover all that was rapidly changing in those first few months.
“You file four stories and go to bed feeling like you’ve left 16 more on the table,” he wrote.
Local outlets began to produce more news than usual, and in many cases, readership spiked. All the while, advertising revenue waned as the shutdown took its toll on local economies, causing businesses to temporarily close. Some, already on the brink, shuttered permanently.
Now, more than six months after that pandemic began, many of the state’s local publishers and editors are forging ahead in a damaged advertising landscape that may not rebound soon.
They’re stepping forward with the knowledge that readers are hungry for clear, expansive reporting about some of the most sobering issues in recent memory: a dangerous virus, the plagued economy, a reckoning with institutional racism, and an impending election.
Vermont newspapers adapt
Earlier this month, New England Newspapers Inc., a group of publications that covers southern Vermont and across the border in Massachusetts, cut costs to manage the pandemic’s blow — and did so without cutting staff or coverage. Instead, with an eye toward younger generations of readers, they cut print editions.
In a letter to readers, publisher Fred Rutberg acknowledged pandemic-related hardships.
“The economic havoc that COVID-19 has wreaked hit newspaper publishing particularly hard, and New England Newspapers has not been spared,” the letter reads. “Our advertising revenues plummeted by almost 50 percent with the lockdown that came in March. They are inching up, but are still more than 30 percent lower than what we earned a year ago.”
New England Newspapers cut Monday print editions for the group’s three daily publications: The Brattleboro Reformer, The Bennington Banner and The Berkshire Eagle.
Instead of a Monday edition, subscribers can now sign up to have a digital edition sent to their inboxes. It’s identical to the print paper, but with plans to add “even more to our digital Monday paper,” Rutberg wrote. He said he made the decision with the institution’s financial health in mind, but also after observing trends among readers leaning toward digital content.
“Between July 2019 and July 2020, the number of digital-only subscriptions increased by 50 percent,” Rutberg wrote, “while the number of new print subscriptions barely made up for those that lapsed during the year.”
To accommodate digital subscribers, the group switched over to an entirely new content management system, with new, more polished websites. In a “Coffee with the President” Zoom meeting, where Rutberg and Bennington Banner editor Kevin Moran explained the new changes to readers, Moran said the staff had spent 250 hours training to use the new digital platform.
Rutberg pointed to research that shows the negative effects on communities when newspapers shutter, and emphasized the strengths of New England Newspapers Inc., particularly with the newly implemented changes.
“We’re not going to close,” he said. “We’re here for the duration, and we’re proud of what we’ve done.”
Rutberg did not respond to an interview request from VTDigger.
Angelo Lynn, publisher at the Addison County Independent, said the pandemic and a recent construction project in the center of town have deeply impacted businesses in Middlebury, where the Independent is located. Middlebury College often provides local businesses a steady stream of students and visiting families, but the pandemic has squashed that, too.
“We have 12 vacancies on Main Street,” he said. “Almost half of the storefronts are empty.”
Lynn said the lack of retail advertising forced the ad staff to look at different revenue models. They’ve added a “donate” button to their homepage, and said they’ve received support from contributing readers.
But while the revenue sources have changed, and may not return to their original state for a while, the paper hasn’t had to make staffing changes, save for one position that was temporarily transitioned to part time, but is now back again.
In terms of content, the Independent is producing more now than before. The paper ran two print editions per week before the pandemic. Now, though it’s cut the Monday print edition, it’s publishing content almost daily. As a result, online subscriptions have increased by about 1,000 since last year.
“We’re up to four newsletters a week,” said Lynn. “That was an effort to put news out there on a timely basis. We realized that twice a week wasn’t enough, we needed to be out there four or five times a week.”
In Waitsfield, Lisa Loomis edits The Valley Reporter, and reports “an increase in readership across all platforms and on social media” for the Reporter, and has seen high click rates on a new, twice-weekly newsletter.
As the president of the Vermont Press Association, Loomis has heard from editors across the state.
“Readership is up,” she wrote in an email. “People are more and more reliant on local newspapers for pertinent and timely information about their communities.”
Some ad revenue has returned with the reopening of Vermont’s economy, and, paired with increased subscriptions and newsstand sales, that’s helped some newspapers out of the trouble they initially experienced at the pandemic’s start.
“But not all of them,” she said. “And that should be a concern to all of us.”
High stakes for newspapers and their coverage areas
Before the pandemic, readership at local weekly and daily print newspapers was declining in Vermont. According to the Expanding News Desert, a project run through the University of North Carolina, Vermont lost three weekly papers between 2004 and 2019, and newspaper circulation decreased by 38%. The trend can be traced nationally — newspapers employ half the number of journalists they employed in 2004.
When the pandemic first hit Vermont’s economy, newspapers across the state made changes. The Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus furloughed 20 employees and reduced printing schedules from five days a week to three.
VTDigger, Seven Days and the Valley News made layoffs, and three weeklies — the Milton Independent, Essex Reporter and Colchester Sun — stopped printing papers, producing entirely online instead. Gannett, which owns The Burlington Free Press, furloughed some staff. The Waterbury Record closed permanently.
Loomis speculated about what might happen if community newspapers shuttered around the state.
“How will a community talk to itself?” she wrote. “Hyper-local issues are best covered at the hyper-local level and that means Vermont’s 10 daily and 3+dozen non daily print newspapers.”
Dan Kennedy, a professor of journalism at Northeastern University and a frequent contributor to Nieman Lab, a national website that analyzes journalism, said cutting print editions makes fiscal sense for local papers. Retail advertising may soon fade as the chief revenue source for news media, he said.
“We are certainly moving toward an era where a successful newspaper will be successful totally on the strength of the money that it’s getting from its readers,” he said. “To the extent that advertising survives, that will just be a nice little extra. We’ve been moving in that direction anyway, and the pandemic sped that up.”
He’s watched print newspapers clean up their websites and upgrade technology to handle digital offerings more effectively, and said that’s a good first start. While the pandemic may open a door toward innovation in local news, Kennedy warned against a silver lining view of the media’s current state.
“I think it is fantastic that there are interesting and innovative projects going on around the country, but there aren’t nearly enough to make up for what we’re losing,” he said. “What I hope is that over the years, people will look at some of these innovative projects and say, I can do that in my community. But it’s gonna take a lot of time.”
