When the pandemic began, Dan Fraser started writing every day. His posts — a blend of community updates, quote of the day, and store news — landed in around 5,000 email inboxes. His outlet: the Norwich town listserv.
The listserv has been around long enough to have a solid local reputation as a place where people talk local politics, barter, sell, complain, and search for things they need. People use it and recommend it to newcomers to get the word out over everything from a lost dog to a lost politician. There are offers for free stamps, and for meditation workshops held on Zoom.
And since the pandemic began, the number of subscribers to listservs and local forums has swelled, as people seek hyperlocal information and a connection to community.
Anyone can sign up for a listserv and write to it. The technology is not new. No algorithms sort in what order posts appear. It’s as simple as sending an email, which is then delivered to thousands of neighbors. The rules are also straightforward: Keep it local, stay civil and don’t post anonymously. There are limits on how often businesses can promote themselves.
“The entire record of lost dogs is there to be found by future anthropologists,” said Tig Tillinghast, who has been moderating the Norwich list essentially since its inception 13 years ago. Tillinghast says that he was boondoggled into becoming a volunteer moderator by a friend, but he’s stuck with it for longer than any job or other commitment.
“It’s been great,” said Tillinghast, who considers the listserv a part of his civic contribution to town (he has also served on the Thetford Selectboard). “It’s been a huge pain and very worthwhile.”
The listserv is also the place for “the most valuable discussion you can have,” according to Tillinghast. Often, it’s where discussions about local politics unfold. “There aren’t forums for that to happen other than town meetings,” he said.
What used to happen in store aisles
In normal times, Norwich residents would gather at Dan and Whit’s, Fraser’s general store in the center of town. As Fraser and others have put it, the store has morphed into something of a community center. But when people couldn’t leave their houses, Fraser tried to use the listserv to replicate what usually happened in the store’s aisles.
“He’s been doing these wonderful cheesy posts that is this funny New England small-town mix of what do we have at the store and here’s what courage means and reflections on who’s doing amazing things in the community,” said Tillinghast, who called Fraser’s daily posts an “impromptu serial editorial thing.”
Fraser said he started writing to “try to take an active role in reassuring people.” When there were interruptions in the supply chain, Fraser wanted to explain to people why the store was having a hard time getting certain items so they wouldn’t worry.
“A lot of older people in town live by themselves. They come to the store every day to get a paper and a gallon of milk. This is their socialization,” said Fraser.
But stay-at-home orders changed that, and “there was really no one checking on them.” Fraser hoped to offer a lifeline to people who needed help. He often posts about fundraisers for local nonprofits and promotes other local businesses, too.
“People have come to count on it,” Tillinghast said.
When there’s an opportunity for humor, Fraser takes it. Like when the store started doing curbside pickup and grocery delivery, and things didn’t always go as planned. “Maybe my husband snuck this in,” an 85-year-old woman who had mistakenly received a pregnancy test kit in her groceries wrote Fraser. Or, “One day some woman ordered 6 plungers.” Fraser said, “You have to wonder, what is going on?”
Not everyone was amused. Some subscribers objected to Fraser’s daily postings, and complained that he was violating the rules about how often businesses are allowed to promote themselves.
“Some of the list lawyers started to beat up on him,” said Tillinghast, who typically comes down hard on advertisers abusing the list. The policy is in place to prevent the listservs from becoming too commercial. Tillinghast and other moderators worry that too many advertisements will drown out other types of discussion and drive readers away. Since the pandemic, though, these rules have gotten a bit more relaxed, as moderators recognize that local businesses are struggling to stay afloat.
In this case, Tillinghast determined that Fraser’s posts weren’t promotional. “It’s support for the community in the pandemic,” he determined. Tillinghast called it an “example of a quiet leader that these communities have and need.”
“Please start again,” Tillinghast asked Fraser, who obliged.
Fraser said he “was surprised when the whole thing went down about not posting every day” because most of the feedback he gets about his posts is positive. Now, he says he tries to promote other local businesses. “I can say that about them, and it’s not violating the rules. That helps our community, helps people stay focused locally.”
With businesses like restaurants and hotels teetering on the edge, Fraser said the most important thing to do is give local businesses “right of first refusal.”
“We’re here, we’re your neighbors,” he said. “The people on Amazon you’re never going to see or hear from again.”
Tillinghast said the pandemic was a good time to revisit the rules of the listserv. “Thirteen years in, you have to step back. It’s very clear that the community needs that kind of thing. So we’re always revisiting the legal regime, how we operate,” Tillinghast added, saying that rules have been relaxed in a trying time.
The Norwich listserv is one of 43 that are run by Vital Communities, a nonprofit that serves the Upper Valley. The lists report a 15% increase in users and postings since the pandemic began. Now, there are 43,240 users across these lists who have sent over 100,000 messages in the last year.
Most of the lists are town-based, and each one has its own defining character. “Each list is really its own ecosystem,” said Rob Schultz, who works at Vital Communities and manages the listservs. “The Norwich list is really different than the Hartford list, which is different than the Bradford list.”
“Strafford is like child’s play compared to Norwich,” said Tillinghast, comparing the two towns’ listservs. Strafford has “a smaller number of calmer people.”
Still, there’s a learning curve for people who are new to interacting online. “A community of people will often not know how to comport themselves when they haven’t done it before,” said Tillinghast. He had to deal with “a lot of people who are new to this way of communication.”
“They have to kind of feel it out,” he said.
When things do cross the line, Tillinghast is the one who steps in. Based on experience and mistakes, he has developed a particular way of going about this. He prefers calling people on the phone to discuss questionable posts, rather than responding online. This is “a huge pain” but he has had to do it less and less over the years as people learn to abide by the rules.
“If you do it where everyone can see then people get very defensive,” said Tillinghast. “This is a long game strategy and I think it’s worked.”
Growth and growing pains
While the listservs depend on volunteer moderators, other local forums have hired moderators to patrol posts. While listservs are popular in the Upper Valley, Front Porch Forum — which operates as a business — has a strong presence in other parts of the state. The online information service is community-based and free to users around the state.
“In Vermont, we have something like 195,000 members, with 260,000 total households. A majority of households participate in Front Porch Forum, and now the numbers have been growing even more rapidly,” said the founder, Michael Wood-Lewis.
In the first four months of the pandemic, Front Porch Forum reported a 70% increase in new member sign-ups. “That was unprecedented,” said Wood-Lewis. “People were flocking to Front Porch Forum as they did to other services to look for information and to look for services.”
The forums have been used to get information out about volunteer opportunities, to coordinate mutual aid, and elected officials have even used these channels to get out important information about public health, for example.
But, Wood-Lewis said, “The bread and butter is neighbor to neighbor. The biggest increase in activity is people reaching out looking to offer what they can or asking for help.”
The number of postings has also gone up. In the first four months of the pandemic, there was a 52% increase in postings compared to the previous four months. “We had never seen that type of surge in member postings,” Wood-Lewis said.
The forum had to increase its staff by 25% to handle the increase in users and postings.
Checking for the truth
As more people turn to these sites for information, the stakes in preventing misinformation are also higher.
One instance was reported on Nov. 2 by the Addison County Independent, when Lesley Bienvenue posted to the Salisbury page. Bienvenue’s posts said she was a member of the County Sheriff’s department and was running for state Senate. “The supposed candidate’s claim is false information that could have easily been checked (we did),” wrote the Addison County Independent.
“This is a reminder that social media sites like FPF don’t actually check information before publishing it. Maybe FPF is a good place to buy and sell household goods and whatnot, but in instances where facts matter and wrong information can affect the entire community, we must remember to turn to information sources that have editors that check out information before publishing it,” the Addison County Independent post stated.
In a written response, Wood-Lewis said the post in question was quickly removed. “Within minutes of learning of this problem, we removed the posting from our website and mobile app,” he wrote in an email to VTDigger. In the time that the post was up, it reached 965 members of the forum, according to Wood-Lewis.
“According to the Vermont Secretary of State website,” Wood-Lewis wrote, “the person in question received one single vote in a race where the two winning candidates collected 13,063 and 12,522 votes.”
Wood-Lewis noted that FPF is moderated, unlike social media platforms like Twitter. “Also, FPF is a Vermont small business … and one that is easily reachable for conversation.”
Readers engage with local news
The demand for edited and curated information is up, too.
Rob Gurwitt, also of Norwich, said Daybreak, the daily newsletter that he runs, has doubled since the pandemic started. Gurwitt, a longtime journalist, started Daybreak in 2019 with 25 subscribers who were mostly his friends. After running the list for a year, he was up to 3,500 subscribers at the onset of the pandemic.
And that number skyrocketed once the pandemic hit. Gurwitt now has 8,500 subscribers, who have signed up based on word of mouth alone. In the daily newsletter, he includes a selection of local news stories, drawing from newspapers such as the Valley News, and Seven Days, but also from local blogs and photographers.
The tone of the newsletters is informal; Gurwitt says he thinks about it as if he were writing to friends. He describes the newsletters as quick, friendly and straightforward, “driven by news or newsroom values, but I didn’t want to hit people over the head” with that.
He said media outlets that focus exclusively on institutions are “not fully reflective of the way we live.”
“People care a lot about other parts of their lives that don’t have to do with institutions,” he said, and those are some of the things he tries to include in his newsletters.
“A photo of something going on in the area, or a pair of eagles, something like that is news, too, in the sense that it fills in people’s picture of what’s happening around them.”
Gurwitt includes an occasional poem in his newsletter, and sometimes a link to a humorous video he found somewhere on the internet.
“That’s my approach. If I think it’s interesting or cool or just worth talking about, then I put it in,” he said.
He said he picks out stories that he finds personally interesting and hopes that his readers will take interest in them, too. So far, it seems that readers are responding.
Three reasons
Based on feedback from readers, Gurwitt thinks there are three reasons people are turning to local news, now. While news may have felt one step removed before, now it feels directly relevant to readers.There’s an immediacy to learning about a lockdown order that affects a reader’s day-to-day life.
“With the virus and the lockdowns and the economic collapse, those were in our faces, and they were wrecking our communities every day. Every day brought news about their impact and how the places we live in and care about were changing,” Gurwitt explained.
People also turned to news for connection during isolating times. “People just badly needed something that helped them feel tied to the community around them,” said Gurwitt, and the newsletter was one place where highly localized news was available.
And then, there was also a need for diversion and a break.
Gurwitt doesn’t see what he’s doing as a replacement for traditional newsrooms, but as a complement to them. “Part of my purpose is to help get people to various news organizations that they would otherwise not see,” he said.
And larger local news organizations are growing, too.
According to Maggie Cassidy — editor of the Valley News, the daily newspaper based in West Lebanon — digital readership has grown since the pandemic started. In 2020, average monthly pageviews were up to 1.8 million per month, with 262,000 unique users coming to the website per month. In 2019, monthly pageviews were at 1.4 million, with 249,000 unique users. So: 400,000 more views on average per month, by 20,000 more unique users.
While digital subscribers to the Valley News online have increased, single-copy print sales are down, which Cassidy attributed to the fact that people are staying home, rather than going out to the store to buy a paper.
While the Valley News has never allowed comments on its website, people have been engaging more with the news since the pandemic struck. Cassidy said there was “an absolute undeniable increase” in letters to the editor. “It really exploded,” she said.
The letters “ranged on everything from Covid to also, you know, racism and police brutality and then now the election. With all of those things being issues that people had a lot to say about and the fact of being home and having the time to write letters, potentially,” Cassidy said.
Readers were writing, and they also showed up to support the paper at a time that was financially difficult. In April, the Valley News announced it was holding a fundraiser, at a time when many advertisers had to pull ads from the paper because their business had pancaked. The fundraiser ran until early June.
“It was really nice to see this huge response from the community supporting the work that we do throughout the building, including especially the newsroom,” Cassidy said.
Seven Days, headquartered in Burlington, also says readership has grown markedly. Publisher Paula Routly described a “dramatic spike in online readership in March and April, from 1 million pageviews a month to more than 1.5 million.” Now, she wrote in an email to VTDigger, those numbers have leveled off to where they were pre-pandemic.
“We expect that could change if we go through another shutdown or spike in cases, when information is changing daily,” Routly said.
Print circulation has remained steady throughout the pandemic, she said, in spite of closures at many drop-off locations where the paper is normally distributed. “We found other places to distribute the paper, including pop-up newspaper stands in residential neighborhoods,” Routly wrote.
Dan, of Dan and Whit’s, said he plans to keep writing his daily updates, even after the pandemic ends. “Until they kick me off,” he said. “If you don’t like it, just skip it.”
“It does have a power,” Tillinghast said about the list. “It’s not the list but it’s the community that has the power. It’s worth doing.”
