The St. Albans Messenger has announced that it will scale back print production from six days a week to just two, dedicate more resources to its website, and increase staff.
The transition, effective the week of Jan. 25, makes the Messenger the latest Vermont-based news organization to cut back on print. Newspapers around the country have been struggling to adapt to an evolving digital landscape, and to deal with economic impacts resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic.
“This change will allow the Messenger newsroom to publish more timely updates to www.samessenger.com as well as its social media pages,” the statement on the St. Albans Messenger website reads. “Additionally, readers can join more than 5,000 email subscribers who have signed up to receive informative, engaging newsletters that are published each morning.”
The Messenger is now trending toward the fate of the weekly newspapers the company owns — the Milton Independent, Essex Reporter and Colchester Sun. All three halted their print publications last March, as the pandemic began to cut deeply into the advertising that supplied most of their revenue.
All four papers are owned by Jim O’Rourke, CEO of O’Rourke Media Group, who bought the publications from Emerson Lynn and Suzanne Lynn in December 2018. Since then, O’Rourke Media Group has also purchased publications in Arizona, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
O’Rourke has overseen a number of changes in the way the St. Albans Messenger and its sister papers operate. Courtney Lamdin, now a reporter for Seven Days, had been the editor of the three weeklies, but O’Rourke eliminated her job shortly after the sale.
“For an operation of our size, [O’Rourke] felt there only needed to be one person in charge of the editorial side,” Lamdin told Seven Days at the time.
Instead, Michelle Monroe, then the editor of the St. Albans Messenger, became the executive editor, overseeing all four publications. Monroe left that post in December, replaced by former Rutland Herald newsroom manager Cameron Paquette.
The St. Albans Messenger’s revamped website was championed by O’Rourke. Tuesday’s announcement said the website audience has grown 400% since a redesign in September 2019.
The newspaper was still operating on a print-first basis before that point, and its online offerings were mostly limited to content such as obituaries, rather than breaking local news.
Now, all four newspapers publish on the same platform. Their respective websites use the same template, identical to the Messenger’s website save for the name and the color scheme, with the same four sections on the top banner: news, sports, obituaries and editorial. The top article on all three home pages is a listing for an Airbnb — a cabin in southeastern Vermont — even though the Vermont Department of Health “strongly advises against nonessential travel, even within Vermont.”
In addition to the recent hiring of Paquette and reporter Kate Barcellos, the Messenger said it hopes to add another reporter in the coming weeks.
O’Rourke could not be reached for comment about the change in print schedule or the staffing changes. But, he said in a tweet, the Messenger is “only in a position to execute on this change because of the strength of our team.”
Clarification: This story has been updated to more fully describe the previous ownership of the St. Albans Messenger. Emerson Lynn and Suzanne Lynn were joint owners of the newspaper.