CHARLOTTE — Since a widely respected reporter quit her job at Charlotte’s local nonprofit newspaper two weeks ago, residents have been asking why — and wondering whether board members’ personal agendas led to her departure.
Their queries have been amplified by a group of nationally renowned journalists who moved to the town in recent years and became involved with the Charlotte News. Those journalists — including New Yorker writer and Planet Money cofounder Adam Davidson and former New York Times war correspondent Christina Asquith — have resigned from the newspaper’s board of directors in protest, alleging that others on the board interfered inappropriately in reporting decisions.
According to Davidson, who relocated to Charlotte with his family last August, “Fearless journalists will create conditions where some people want to get rid of them and … people who run journalistic operations need to reflexively defend journalism.”
Chea Waters Evans, the reporter and editor who produced the bulk of the biweekly paper’s editorial content, resigned from the Charlotte News on March 8 after receiving negative feedback from some on the paper’s board. Her departure prompted outcry on Front Porch Forum from residents who questioned the circumstances of her resignation.
According to Evans’ defenders, she was an unusually dogged small-town reporter — leaving no stone unturned in this affluent Lake Champlain town of some 3,750 residents.
“Regarding Chea, we don’t give a damn about internal politics. We just know she’s the best the [Charlotte News] has ever had,” resident Kevin Farley wrote on Front Porch Forum. “This situation has a stink to it. I’m guessing now we’re going to get the same old boring crap we got before Chea.”
After Evans quit, the four high-profile journalists quickly resigned from two seats they collectively shared on the paper’s board, alleging that other board members had pushed out Evans — and that they seemed uninterested in following standard ethical practices required of a news organization.
Their concerns about the Charlotte News, which is run as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, echo challenges faced by small nonprofit news operations around the country. A growing number of newsrooms have adopted the nonprofit model in recent years as for-profit daily newspapers have shed staff or gone out of business entirely. The shift in the industry has brought forward fresh sets of ethical questions for newsroom directors to navigate, experts say.
John Quinney, a renewable energy consultant and the Charlotte News board president and interim publisher, told VTDigger that Evans left without providing a reason. He declined to say more about her resignation, calling it a “personnel issue” that merits discretion. Still, he echoed others’ praise of her work.
“Chea’s skills and expertise and experience as a writer and reporter are widely acknowledged around town, and I would share that recognition,” Quinney said. “She was a very talented writer and reporter. No question about that.”
‘It was a dream to me’
Evans’ understanding of her beat, supporters say, is a result of having grown up in the town she covered. She attended Charlotte Central School and Champlain Valley Union High School, left for college in upstate New York, and then returned to Vermont to work as a reporter.
After several years writing for the Shelburne News and The Citizen, Evans became the news editor of the Charlotte News in 2019. The chance to report for her hometown paper — a job she said pulled in about $700 per biweekly issue — was one Evans had imagined since she picked up the paper from her parents’ mailbox as a kid.
“Clearly I was not out buying Gucci shoes with my Charlotte News money,” said Evans, 46, who has three sons enrolled in Charlotte schools. “But I really didn’t care. I knew going into it that this would be a labor of love. It was a dream to me.”
During Evans’ tenure, the newspaper featured community stories typical of small, understaffed local newspapers, along with more ambitious accountability journalism. The latter won Evans the admiration of the four friends and reporters who met in Baghdad covering the Iraq War in 2003 and who now live in Charlotte: Asquith; her husband, author and former Bloomberg News editor Jack Fairweather; Davidson; and his wife, author-playwright Jen Banbury.
“Chea brings us the facts, but she also doesn’t rev the engine,” Asquith said.
“She has a lightness of touch she brings to things.”
Ethics questions in a small town
Evans told VTDigger that she resigned from the paper after a pattern of vague, increasingly negative feedback about her work starting earlier this year. She said it mostly came from the paper’s then-publisher, Claudia Marshall.
The Charlotte News is run by a board of directors and a volunteer publisher who also serves as the board’s president. The bare-bones staff includes a design editor and a do-it-all reporter-editor. Until recently that was Evans.
Evans said the board seemed pleased with her work. She earned a raise and a title change in January. But the next month, speaking on behalf of the board, Marshall began to suggest that Evans’ reporting was not up to par and that the paper would be forming an “editorial committee” to oversee and improve her work, Evans said.
According to Asquith, Marshall misrepresented the purpose of the editorial committee in a manner that seemed intended to make Evans feel bad about her performance. The committee’s real purpose, Asquith said, was to help Evans rather than micromanage her.
Evans said she still doesn’t understand how her coverage could have better met the board’s goals. Ultimately, the anxiety of the job began to outweigh the joy her work brought her.
“All of a sudden, that scale was tipping in a way that was like, ‘This is really stressful,’” Evans said. “Suddenly I’m up all night worrying about [the paper]. And I just thought … it seems like we have different goals. And I probably should just bow out.”
In letters obtained by VTDigger announcing their resignations from the board, the four journalists spoke out against their colleagues’ treatment of Evans. They also expressed broader ethical concerns about the paper’s direction.
Asquith left the board “to protest the unfair character attacks” on Evans that drove the reporter-editor’s resignation, Asquith wrote in a March 14 letter. “I completely disagree that she is ‘belligerent’ and ‘unmanageable,’” she wrote, referring to descriptors Marshall allegedly used to describe Evans.
Marshall, who herself resigned as publisher after the journalists objected to the board’s treatment of Evans, declined to comment when reached by VTDigger.
Perhaps of greater concern than Evans’ treatment, the journalists said, was the board’s unwillingness to incorporate journalistic ethics into the way it ran the organization.
In one instance, Asquith said in her letter, the board “endorsed unethical journalistic practices” by considering a policy that would give the paper’s publisher — the board president — oversight of editorial content.
Quinney, the interim publisher and board president, told VTDigger he does not decide what is published in the Charlotte News. Members of the paper’s board, however, have sought to exert influence in those areas in the past, records show.
Marshall, the former publisher, and a predecessor, Vince Crockenberg, contacted Evans directly to criticize editorial choices — including when family members of board members were implicated in coverage, according to emails obtained by VTDigger.
Last June, when Crockenberg was serving as publisher and president, Evans edited a story written by his spouse, Susan Crockenberg. Vince Crockenberg, who remains a board member, wrote Evans a lengthy email in which he called her editorial decisions about the story “wholly inappropriate.”
During her tenure as publisher, Marshall’s husband, Matt Zucker, sat on the town’s Zoning Board of Adjustment — a body that Evans covered critically at the Charlotte News in the months ahead of her departure.
“I think that they just didn’t understand that she was just trying to report independently, and they took that to mean that she was difficult,” Asquith told VTDigger.
Crockenberg and fellow board member Robert Bloch declined repeated requests for comment from VTDigger, deferring to Quinney, the interim publisher. Ted LeBlanc, the board’s treasurer, did not return a request for comment.
Ethics on a national scale
There’s nothing new about a newspaper publisher exerting pressure on a reporter to protect friends, family members and advertisers. What is new, as nonprofit newsrooms proliferate in small communities, is the volunteer board member seeking to influence coverage.
“I think that these challenges to the ethics of small-town, nonprofit news organizations are going to become more prevalent as people try to build or expand nonprofit news organizations around the country,” said Kelly McBride, an expert on journalism ethics at the Poynter Institute’s Center for Ethics and Leadership.
McBride, who also serves as NPR’s public editor, said she has heard from a growing number of journalists in nonprofit newsrooms who have described powerful people with conflicts of interest seeking to influence their reporting. She’s hoping to create a set of standards to help nonprofits navigate ethical issues, she said.
Though such matters may not captivate the average news consumer, they should, McBride said.
“If you can’t trust your news organization in one specific area, chances are you’re not going to trust it in any area, which means that the information itself becomes less valuable to you as a citizen,” she said.
Davidson is trying to create similar guidance for journalism nonprofits, inspired by the experience he had at the Charlotte News, through the American Journalism Project, a venture philanthropy organization that supports nonprofit news outlets. (Disclosure: VTDigger works with and receives funding from AJP.)
“The rules of journalism can be a bit counterintuitive — for example, having a board that oversees its staff,” Davidson said. “When you want to establish a true news operation, you need to protect reporters and editors from interference, whether that’s explicitly malicious interference or just inadvertent interference.”
Quinney told VTDigger that he’s eager to develop a set of ethical standards for the Charlotte News, too — and said he would consider collaborating with Davidson on the venture. “I think that would be a wonderful thing for community newspapers around the country to have,” he said.
In the meantime, as the town faces development pressure and environmental challenges similar to other Vermont communities, residents are considering what Charlotte stands to lose without Evans’ reporting.
From stories about a thorny zoning dispute to a pre-mortem analysis of the town’s “pumpkin man” tradition, her journalism “really gets into the details and tries to be fair and reasonable,” said Lane Morrison, a longtime town official and former Charlotte News board member.
“I think she’s a real gem to this town,” Morrison said.
“If we don’t get it back, I’m worried — I’m worried as a selectboard member for the voters’ ability to remain informed on issues,” said Lewis Mudge, a member of the town’s selectboard. “And I’m also worried for myself, as a resident of Charlotte, to be able to understand the management of a town. I think we deserve to have information with which we can make informed decisions.”
Editor’s note: This story’s headline was changed post-publication.