Lisa Scagliotti founded the Waterbury Roundabout in May 2020 as a purely web-based publication, aiming to fill a news void after the closure of the town’s weekly free paper two months earlier.
She quickly formed a partnership with the Barre Montpelier Times Argus, which delivered a new free weekly with local news to households in Waterbury and parts of Duxbury, Moretown and Bolton.
Now that partnership, the Waterbury Reader, is ending, with the last print edition coming out on Friday.
“I never in a million years thought we were going to actually have a print newspaper,” said Scagliotti, who works as an editor and reporter producing the majority of the Roundabout’s stories alongside a small group of other contributors.
Scagliotti said that prior to the Times Argus’ involvement, the digital production of the Waterbury Roundabout was “basically a class project” with students at the University of Vermont helping to report for the news organization and even creating the website.
Despite the partnership ending, the Waterbury Roundabout will continue to operate as a digital publication. But to do so, it will need to replace the $500 a week it received through the Times Argus partnership, Scagliotti said.
Although she’s upset by the end of the partnership, Scagliotti said she wasn’t surprised.
The Waterbury Reader didn’t yield the advertising revenue it needed to cover all the costs of production, printing, trucking and postage, among other expenses.
According to Steve Pappas, the executive editor of the Times Argus, the Waterbury Reader cost between $1,500 and $1,600 to produce. For the entirety of their partnership, the Times Argus lost about $800 to $900 a week with the publication of the Waterbury Reader, Pappas said.
The dearth of advertising dollars isn’t unique to the Reader, according to Jeff Potter, the editor-in-chief of The Commons, a nonprofit news organization covering Windham County in print and online.
“The Brattleboro area is bouncing back from the pandemic. Organizations are starting to have events again, and businesses are opening again, but the advertising really isn’t springing back that way to the level that was pre-pandemic,” Potter said.
The Commons has been increasingly relying on other forms of digital fundraising rather than support from local commercial advertising, Potter said.
According to Potter, the value of local journalism has changed over the past few years with more people becoming aware of the importance of funding their free local paper.
“This is a test of how badly a community wants news,” Potter said.
Despite the financial challenges, Pappas tried for as long as he could to continue printing and distributing the Waterbury Reader, according to Scagliotti. “I really feel like he was very committed to wanting to see a paper succeed in Waterbury,” she said.
Scagliotti noted that Pappas gave the Reader several weeks to try different ways to raise funding for the print publication. They printed several notices in the paper urging readers to donate money in order to keep the paper alive.
Ultimately, few people did.
Even so, Scagliotti said that she remains optimistic about the future of the Roundabout and has recently seen contributions increase.
At the beginning of September, the Roundabout received $40 in total contributions. Since Sept. 8, when the latest issue of the Reader came out, the organization is currently at over $3,000 in donations. Usually, the Roundabout receives less than $1,000 a month in donations.
The Roundabout also recently received a $3,000 grant from the Vermont Community Foundation for business development.
The news outlet’s recurring monthly donations, which Scagliotti characterized as key to the Roundabout’s survival, have also increased from 22 people to 61. Many donors give between $5 and $10 a month, she said.
Scagliotti said that the Roundabout would also ideally be able to raise between $100,000 to $150,000 a year so that the people who work at the Roundabout could be adequately compensated for their work.
In addition to Scagliotti, there are three other individuals who work for the organization and two interns who are compensated with class credit or funding through the University of Vermont’s Community News Service.
“I feel encouraged and I feel that things are headed in a good direction. It’s just a matter of us now, being able to put the things in place that we need to see if we can make it work,” Scagliotti said.
Disclosure: The Vermont Journalism Trust, the parent organization of VTDigger, is the Waterbury Roundabout’s fiscal sponsor, meaning the trust processes the Roundabout’s tax-deductible donations or grants that require nonprofit status.
Correction: This story was updated to clarify the fundraising efforts for the Reader.