The conservative media organization True North Reports is shutting down, its founder and funder announced Friday.
In a farewell post on True North’s website, Lenore Broughton thanked contributors and readers for their work to “keep media and government honest and promote civic engagement.”
“It’s hard to say goodbye,” she wrote.
Broughton, a Burlington heiress who has bankrolled a slew of conservative campaigns, established True North Reports more than a decade ago as a right-wing outpost in left-leaning Vermont. Before that, she funded True North Radio, a paid program on WDEV.
Broughton did not explain in her post why the website was shutting down and did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a separate post Friday, former gubernatorial and state Senate candidate John Klar wrote that he was “greatly saddened that this important resource is closing down, because it has been a ‘true’ free speech platform.”
Klar said that he had embraced the platform because he had been “appalled by the overt, propagandistic censoring of certain content by certain other publications,” adding that “most Vermont media don’t report ‘both sides.’”
It was not immediately clear how many jobs would be affected by the move, though Broughton thanked editor Bruce Parker and reporter Michael Bielawski in her post.
True North was part of an evolving ecosystem of conservative media organizations in Vermont that once included the Vermont Tiger blog and Vermont Watchdog and now includes the Vermont Daily Chronicle.
