Well over a century after it was founded, the County Courier — billed as “Franklin County’s community weekly newspaper” — has stopped publishing a print edition. Meanwhile, another northwestern Vermont newspaper is planning to resurrect a print edition and a third is up for sale.
A note to readers in the County Courier’s July 27 issue said that, due to rising printing costs, it plans to publish stories only online “for the foreseeable future.” The 142-year-old newspaper, based in Enosburg Falls, is owned, published and edited by reporter Greg Lamoureux. It also “will be reorganizing” under a new business model, the note says.
“Bob Dylan once wrote, ‘The times they are a-changin,’” the note reads. “That rings true this week for the readers of the County Courier.”
The paper’s final print edition ran a single, short story on its front page about rainfall in Franklin County following the intense flooding earlier in July. Inside, the 8-page issue carried several opinion pieces and local crime briefs, as well as obituaries, details of property transfers and a roundup of social gatherings in the town of Montgomery.
Since late last month, the County Courier has been posting some news stories to its website, which in the past largely carried just local obituaries.
The newspaper did not respond to multiple requests for comment this week about its decision to cease printing. No one answered the door at its office on Main Street in Enosburg Falls on Wednesday afternoon. The office appeared dark from the outside.
The County Courier is the latest in a series of Vermont newspapers to scale back following decades of decline in print advertising revenue, a trend exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Hardwick Gazette ended its print edition in 2020 and sold its building the next year. The owner of the Waterbury Record closed that paper in 2020. And the daily newspapers that once dominated Vermont journalism, such as the Burlington Free Press and Rutland Herald, have hemorrhaged staff and circulation for years.
The County Courier’s decision means the twice-weekly Saint Albans Messenger is now the only print paper regularly covering Franklin County. The Messenger has eight reporters and editors contributing to its coverage, according to managing editor Bridget Higdon.
Higdon said her newsroom was saddened to hear that the County Courier had stopped printing. “We want to support fellow newspapers and want to see local media survive,” she said, adding that the Messenger is “going to keep doing what we’re doing.”
Unlike the County Courier, the Messenger is owned by a national newspaper company: O’Rourke Media Group. The firm, led by executive Jim O’Rourke, also publishes three other papers in northwestern Vermont: the Essex Reporter, Colchester Sun and Milton Independent.
After buying the papers in 2018, O’Rourke cut staff in half and slashed the Messenger’s print schedule from six days to two, Seven Days reported in 2021. None of the three Chittenden County papers, meanwhile, have published print editions since 2020.
But that’s set to change, according to Higdon, who’s also managing editor of the Reporter, the Sun and the Independent. The company is planning for the Essex newspaper to publish a monthly print issue starting in September. And Higdon said she hopes the Colchester and Milton newspapers will begin printing monthly, too, at some point in 2024.
The new Essex print issue will feature coverage of government and schools, as well as “longer investigative pieces, eye-catching photography, obituaries, letters to the editor, community-contributed content and more,” according to an online announcement.
Change is also underway at another northwestern Vermont newspaper — The Islander, which largely covers Milton and the five towns that make up Grand Isle County. Tonya Poutry, who has edited and published that paper since 2016, and has worked there since the early 2000s, wrote in an article last week that she now intends to sell it.
Poutry chalked up her decision to the competing pressures of running another local business — The Green Frog, a gift shop in South Hero — as well as wanting to try something new. She wants to sell the paper to another local resident, she wrote in a publisher’s note, but will likely offer it to national newspaper chains if no one bites.
Poutry declined to elaborate on her written note when reached on the phone.
“I welcome anyone that would like to have a discussion to contact me by the end of August,” she wrote. “I love the Champlain Islands and am proud to have served you all for as long as I have.”
