It was Tom Kearney’s voice that led him to a career in journalism.
As a self-described “extremely shy” 13-year-old student at a Catholic high school in Brattleboro, Kearney had been convinced to take part in an oratorical contest sponsored by the American Legion. He didn’t win, but when it was over the general manager of a local radio station approached him and asked, “How’d you like to be a radio announcer?”
Kearney worked his way through high school and college with the help of a series of radio gigs — including one memorable shift 60 years ago last month, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He became the news director at a Keene, New Hampshire, radio station, then a reporter at the Keene Sentinel, then city editor, managing editor and executive editor. After close to four decades at the Sentinel — including two at the top of the masthead — Kearney decamped to Vermont, where he led the Stowe Reporter and its sibling papers and, eventually, landed at VTDigger.
Last week, after more than three years as a senior editor at the statewide, digital news organization, Kearney brought this latest chapter to a close.
“I’ve had an enormous amount of fun,” he said. “Telling stories about what’s going on in the places where you live is pretty exciting and really of service.”
Kearney, 76, isn’t calling it “retirement,” per se. He’s already lined up one part-time editing gig and also hopes to teach journalism. But after undergoing heart surgery last year, Kearney said, he wanted to scale back.
At VTDigger, which he joined as weekend editor in August 2020, Kearney played a variety of roles. He helmed the opinion section, working closely with Vermonters to share their views in columns, commentaries and letters to the editor. He served as interim managing editor. And, most recently, he was the news organization’s first dedicated southern Vermont editor — a return to his Brattleboro roots.
Kearney was best known at VTDigger as a caring and compassionate supervisor, equally comfortable working with a novice reporter as a grizzled veteran.
“Almost uniformly, the Digger reporting staff is excellent,” he said. “It was a pleasure to work with reporters who were smart, who worked hard, who really cared about what they were doing and wanted to make waves.”
VTDigger CEO Sky Barsch first met Kearney when she was working as a reporter for the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus. At the time, Kearney’s spouse, Maria Archangelo, was the paper’s top editor.
“Tom and Maria have been thoughtful mentors over the years,” Barsch said. “Both have demonstrated the importance of creativity and innovation when running a news organization and that it’s important to remember to have some fun along the way. We’re going to miss Tom so much here at Digger — but he’s offered to continue to be a mentor, and I warned him that I fully plan to take him up on that offer.”
Kearney has seen quite a bit of change in the industry since he joined it in the late 1960s. Back then, he tapped out stories on a Smith-Corona manual typewriter. Over the years, he ushered his newsrooms through several technological revolutions and countless publishing platforms. In 2016, Kearney was ahead of his time again when, after Archangelo landed a job in Philadelphia, he became an early remote worker at the Stowe Reporter.
The concept was so novel at the time that Poynter wrote a piece about Kearney with the headline, “This man edits three Vermont papers (and some glossy magazines) from Philadelphia.”
That experience helped Kearney make the transition to VTDigger several months into the Covid-19 pandemic, when the news organization’s Montpelier office was closed.
“It’s been entirely Zoom,” Kearney said of his time at VTDigger. “I’ve never been to the office. So I had to learn a whole new management style, how to relate to people without seeing them in person.”
Last week, Kearney and Archangelo traveled north for VTDigger’s holiday party in Montpelier — an opportunity to celebrate Kearney’s tenure — and he finally met many of his now-former colleagues in person.
Despite all the change in the industry during his tenure, Kearney’s commitment to the bedrock principles of journalism have not wavered. He has fought for decades to keep government meetings open and government information available to the public. During his time at the Sentinel, he estimates, the newspaper filed more than 125 legal actions and took a dozen of those to the state supreme court.
Why? “It’s easy to hide stuff as a public official if you can do it with impunity,” he explained. “If you know you’re going to get sued, it changes the ball game.”
Kearney’s commitment to press access and freedom have earned him many top awards, including the Academy of New England Journalists’ prestigious Yankee Quill, the New Hampshire First Amendment Award and a perch in the New England Newspaper Hall of Fame. On his last day at the Sentinel, in 2005, the mayor declared it “Tom Kearney Day” in Keene.
Kearney’s advice to journalists also hasn’t changed after all these years.
“Don’t sit back and wait for the news to come to you,” he said. “If you’re going to tell the whole story to the people who are reading it, you have to go find it.”
