Media guide: Vermont villages are publishing boom towns

Vermont Business Magazine, Feb 1994 by Youngwood, Susan

THE CREDO OF The Other Paper, a community newspaper in South Burlington, is simple: "If Burlington fell into Lake Champlain and didn't jog South Burlington, I wouldn't print it." said publisher and editor Ruth Poger.

The publisher of The Colchester Chronicle, on the other side of Burlington, has a similar standard for deciding what news he prints. "If Governor Dean were shot in Burlington, it wouldn't make it into the Chronicle unless he staggered across the town line and died in Colchester," said Guy Page.

The Colchester Chronicle and The Other Paper are two of more than a dozen community newspapers started in the last two decades in Vermont, part of a national trend of growth of suburban newspapers and spurred by changing computer technology.

Community newspapers in Vermont have one thing in common --they concentrate almost exclusively on local news. State, national and international news is kept out of the paper unless given a local angle. But other than that, Vermont's community newspapers vary in format, ownership and philosophy.

On one end of the spectrum, some community newspapers in Vermont are nonprofit organizations, run by volunteers who feel they are doing a community service. On the other end are for-profit newspapers owned by professional journalists.

Some of these papers are free and mailed to every to resident. Others rely on subscriptions and newsstand sales.

"While we all need to know national and state am international news, community news affects your children in school and affects your quality of life at home," said Angelo Lynn, publisher of The Addison Independent in Middlebury and president of the New England Press Association, a trade organization of community newspapers. "In community newspapers, at least 80 percent of the writing is about local and regional news."

What is probably Vermont's newest community paper printed its first issue this fall. The Montpelier Bridge was created by a group of volunteers and mailed free to every Montpelier resident. The Bridge ran stories on the city and school budgets and the creation of a poetry journal al Montpelier High School, and listed all real estate transactions from June through October.

The Montpelier Bridge joins a group of small papers in communities ringing the Barre-Montpelier area--the towns of Calais, Middlesex, East Montpelier an Waterbury all have community papers.

Many Burlington suburbs started community papers in the last 20 years--South Burlington, Colchester, Shelburne, Essex, Milton, Hinesburg and Williston.

The editors of these suburban papers say they are not competing with the daily paper because they perform a function the daily paper cannot.

"The local daily covers international, national and state news, and covers a large number of towns," said Phil Dodd, who helped found The Montpelier Bridge. "It would be difficult for them to cover all the local news in a thin paper."

Jean Cate, who puts out the East Montpelier Signpost, agrees. "The paper would weigh a ton," she said. "We focus on bitty stuff that they have no call to, and that's the way it should be."

Some publishers hope that by reading the local weekly, citizens will be inspired to read other papers. "What we would hope from readers is that they would not be satisfied with just the neighborhood news and continue to look to the area dairy and national dailies," said Lynn. "There isn't a legitimate community newspaper that doesn't believe that readers shouldn't be reading the daily. We are not meant to be a substitute to the daily at all, but a supplement."

Do Vermont's dailies agree?

The Burlington Free Press, Vermont's largest daily, seems to have responded to the increased competition by beefing up its coverage of surrounding suburbs. A daily "Towns" news page gives information about local communities gathered by a network of stringers. A telephone call to Free Press publisher James M Carey asking for comment was not returned.

John Mitchell, publisher of The Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and The Rutland Herald, says he does not view the new papers in Washington County as competition. "It's like comparing apples and oranges," he said. "Because they are Free, you don't know if there is a demand. All we know is someone is publishing them--the true indication of whether there is demand is whether someone will pay for it."

Even some larger community papers are getting competition. The Addison Independent, which covers 22 towns, has seen two smaller papers started in the last few years: The Five Town News, which covers the five towns in the Addison Northeast Supervisory School Union, and a paper in Vergennes. "It makes us do a better job covering those small towns," Lynn said.

Nationally said Lynn "There has been a huge increase in suburban weeklies, which ring the larger dailies and provide the community news people want. The biggest growth in newspapers has been in suburban community newspapers. The message to large dailies not covering news at the lowest common denominator is that people want to read that stuff."