Dan DeWalt
The Commons was born out of a need to free ourselves from the corporate gatekeepers who decide for us what is newsworthy and what is not. As this paper has grown and matured, it has indeed made its own decisions about what to print, free from profit and relatively free from advertising pressures. Our community is richer for it.
More obstacles remain, however, to give everyone in our society a voice and a stake in determining what is worth knowing about.
In addition to articles that shed light on the plights of the marginalized and of those without power, journalism must figure out a way to make those of us in society's mainstream understand that those who live outside of the mainstream are not just interesting subjects for our study and reflection, but that they are equal and vital parts of our society who deserve a platform for telling their stories, that those stories are important for all of us to hear, and that those folks are just as important to our society as are the rest of us.
News organizations have lately developed a warped sense of “fair and balanced” reporting, not by embracing and promoting a point of view like Fox News famously does, but by a new paradigm that demands every “liberal” view be met with an opposing “conservative” view, regardless of the merits of the either side's arguments.
What they haven't noticed is that they are earnestly covering both sides of the same coin.
This is not the coin of the realm, but only that of the rich and powerful who are running the show badly.
As the Commons team moves into the future, let's give it our support and encourage them to erase the invisible but ever-present boundary between those of us who feel like we belong and have a stake in our society and the “others” who we now only understand through the occasional quasi-exotic news story.
In most ecological settings, life is richest in the margins. Our community is no exception.
Dan DeWalt, a community activist, musician, and teacher, is one of the founders of our newspaper.
Kate Casa
It's only right that a paper so deeply rooted in its community was born at a Brattleboro kitchen table.
To appreciate the impressive position The Commons and Vermont Independent Media have achieved in the community, and in journalism as a whole, it's important to look back at the origins of this extraordinary organization.
The idea of an honest, authentic community-owned news organization grew out of a series of events at the town's beloved Brattleboro Reformer, a paper with an extraordinary history of courageous, thought-provoking journalism.
It was the Reformer's crop of world-class columnists - Judy Gorman, Marty Jezer, Joyce Marcel, Elayne Clift, Jim Austin, and others - that initially attracted me to the gutsy little paper with an outsized voice. Their wise, funny, introspective, extroverted, shrewd opinions on everything from East Timor to local trash collection were what prompted me to pack up my kids, pets, and worldly possessions and move from California to Brattleboro to take the job as managing editor in August 2001.
Once there, I understood that the paper was at its zenith when it mirrored the actions, ideas and intellect of the diverse, creative, smart, loyal, often-contradictory values of the communities it served.
It was a balancing act - one that I did not always execute with acumen or grace - but it was an experience that I will never forget.
Unfortunately, for all its strengths, the Reformer was not immune to journalism's shifting tectonic plates. Corporate ownership often came up against the best interests of the good people who ran the paper and those who read it.
And so it was that a band of idealistic local folk came together, first amidst the warm oak and sardonic wit of Judy Gorman's Union Hill kitchen and later in the basement of Brattleboro Savings & Loan, to brainstorm a way to safeguard local journalism.
There was Dan DeWalt of Newfane, the man who refuses to stop believing in the power of the people and their right to have a voice; Pat DeAngelo, walking the precarious progressive highwire of the Brattleboro Selectboard; Curtiss Reed, the town's social conscience; the indefatigable (in body and soul) Barry Aleshnik of Guilford; the pragmatic and exacting Barbara Evans; the powerhouse intellect of Marlboro's Alan Dann; the unstoppable Ellen Kaye, home-schooling Sophie even as she brainstormed media literacy.
From points north, we got caution and counsel from some of Vermont journalism's brightest minds - Shay Totten and Greg Guma, who themselves were pioneering a new statewide news organizations, and Norm Runnion, who had been at the helm of The Reformer in its heyday.
(My porous memory puts me at risk of offending the many, many others who brought their ideas and brilliance to some or many of our weekly meetings, and so I apologize here for the vagaries that age, distance, and time have imposed.)
It was under the influence of their heady cocktail of opinions and ideas and hope that these people embarked on a quixotic mission to build a nonprofit news organization grounded in the values and interests of its readers, one that would be accessible to all, give voice to the voiceless, and faithfully reflect the wide array of Windham County perspectives.
There were no financial investors, and nothing to take to the bank except the rich faith in an extraordinary community to step forward and support this project. The only margin for failure lay in the distinct likelihood that the collective energy of this crew might fail.
Miraculously, it never did. Emotions flared, egos emerged and subsided, energy waxed and waned. Good people left, but others stepped forward to pick up the slack and bring new ideas into Vermont Independent Media to make it what it is today - a living, breathing ideal of what community journalism should look like.
As one of those who shared this dream in 2004 - 300 amazing editions ago - I am immensely proud to watch The Commons not just succeed, but thrive, in the true spirit of those who dared to dream.
Kate Casa, an interim managing editor of The Commons in 2006 and 2007, remains a friend of the newspaper. Her dismissal as the Reformer's managing editor in 2004 was the catalyst that sparked the organization of The Commons and Vermont Independent Media. She works in nonprofit development in the nation's capital.
Chris Lenois
First and foremost, we should feel fortunate that we live in an area covered by a variety of media: print, broadcast, and online. There are larger communities in the country which are completely devoid of a local voice. Here we have a choice, which, we're always told as Americans, is healthy.
Even better, the media choices we have aren't necessarily ones where we have to select one over another. Each has its own voice that fills the community's needs in a particular way, and people gravitate to what suits their respective tastes and timeframes.
Even though Internet technology has inserted itself into the relationship between media and the community, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. Fears about the “end of good journalism” feel misplaced - the opportunity for dialogue alone should ultimately enhance quality. I also think the obstacles of monetization and profitability will be resolved as more people become attuned to the changed landscape.
The Internet changed the parameters of a community, to be sure. No longer is it a geographic region, or even a point-of-interest. Community begins with an individual and stretches as broadly as one desires. So long as media provides content that is meaningful, however, it has a place within those self-determined borders.
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I remember being really excited when The Commons started up. I had worked for a similar publication called L'Observateur, which covered an area between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. L'Observateur was slightly different in that it was a for-profit paper that published twice a week, but both it and The Commons strive to provide newsbeat-style reporting for a largely rural community in the same, expansive manner that dailies often cannot for reasons of space, deadlines, economics, and the like.
But The Commons also offered a little something extra. (What might be called a lagniappe down in Louisiana.) Food and Drink sections, arts calendars, and editorial commentary of the caliber you'd find in its bigger-brother dailies and hipper-sister alt-weeklies. It was also free! Which, at least in urban areas I've lived and visited, gives periodicals an additional dose of street credibility.
A good name sets the right tone for a publication's content. The cajun influences of the L'Observateur moniker instantly placed it as the paper of record in the minds of a people who believed you had to be able to trace your kinfolk back seven generations to be considered a local. The Commons similarly clues you into its ethos to provide a platform for voices in the community to expound on issues both near and far.
In an age where expert content can be imported easily (and oftentimes more cheaply), I like that The Commons draws from the voices of individuals right here among us. In many ways, the analysis and critique has more credence because we know it is filtered through the lens of living in the same community.
I share these thoughts not to assert that The Commons is necessarily better than other media covering the area, though I do think it's quite a good publication. We as a community are the better for having what it offers among the assemblage of print, radio, television, and online media keeping tabs on the greater Brattleboro area and the issues that affect all of us who live here.
Chris Lenois, a graduate of Brattleboro Union High School and the University of Vermont, lived and worked in New Orleans from 1999 to 2006. He now hosts the “Green Mountain Mornings” show every weekday morning on WKVT.
Lise LePage
When Chris Grotke and I launched iBrattleboro.com in 2003, we were generally regarded as crazy. Didn't we know how much trouble we were starting by letting people speak for themselves?
We knew.
But we also knew that hearing from people who aren't government, corporations, or professional media is necessary if we are to have democracy. Or so we thought.
Today, there's some debate as to whether we even have a functioning democracy, and this with a plethora of social and citizen media all but drowning out the mainstream. Apparently, free speech is only part of the equation, because we have plenty of speech.
Part of the problem might be the kind of speech we're engaging in. Over a decade ago, when iBrattleboro first got going, lots of people were writing and commenting on very controversial issues. In the present day, not so much.
Blame it on the National Security Agency or even the Facebook effect (aren't party pictures fun?), but people seem less willing to put their words on the line than they used to be, except on the safest of topics.
This is a shame. It robs people of a chance to express their views and the rest of us from being able to read them.
Fortunately, we know from experience that like the news, social action moves in cycles. When people have something to say, citizen media is there to let them say it. The need to speak out on one issue or another drives most of our membership at iBrattleboro to sign up in the first place.
Even if many people have returned to lurking, citizen media remains hugely important on the local level. No one else is going to cover all our news - let's face it - and in a town as active as Brattleboro, it takes a lot of media to keep us informed.
I love that we have a citizen newspaper, radio station, television station, and an online news site. Future historians will have lots of material to pore through when they reconstruct us years down the road.
Still, it's hard to believe that The Commons is already 10 years old. It doesn't seem that long ago that I was on the board, helping to come up with a plan to launch.
My fellow board member Alan Dann's memorable phrase for the board's dilemma was that they needed to “sh- or get off the pot” after almost two years of work. The Commons finally did, in January 2006. I still have the the notes that were to become major elements of their launch list, including “paper boys” (board members) hawking issues of The Commons at Gallery Walk.
Congratulations to The Commons for 10 years of local news coverage, and congratulations to all the citizen media outlets around town for staying alive in trying times and documenting the ongoing story of Brattleboro through the eyes of its citizens.
Lise LePage has co-published iBrattleboro, with Chris Grotke, for 12 years. The couple also owns and operates MuseArts, a web development and consulting firm.
Martin Langeveld
Printed newspapers are often seen as an endangered species these days. I've described them that way myself in blog posts about the media business, and even the publisher of The New York Times has allowed that “We will stop printing The New York Times sometime in the future, date TBD.” Weekly newspapers are still faring better than dailies, but generally that means they are just declining less rapidly.
There are many reasons for this, but the biggest one boils down to this: There are no advertisers, brands, or ad agencies on Main Street or on Madison Avenue who are trying to figure out how to spend more money in newspapers. Instead, they are taking money out of print and out of broadcast and putting it into digital media like websites and mobile apps. At the same time, new generations of consumers prefer to consume news and information online rather than in print or on broadcast.
The Commons, over the course of 300 issues, has learned to buck both of these trends. Especially since shifting from monthly to weekly publication a few years ago, it has gained both readers and advertisers and continues to improve its coverage of Windham County affairs. Probably no other weekly newspaper in the country can say it has doubled its readership in such a short time.
What accounts for this contrarian performance? It's simple: The demographics of Windham County give it a strong appetite for good journalism, and The Commons happens to do a great job filling that need.
That said, I do have a concern and a wish: The Commons has an outdated, inadequate website, which is long overdue for a major overhaul. These days, most Internet reading, especially news reading, is done on smartphones and tablets. (Have you tried reading The Commons on a smartphone? Don't.)
While many Commons readers might express a preference for print, the younger half of its audience, and even a lot of folks in the older half, increasingly expect to be able to consume its content online, including on phones and tablets. The Commons, like The New York Times, should anticipate that some day it will no longer be printed. And like the Times, it needs to be doing all it can, now, to be ready for that day.
Martin Langeveld, a former publisher of the Brattleboro Reformer, blogs about the media business at NewsAfterNewspapers.com, and serves as marketing director of Strolling of the Heifers.