BRATTLEBORO — For readers of the Brattleboro Reformer, the surprise announcement last week that the newspaper will be sold in a handful of days to a consortium of investors from western Massachusetts comes as welcome news.
Brattleboro and Windham County need a strong, engaged daily news operation, and the infusion of energy, enthusiasm, and money into the Reformer could not be better news or come at a more critical time for an area that is in so many ways at a crossroads, with Vermont Yankee's long path to decommissioning, the state-orchestrated disruption of education and the local control to which it is accustomed, the path toward legalization of marijuana, the opiate epidemic as a public-health catastrophe, and so very many other critical issues that demand nuance and understanding.
It will be a long and difficult road ahead, and the journey is not for the faint of heart.
We at The Commons have looked on with sorrow - and with empathy for and congratulations to the Reformer's hard-working employees, many of whom are friends and former colleagues to our own staff here - as the once-proud daily has been strip-mined of essential personnel and squeezed for every dime, a process that has accelerated in recent years.
Our young newspaper, and the nonprofit that publishes it, caught fire in 2004 on the premise that absentee ownership of the daily newspaper - and ensuing lack of accountability to its readership - was unhealthy to community. At that time, the prevailing threat to community was media consolidation, which played out in the form of MediaNews Group - the Reformer's distant corporate owner - gobbling up smaller publications like the Original Vermont Observer and the Town Crier.
As the Great Recession slammed this country, MediaNews's buying spree began to look more like a Ponzi scheme. The business pages reported its corporate bankruptcies, mergers, reorganizations, and consolidations.
The paper has acquired a dubious reputation for disposing of good, dedicated, and grossly undercompensated employees, often fired on a whim, if they were given any explanation at all. In a business that depends on building loyalty and trust with sources, newsmakers, advertisers, and various constituencies, that loyalty and trust between this daily newspaper and this larger community were broken to the core at so many levels for so long.
Increasingly, entire departments disappeared from Brattleboro - if they were lucky, to Pittsfield, Mass., where the Reformer is now printed. More often, these jobs were dispersed to hubs in Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. By the time Digital First inked the deal with the town of Brattleboro to sell the Reformer's headquarters to serve as a new police station, the paper needed to lease back only a fraction of the space for its truncated operations.
Meanwhile, readers saw at the corporate level a slew of inchoate measures.
At one point, the company, now a mashup of two desperate chains and collectively known as Digital First Media, embraced the audacious culture of a visionary startup looking to bullishly reimagine its process and its product. But it couldn't reconcile that bold reinvention to a business-startup culture - after all, if Digital First were a startup, it would be expected to lose money - with the penny-pinching discipline of a company desperate to squeeze the last dime out of its quarterly profits.
And lately, all pretense of journalistic mission has vanished as the papers were put on the market, first en masse and then a la carte.
And amid all this corporate whiplash, its reporters, some with significant experience and talent, were paid as little as $12 per hour.
“That's what we pay entry-level employees to fog a mirror,” one incredulous business leader recently told us on hearing of the problems facing our daily newspaper.
* * *
That blunt recap - which, we acknowledge, can be uncomfortable and hurtful for some, though that is not our intent - is relevant for several reasons.
First, it paints the picture of why this sale is such promising news. It provides such hope for a staff that has worked for years with so much of the paper's future beyond any local control - yet who bore the consequences of corporate mandates for profitability.
Secondly, this brief history illustrates the very real and very daunting magnitude of how much needs to be fixed for the Brattleboro Reformer to be whole again and to thrive - to become one of “the best community newspapers in the country,” as one new owner boldly proclaimed. Under Norman Runnion's editorship and the ownership of a family-owned company, the paper once unequivocally was. Can it be again?
We hope so, and some first impressions are very promising. Right out of the gate, the soon-to-be-owners of the Reformer (as well as the Bennington Banner, the Manchester Journal, and the group's flagship property, The Berkshire Eagle) addressed - with admirable frankness and candor - the quality issues and broken business models of these once-great small dailies.
The new owners seek to address the distressingly thin content of the daily with more staff. They seek the return of the outsourced operations with more staff. The frequency with which they answered “more staff” at their press conference in Brattleboro on April 21 is a great acknowledgment of the huge body of human capital that has been considered expendable to the company over the past 20 years.
But doing so will take a long time and a lot of money. How much time and how much money cannot possibly be projected.
That reality, in turn, demands a huge leap of faith, infinite patience, an irrational love of community, and pockets that are deep beyond measure. And although the new owners professed love for and commitment to this community, the Brattleboro Reformer is not their newspaper in the same way that The Berkshire Eagle is their newspaper.
Do the investors, who originally set out to purchase only the Eagle, have the will and the wallet to sustain that commitment for years - and it will take years - without any guarantee of return, in an industry that is in economic and technological disruption, in a region that is in economic transition, in an area that simply is not their home?
Those questions are realistic and fair, and it behooves us to ask them in the spirit of ensuring what we all want: a healthy infrastructure for all of us who report, write, edit, consume, react to, and make the news in our communities.
* * *
We at The Commons have undertaken our most recent fundraising and membership campaign in large part to make sure the community has a stable and sustainable news source in the absence of community confidence in Digital First Media, particularly after last year's layoffs. We have put a lot of work and heart in exploring our capacity and our role under these circumstances.
In light of this new announcement, we will, of course, evaluate our plans and strategies accordingly. Ultimately, Vermont Independent Media's mission is to support quality journalism in Windham County. It is definitely not part of our plan - and it never has been - to go head to head with a viable daily. The best we should say now is, “Stay tuned.”
One bright note is the new ownership's immediate enthusiasm and reception to the idea of the Reformer collaborating with its media brethren in ways that simply would not have been sanctioned under Digital First policies. We are excited to imagine new possibilities for good journalism together.
With that said, we steadfastly embrace our not-for-profit model, which embraces journalism as a fundamental public service at the deepest levels. And we will continue to build a strong news organization that can respond to the community's needs, by continuing to work hard to make The Commons the best weekly it can be. We will continue to produce this still-improbable-but-starting-to-thrive grassroots publication through sheer force of will and the support that we hope that we continue to earn from you.
So we will operate our nonprofit and our publication with integrity and with fondness for the Reformer staff. We will embrace the healthy competitive tension to the extent that it benefits readers and the community. That's really good for everyone.
We will do so with all the very best wishes for the Brattleboro Reformer's well-being - and for the success of people who have the motive, means, and opportunity to make a difference in western Mass. and southern Vermont and who have the audacity to put real money on the line to make it happen.
That's rare, and that's a blessing for everyone.
May they succeed.