It’s hardly news that print journalism has seen better days. Over the past two decades, newspaper circulation has plummeted 70 percent nationwide — or about 80 million subscribers. A third of newspapers that were operating in 2005 have closed.
More than 8,000 journalists have lost their jobs since 2022, including 300-plus earlier this month at the Washington Post. It’s no wonder so many traditional print reporters have struck out on their own or flocked to new platforms — or both. For example: Matt Taibbi, a former Rolling Stone contributor, created Racket News on Substack to write political commentary; Kara Swisher moved from the New York Times opinion page to podcasting.
In Vermont, the trend looks a bit different. All across the state Substackers are typing away, but how many of them are making a living at it? Using very different strategies, two veteran newshounds — Rob Gurwitt of Daybreak and Mike Donoghue of Vermont News First — are making self-publishing pay.
The Early Bird
Rob Gurwitt, founder and editor, Daybreak
For much of his career, Rob Gurwitt specialized in long-form, magazine-style journalism: 3,000- to 10,000-word profiles of, say, Laotian and Cambodian meat cutters in Kansas, a renegade traffic engineer in Vermont, and a federal demographer with a photographic memory.
But as the freelance market dried up, he took a different path. Gurwitt, 68, is the founder, editor and (mostly) sole producer of Daybreak, a weekday morning email newsletter and website that aggregates news, similar to HuffPost and Seven Days’ Daily 7. Lovingly curated with a smart, playful voice and intriguing images, Daybreak focuses on the Upper Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire and its environs.
Launched in February 2019 with just 25 followers, Daybreak has grown to more than 15,000 subscribers. Doing 15 or so write-ups per day of 80 to 90 words apiece, he’s connecting folks in the Upper Valley with their communities and sharing news that they might not find on their own. In seven years, Daybreak has shown that readers yearn for curated news chosen not by social media algorithms but, as Gurwitt put it, “just a guy sitting by the woodstove trying to figure out what’s going to work.”
Each day, the newsletter delivers clever teasers about regional news, politics and the weather. Gurwitt has spotlighted the controversy over a Woodstock police chief, a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town featuring Noah Kahan songs and a profile of a retired syrup inspector known as “Mr. Maple.”
Amid his breezy blurbs, Gurwitt sprinkles reader-submitted photos of beavers, owls, frozen waterfalls and the atmospheric phenomenon known as “sun dogs.” He also drops in poetry, letters to the editor and random music videos, such as a black-and-white video, first broadcast in 1964, of pianist Vince Guaraldi playing the now-classic “Peanuts” theme. Oh, and ads. The “sponsored” items, for which Gurwitt said advertisers pay “a few hundred dollars,” blend right in.
Gurwitt, a New Haven, Conn., native who now lives in Norwich, hails from a family of journalists. Gurwitt’s mother edited a magazine owned by Reader’s Digest. His sister Jonea was an editor at Consumer Reports. His other sister, Andrea, was a reporter at several New Jersey newspapers. Jonea occasionally helps Gurwitt write Daybreak pieces, as does his adult son, Sam.
Gurwitt cut his journalistic teeth in 1982 at Congressional Quarterly, the Washington, D.C., publication that covers the U.S. Congress. He described his first beat — redistricting — as a graduate education and “journalistic acid bath where any illusions about sweetness and light in politics get stripped away.”
In 1987, Gurwitt moved on to Governing magazine, focusing on local governments around the country. Long before issues percolate up to Capitol Hill, they surface in towns, cities and state legislatures, he noted. Covering them trained his eye to spot national trends. He worked there until 2007 while also penning freelance magazine pieces.
In the late 1990s, Gurwitt and his wife moved from San Francisco to Thetford, ostensibly to try it for a year. “But I knew within five minutes of arriving that I wasn’t going back,” he said.
By the late 2000s Gurwitt was freelancing full time for publications such as Mother Jones, Salon, Columbia Journalism Review and the New York Times. He also cowrote a book with Circus Smirkus founder Rob Mermin on the history of Mermin’s Greensboro youth circus, published in 2012. At that point, most of the magazine editors Gurwitt knew had changed professions or been laid off.
“I woke up one morning,” he said, “and realized I didn’t have any contacts left.”
Gurwitt understood he couldn’t keep practicing journalism the way he had. Yet he knew little about social media and feared the then-new technology.
So when a friend in Norwich suggested he join an Upper Valley startup called Subtext Media, later DailyUV, that was trying to help newspapers enter the digital age, Gurwitt jumped in. He lasted five years, until the company shifted its focus and didn’t need his journalism skills anymore. He left in 2019 to start Daybreak.
Going in, Gurwitt suspected that Upper Valley readers were hungry for a daily newsletter, but he had no idea what its business model would be. He kept working as a freelance editor to make a living and compiled Daybreak in his off-hours.
Each morning Gurwitt would wake up at 4 a.m. — today, it’s 5 a.m. — comb through a robust list of Google alerts and RSS feeds, then check about a dozen local and regional media outlets for overnight stories. Most mornings he had two or three blurbs to write, but much of his work was done the day before. By 6 a.m. he would hit send, then move on to his day job.
Initially, Daybreak grew slowly, Gurwitt said, “and then the pandemic happened.”
In March 2020, Daybreak had 3,000 subscribers. By August, it had grown to 7,000, largely due to public demand for town-by-town COVID-19 news. By year’s end, Daybreak was generating enough ad revenue and donations to become Gurwitt’s full-time job.
He continues to add content such as games, book reviews, videos, Dear Daybreak, a Thursday morning feedback column and “Weekend Heads Up,” a calendar of Upper Valley events. Once technophobic, Gurwitt now closely monitors his web metrics and online advertising, while also doing nearly all his own research, writing, fact-checking, subscription management and sales. One day, he said, he’d love to hire a reporter.
Gurwitt knows little about his readers. He doesn’t collect personal information about subscribers other than their first names and email addresses; he doesn’t want the responsibility of safeguarding their data.
Sophie Crane, executive director of Transom Story Lab and a lecturer at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., collaborates with Gurwitt on her nonfiction audio storytelling class. Her students read Daybreak, she said, because it’s “a fantastic opportunity for them to get out of the Dartmouth bubble and learn about the place they call home for four years.”
“I love the concept,” said David Blow, professor of communications at Vermont State University-Castleton. He said he enjoys Daybreak’s layout and quirky mix of news and features, and “Things like this are the way journalism is going in some small towns. And I bet people in those towns will tell you that it’s increased the health of the community.”
“I was still pretty old-school when I launched this,” Gurwitt said. “What I hadn’t expected … was how much people value hearing not just from me but from each other.”
Vermont’s Crime Dog
Mike Donoghue, Vermont News First
When Mike Donoghue left the Burlington Free Press in 2015 after 45 years chronicling the crime and sports sagas of the day, it seemed like the end of an era.
Donoghue began writing for the Free Press in 1968 as a high schooler. He ended his stint there at age 65, when he took a buyout from Gannett, the paper’s corporate owner. Retirement parties were held. State officials on the receiving end of his late-night calls breathed sighs of relief.
But a decade later, Donoghue has still not hung up his hat. Now 75, he continues to do what he’s always done: crank out daily missives on overlooked criminal cases, harangue lawmakers about the finer points of Vermont’s open records and meetings laws, and leverage his deep source list for scoops. These days, though, he works on his own terms.
Under the moniker Vermont News First, Donoghue has rebranded himself as a kind of cops-and-courts newswire, covering crime and helping fill the pages of small newspapers hungry for local reporting.
His byline is ubiquitous, popping up in papers in every corner of the state, from the Caledonian-Record in St. Johnsbury to the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus to the Bennington Banner. In all, about 20 Vermont news outlets regularly run Donoghue’s work.
“He’s everywhere,” said Jim Welch, a former Free Press editor who worked with Donoghue for about a dozen years. “He’s been at it for so long, he’s kind of an institution. And he brings important stories to light that otherwise wouldn’t be known, especially at a time when we’ve seen an incredible pullback on state and local media in Vermont.”
After leaving the Free Press, Donoghue, who also taught journalism at Saint Michael’s College for decades, took a short-lived break. But old habits die hard. Pretty soon, he was back at the federal courthouse in downtown Burlington looking for cases that piqued his interest. He started pitching stories to editors around the state whose papers, much like the Free Press, had shed staff — often including veteran reporters. That downsizing created a void in local coverage, especially on the law enforcement beat.
“I figured I had a little niche that I could really sell,” Donoghue said. Before long, editors started asking him to cover other issues “and this thing just kept mushrooming,” he said.
He calls himself Vermont News First, which serves as a kind of motto: “I’m gonna cover Vermont news,” he said. “And I’m gonna be first.”
I’m gonna cover Vermont news. And I’m gonna be first.
Mike Donoghue
The name rings true. In January, Donoghue broke the story that Windsor County Sheriff Ryan Palmer had been arrested on charges of sexual misconduct. Early last year, he was the first to publish the news, which he said came from “one of my favorite tipsters,” that a U.S. Border Patrol agent had been fatally shot in Coventry. That story became national news, and Donoghue is now covering the alleged shooter’s criminal case for a handful of local papers.
Donoghue produces stories at an impressive clip, publishing up to 10 a week. He’s been saying for years that he needs to cut back but seems unable to pull himself away from the next lead.
As an experienced reporter who has decades-deep source relationships with police, prosecutors, defense attorneys and state officials, he’s become indispensable to papers throughout Vermont.
He is now a part-time staffer at the Islander, for which he has covered a drug- and gun-trafficking case that has dragged on for more than four years. And editors at other outlets around the state tap him to cover some of their biggest stories. For Lamoille County’s News & Citizen, for example, Donoghue is following a potential capital case involving a former Stowe resident charged with fatally shooting two men in the Northeast Kingdom in 2023.
Dan Cotter, publisher of the 173-year-old Vermont Standard, said he wanted someone with “some real journalist chops” when a lawsuit alleging mismanagement and sexual harassment was filed in 2023 against the Woodstock Foundation, a prominent local institution.
He turned to Donoghue, who broke the story and then chronicled each development. The Standard has just three reporters; Donoghue freelances, but he might as well be a staffer, Cotter said.
“Now, he’s more or less our lead reporter working on the heaviest stories,” Cotter said. “In terms of who’s writing some of the most compelling stuff in our paper, it’s him.”
Cotter said Donoghue’s decades of source building give him a leg up over most reporters.
“So many of the people who would have the institutional knowledge … they are the ones that have been let go,” Cotter said. “Here you’ve got a guy that brings all that.”
Donoghue was the only reporter who covered a murder case in Hinesburg in depth a few years ago, said Sam Hemingway, a former Free Press reporter and columnist who edited Donoghue’s work for years.
“I would argue the kind of crime reporting he does is as important as ever,” Hemingway said. “Vermont media doesn’t spend as much time with those kinds of stories. Mike puts it on the map when he does it.”
Donoghue’s stories usually chronicle the fundamental details of a case rather than digging deeper into the systemic issues contributing to crime and violence in Vermont, said Hannah Riley Fernandez. She’s the director of programming at the Center for Just Journalism, a national organization that works to improve news coverage of the criminal justice system.
“He does represent this really important tradition in journalism,” Riley Fernandez said of Donoghue. “He’s a longtime beat reporter who documents what happens day-to-day.”
But without deeper context, she said, media coverage can contribute to the assumption Americans often make that crime is always rising.
Donoghue disputes the idea that his work hasn’t probed deeper issues.
“There are several laws that have been passed based on stories that I covered,” he said. “I’m still holding people accountable. When I can and when I think somebody’s not doing right by somebody, I write about it.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Self Reporting | As local news outlets shrink or disappear, two veteran print journalists have found success going solo”
This article appears in The Media Issue • 2026.
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