Vermont news outlets work hard to report on what’s happening around the state. They make less of an effort to cover themselves — or each other. Here are some changes you may have missed.
1. Good Sport
Colchester
Vermont Public’s Mitch Wertlieb started “The Sports Rapport” at just the right moment: four days before the Winter Olympics. He’s since interviewed Vermont-connected Olympians Ben Ogden, Mac Forehand, Jack Young and Julia Kern on his new weekly show about the “world of sports in Vermont and beyond.” It live streams on YouTube on Monday at 2 p.m. and airs on the radio later that night, at 8 p.m. What a welcome change to hear a journalist asking informed but probing questions of athletes, instead of the usual: “So what happened out there?” Wertlieb is the Terry Gross of sports. He’s carved a niche that combines all of his skills and interests — the only thing missing is the Grateful Dead. Read more about Vermont Public in this issue.
2. New Kid on the Block
Burlington
Kristen Fountain is the new coordinator of the Vermont Journalism Coalition, a nonprofit recently created to support and sustain local news. She took over for Paul Heintz, formerly of Seven Days and VTDigger, who got the org off the ground while freelancing for the Boston Globe — his new full-time employer.
One of Fountain’s first jobs in the new role was to emcee a February 4 event at the Statehouse, at which Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas handed out $100,000 in civic journalism awards to 16 local media outlets and the Vermont Community Foundation released a report on the state of local media. Last Monday, the new VJC board of directors gaveled in 39 founding members, including Seven Days.
3. By the Book
Burlington
The name of the North Avenue News has changed to Burlington Community Newspaper, but everything else is expected to stay the same at the Queen City’s other paper, the tagline of which is “News Good for the Whole Month.” After operating it for 25 years and growing circulation from 4,000 to 17,000, Cliff and Ellen Cooper sold the media property in January to another couple of print fans: Michael DeSanto and Renee Reiner own Phoenix Books in Burlington, Essex and Rutland, as well as the Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock and local publisher Onion River Press. Because DeSanto’s father ran a printing press, he told Seven Days, “I’ve always had a romantic notion about that.”
4. Solo Act
South Burlington
Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? After 45 years at the Burlington Free Press covering cops, courts and sports, Mike Donoghue “retired” in 2015 and reinvented himself as a freelancer. His one-man wire service, Vermont News First, is selling stories to outlets across the state. Read all about it.
5. Radiohead
St. Johnsbury
A year ago, Vermont Sen. Russ Ingalls, a Republican real estate agent from Newport, bought a chain of radio stations that can be heard throughout the Northeast Kingdom and into New Hampshire. He paid $1 million for the company that broadcasts on seven stations, including WMOO “Moo 92,” JJ Country and WIKE “The Notch” in Newport; Magic 97.7, Kix 105.5 and WSTJ out of the St. Johnsbury area; and WMTK “The Notch” in Littleton, N.H.
That’s Trump Country, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Ingalls added Fox News to his mix of national sources. “I don’t give two shits about Trump. I really don’t,” he told VTDigger last September, a month after he made the change. He said listeners were asking for more “positive” stories about the country.
6. Trading Spaces
Stowe
The Stowe Reporter has new digs. Staffers spent the second week of February moving the operation from 49 School Street, where it has been for half a century, to 782 Mountain Road. The old space had become “too big, too old and too expensive,” according to majority owner Robert Miller, who lives out of state. Since editor-publisher Greg Popa left in 2024, Tommy Gardner has been running the five papers of the Vermont Community Newspaper Group: In addition to the Stowe Reporter, that’s the News & Citizen of Morrisville, the Other Paper of South Burlington, Shelburne News, and the Citizen of Charlotte and Hinesburg. Despite the disruption, everything got out on schedule, Gardner said: “We didn’t miss a beat.”
7. Changing the Station
Waterbury
Waves were inevitable when Myers Mermel bought WDEV-AM at the end of 2023. What listeners were likely not expecting from the new owner, who ran for U.S. Senate as a Republican, was more progressive programming. Last year the station started airing a weekday podcast produced by the Nation. The Tuesday host of the “Vermont Viewpoint” talk show is former lefty lieutenant governor David Zuckerman. Coming soon, according to Mermel: a one-hour weekly segment called “Mamdani Time,” hosted by the Nation’s D.D. Guttenplan.
Mermel and business partner Caroline McLain just bought a broadcast license for a radio station in Plattsburgh, N.Y., that shut down last May. The plan is to run Plattsburgh news on WIRY AM in the morning and simulcast WDEV the rest of the time. Mermel and McLain are looking to acquire other radio properties, too, in Vermont and New York.
8. In and Out
Montpelier
VTDigger CEO Sky Barsch was instrumental in recruiting the nonprofit’s new editor-in-chief. Pulitzer Prize winner Geeta Anand left a deanship at University of California, Berkeley’s school of journalism to take the top job in the Vermont newsroom last summer. Anand met her husband, a Plymouth native, while attending Dartmouth College, and one of her first gigs in journalism was covering Springfield for the Rutland Herald. Anand and Barsch worked together for six months before the latter announced she would be leaving in June, after three and a half years of fundraising, recruiting and negotiating a contract with the VTDigger union. “My goal was to leave the place better than I found it,” Barsch said.
9. They Sure Type Fast
Northfield
Everybody is wondering who is pulling the levers at Compass Vermont — a news site on Substack that is generating a shocking number of byline-free local stories. Is it a journalist or a robot?
10. All-Stars
Middlebury
Nationally renowned Vermont journalists Garrett Graff and Bill McKibben know a good newspaper when they read one. That’s why both gave rousing speeches at a fundraiser late last year for the Addison County Independent in Middlebury. After 42 years of running the newspaper, Angelo Lynn has started asking readers for donations in addition to being paid subscribers — doing so makes them “Addy All-Stars.” He also created a nonprofit, the Addison Independent Trust, to accept tax-deductible gifts. Lynn has three daughters, all of whom are in the business. Polly and her husband, Jason Mikula, own and manage the Mountain Times of Killington. Copublishers Christy and Elsie are poised to take over the Addison Independent.
11. Daybreak-ing News
Norwich
It’s a good thing Rob Gurwitt of Norwich is a morning person. He gets up before dawn to find out what local news broke the night before so he can incorporate it into his newsletter, Daybreak, which lands in more than 15,000 inboxes by sunup. It’s become a vital part of the media ecosystem in the Upper Valley and beyond.
12. Readers to the Rescue
Woodstock
The 173-year-old Vermont Standard boasts that it is the oldest continuously published weekly newspaper in the state. It survived floods and fire before the COVID-19 pandemic. In the midst of it, though, the paper was losing $150,000 a year. Closure looked inevitable. That’s when publisher Dan Cotter started asking readers for money — Woodstock is a great town for that! — in front-page columns. He also established a nonprofit, the Woodstock Region Journalism Foundation, to attract big donors. It worked. In 2024, Cotter raised $429,000 in local philanthropic support.
13. The Zine Scene
Arlington
State-owned Vermont Life magazine ceased publishing in 2018, but three glossy magazines live on: Stratton Magazine, Vermont Magazine and Manchester Life Magazine. As of December 2025, the trio has a new owner: John and Jen Kane Paterson of Weston. Their company, Green Mountain Media Group, purchased the titles from Joshua Sherman of Old Mill Road Media. Sherman will continue to operate Berkshire Magazine as well as his state-of-the-art recording studio in Arlington. Both Patersons have impressive résumés, with combined experience in advertising sales and investment banking. Fun fact: John is the son of award-winning children’s author Katherine Paterson.
14. Planet Brattleboro
Brattleboro
The Town of Brattleboro doesn’t know what to do with Hank Poitras. Also known as Planet Hank, the controversial citizen-journalist and conservative commentator has been videotaping street fights and police interactions with homeless people and posting the footage on his website, Brattleboro News, since April 2024. Last October he took the helm of the Windham County Republican Committee. At a January 27 selectboard meeting, the owner of Mocha Joe’s Café on Main Street suggested an ordinance that would restrict members of the media to “a clear safe perimeter … at active police and first responder scenes” to protect the privacy of victims. Poitras showed up at the meeting, too — to hand out copies of the U.S. Constitution. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “All Over the Map | What’s news in Vermont media across the state”
This article appears in The Media Issue • 2026.
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