It takes more than a free lunch to round up a roomful of working Vermont journalists. On June 13, before and after a buffet, the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News served up a day of programming in the Silver Pavilion of the Alumni House for those of us in the business of informing the public about what’s happening in our state.
CCN director Richard Watts deserves credit for convening the group — for the fourth year in a row — and connecting us to identify common threats and opportunities. While his official job is to build the student journalism program he founded, which last year won a $7 million grant from the Knight Foundation, the local media ecosystem around it faces urgent and existential challenges, from finding the money to pay reporters to ensuring they have access to the news they seek.
I first interacted with Watts when he was director of UVM’s Center for Research on Vermont. He published a newsletter with stories I often wished we’d had in Seven Days — and I told him so. Not surprisingly, Watts is a former journalist. He also ran political campaigns. Savvy, strategic and driven, he’s a master networker.
Watts was the one who thought to invite former Vermont Supreme Court justice John Dooley to the conference to talk about current threats to press freedom — and had his phone number. In a session titled “Defending Journalism in Vermont and Beyond,” the retired judge schooled the crowd on the 1964 precedent-setting legal case, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, that defines “defamation” in this country — arguably, with too much wiggle room.
Dooley was in good company with Lia Ernst, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont, who has been involved in almost all of the recent immigration cases that have wound up in local courts. She had practical advice for journalists covering protests and also crossing the border. Matt Byrne — an attorney with Gravel & Shea who represents many Vermont media outlets, including Seven Days, on First Amendment issues — talked about ways to strengthen local laws to better protect news publishers and reporters.
All agreed that Vermont’s public records law, which now has countless exemptions, badly needs an overhaul so that journalists can better access information the public has a right to know.
That would involve the legislature. In the audience were Lt. Gov. John Rodgers, Rep. Chea Waters Evans (D-Charlotte) and Sen. Andrew Perchlik (D/P-Washington). Also, Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas. The four — plus Rep. Barbara Rachelson (D-Burlington) — were recognized as “public policy champions” for supporting a bill that almost became law this year. H.244 would have mandated agencies of state government to spend a percentage of their advertising budgets with local news outlets.
The proposed legislation got as far as it did because Paul Heintz — formerly of Seven Days and VTDigger — was guiding it through the Statehouse. He was our full-time political editor in 2017, when he successfully lobbied the legislature for a Vermont shield law for journalists, which protects reporters from having to reveal confidential sources and information.
Now freelancing for the Boston Globe, Heintz accepted this CCN-funded short-term lobbying job to address the business challenge of running a news operation in the age of Google, Meta and Amazon. H.244 passed the Vermont House but not the Senate, and in the course of crafting the bill, Heintz discovered just how difficult it is to learn how and where state agencies are spending taxpayer dollars on advertising.
Pushing for this legislation was essentially the first act of a new entity, the Vermont Journalism Coalition. Until now, the state’s media outlets have formed their trade organizations based on medium. The Vermont Association of Broadcasters serves radio and TV, while the 158-year-old Vermont Press Association represented the state’s newspapers. But as local print media outlets have folded and shed jobs, there are fewer bodies to attend meetings or compete in awards contests. The Vermont Press Association hasn’t convened its members since before the pandemic.
The Vermont Journalism Coalition will represent local news publishers of all shapes, sizes, platforms and business models. It arose out of conversations between Seven Days, WCAX-TV, Vermont Public, VTDigger and CCN and quickly broadened to include community weeklies across the state.
In a press release, the coalition declared its aim “to advocate for the rights of journalists, provide business and legal support to members, and raise awareness of the industry’s critical mission.” Heintz is the part-time director. Funding it for two years are CCN and the Vermont Community Foundation. The latter org is a conduit for the money Vermont could receive from a national fundraising effort for journalism known as Press Forward.
All of this is good news, for sure, though it remains to be seen whether any of these efforts will deposit cash in the hands of local news reporters and publishers. A free lunch doesn’t pay the bills. In the end, it’s going to take action by all of us — the media, the legislature and readers like you — to keep Vermont media alive and kicking.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Mixing Media”
This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2025.
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