 Hello, everyone. Welcome. I'm Carol Hinkel, president of Triple E. I want to welcome you to this, our fourth lecture of the spring series. Just want to mention that this weekend you should be receiving an email looking for your feedback on our first four lectures. So if you would fill that out and email it back, that would be wonderful. The program committee really appreciates that. So now we're in for a treat. I would love to now introduce Beth Wood, our program chair who's going to introduce our speaker, Beth. Good afternoon, everyone. It's a great pleasure to welcome back Ann Galloway, the founder and editor of VT Digger. If you were here for any of our previous talks with Ann at Triple E, you'll know that we have a very interesting hour in store for us. Earlier in her career, Ann was the Sunday editor of the Rutland Herald and the Times Argus and Barry Mott Pealier. And until 2008 when the recession hit, and like many organizations, they were forced to eliminate some positions, including Ann's. And it was at that point that in 2009, Ann launched VT Digger as an online news outlet for the state of Vermont. At that point, the VT Digger had one person staff, Ann, with $16,000 a year to work with. And it has evolved into a $2 million a year, seven day a week news outlet with a staff of 25. Ann has been a finalist for three important national awards for ethics and innovation and journalism, and for Diggers investigation into the fraud at JP. And if you were here for Ann's previous talk on that topic. You'll remember the very challenging and significant role that Digger played in bringing to the fore the fraud at JP. Last fall, Digger won four national journalism awards, including one for its coverage of COVID-19. And Ann is here today to talk about how Digger evolved and adapted during the pandemic. And it's with great pleasure that we welcome Ann back to Tripoli. Take it away, Ann. Thank you. Thank you so much, Beth. It's great to be with you all. Sorry, I was muted there for a second. And thank you for bearing with me. I do have a slide presentation. So I will attempt to share my screen here. And I promise it's not too long. So let me start this and there we go. Okay. So again, I'm very pleased to be with you today. Digger was founded in 2009, as Beth said, when, when I was laid off at the Rutland Herald in the Times Argus. And we're a little bit different from other news organizations. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about that. And then I'm going to talk about our COVID coverage during this very difficult time we're all in right now. So VT Digger was started in 2009, as I mentioned previously, and at the time, newspapers were really struggling. The Rutland Herald in the Times Argus had layoffs of about 20 people. The Burlington Free Press was also laying people off and that problem is only intensified over the past decade or so. Back in 2009, I did a lot of research and really honed in on a nonprofit model for online journalism, both because I did not have a million dollars in my pocket. And because I thought that a nonprofit model would be a way for people to be a part of the news, both by understanding how we spent our money. And also by enabling folks to contribute and being a part of it that way. So I'm going to go over some brief statistics around where we are with journalism at this juncture. Nationwide, we have seen a loss of about 50% of the nation's journalists and we continue to see more and more newspapers go out of business. In this year alone, we've seen another 60 newspapers go under. And as that's occurred, we've seen more corruption in communities across the country. We've seen a disconnection between people and their politicians and local government. It's really, I think had a huge impact on the vitality of our democracy and has resulted in more polarization. And big tech is really the culprit here. And, you know, Google and Facebook have really eaten up a lot of the ad revenue. Back in the day, newspapers had tremendous profits on average newspapers made about 18% a year in profits, and that all disappeared with the advent of online journalism and that's because Google and Facebook are able to sell ads at a much lower rate based on the number of people who come to a website. And if you happen to be running a really small newspaper that has 3000 or 5000 readers like a lot of dailies and weeklies in the state of Vermont. It's really hard to make enough money and compete with Facebook and Google. This is the hockey stick slide that I like to show that indicates how the profits have shifted away from newspapers to Google and Facebook. And, you know, we're in an economy now that is largely an attention economy. So what you choose to look at online is what succeeds. And so, you know, we are all now subject to information from a variety of different places and these are just a few examples. And I think that, you know, I think has been contributed of course to the demise of traditional newspaper ring in Vermont and nationally is this lack of trust in reporting, and also new trends in social media which people can make assertions that actually are false that can be interpreted as being true, simply because they're being published on on those platforms. And so that has kind of ironically drawn into question everything, including the reporting that people do locally. We can now get their news from social media. These are old statistics but it happens to be the most recent Pew Research Center report. And my understanding is that young people get almost all of their news from social media. So this gives you a sense of what's happened over the past several decades we've seen like I said a major decline in local reporting and without digger now has the largest newsroom in Vermont, and we've become the newspaper of record. That's not exactly where I thought we would end up at this time, I thought that we would be continuing to compete with some of the other big companies in the state, but those newspapers have really seen a huge decline in ad revenue and the resources that they've needed to do the reporting that really helps us feel connected as a state. Shockingly, the AP the Burlington Free Press and the Rutland Herald no longer cover the Vermont State House, which is kind of amazing since all three of those organizations were really instrumental in making sure Vermonters had all the information they needed about what lawmakers were up to and and the oversight function of the legislature in general, in which, you know, basically representatives and senators hold the executive in check. All of that reporting is now done by BT digger and to a certain extent by seven days and Vermont public radio. So digger is a little bit different from other news organizations in Vermont because first of all, we're, we're a nonprofit, and we have a mission. And our mission really is about public service, and it's not about profits. It's really about making sure that Vermonters have the information that they need on a daily basis. And this gives you a snapshot of what our daily reporting is like where we are. We've expanded into the Northeast Kingdom Burlington area and we now have two reporters in southern Vermont one who is with report for America, which is a new program sort of like Teach for America. But it's about making sure that recent college graduates have an opportunity to become part of reporting staffs at news organizations around the country. From the beginning, we've been very focused on public policy so that's why we have traditional beep reporting around business criminal justice, education, politics, health care, and energy and environment. We spent an awful lot of time on investigative reporting. And as Beth mentioned, our biggest story was the fraud at J peak, and I'm still reporting on that in the background. We are suing the state for the third time over records, and I think that in the next couple of months, we may finally actually get to the bottom of the state's involvement in this, what was the largest fraud in the state's history and the largest fraud in the EB-5 program nationally. These are some recent investigations that we have done on top of our very intensive COVID coverage, which I'm going to talk about in more depth here in a minute. But we had a big piece about the Slate Ridge Militia Training Center in West Paulette. And these were folks who have large caches of guns on the site and who have threatened the neighbors there. And on the weekends, they blow up cars and things like that to protect, basically to practice for some kind of action, which is not clear when or if this might happen. But there were threats of actions at one point. We were not able to trace anyone from Slate Ridge to the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, but there were concerns that people from the Green Mountain Militia and other groups might have been there. This report that we did came out in October. The New York Times actually published a piece that was largely based on our reporting just this week. We also had a major piece a few weeks ago about Black women leaders across the state, well, largely in southern Vermont, who have left positions of leadership because they've been threatened and discriminated against. And this was a big summary report that helped people understand the depth of that problem. You know, a lot of people asked me whether the nonprofit online news model is the way to go and I absolutely do think that it is. And that's, again, because of the way the business model has changed over time as a result of competition on the on the web. We are now part of the American journalism project, which is a cohort of about a dozen news organizations across the country that are really trying to develop a sustainable model for journalism in in states and cities. So now the subject at hand COVID-19. We have really devoted a lot of resources to coverage of the current virus. Every reporter in our staff was involved in the first few months in making sure that we were covering every facet of the impact of this virus on on the state population and so as you know, we saw cases rise here very quickly in March and April and the state really struggled to stay on top of it. I had some background conversations with state officials and beg the governor's office to hold more regular press conferences and that's one of the reasons why we now have there were three press conferences week now there too but that was a result of pressure that we put on the governor's office to get more information out more quickly and I think, you know, they saw the wisdom in that and kept it going and it's been hugely beneficial to the state for all of us to know what's happening on a daily basis in terms of the number of cases in prisons, the number of cases in towns across the state we pushed for that data the town by town data. We also pushed for the hospitalization data which was not forthcoming to begin with. And then we've had many stories about the unfortunate deaths of individuals, telling their personal stories, both in the spring and again in the fall. We've also kept very close tabs on access to everything from PPE to contact tracing to the efficacy of the vaccine, the new variants. We've just really continued to crank out a lot of stories on this particular topic and that's because this is all people out at this point I mean we are. 2020 was such an intense year for us, reporting wise because we not only were on overdrive with our covered reporting. We also were trying to pay attention to what was happening with the social justice movement. We had three separate legislative sessions over the course of last year and unprecedented one in the summer and then another one in the fall, plus the election. It was just an insane year for reporting. And this year hasn't let up either it's it's been really quite a time. And you know we also have new photographers on staff who have taken some stunning images over the course of the past year about coven and about a number of other issues that have come up. It's just so amazing we as a state we've changed so quickly, we've somehow pivoted to mail and balloting. You know we now have all these stand up vaccination sites around the state. We've worked with Walgreens and Kenny drugs. It's the Scott administration and the legislature have really stepped up to make sure that for monitors are able to function at this very difficult time. We've also done a lot of work in terms of economic reporting. We may have seen the issue with the 1099s we were out ahead on that story along with stories about the unemployment rate about restaurants that have gone out of business about the difficulties that the hospitality industry have had faced over this time. We've changed and we've tried to try to level best to keep up with it all. We've also written a number of stories about nursing home conditions and about the coronavirus sweeping through a number of nursing homes across the state and really it's just been such a tragic circumstance for so many people. It's because of our current virus coverage actually that our readership really skyrocketed last year we went from about 350,000 unique visitors a month to 1.4 million readers in March of last year 1.2 million in April, about 1 million in May and we knew that that readership would taper off a bit and we're now at about 800,000 unique visitors a month. On average we now have about 350,000 for monitors coming to BT digger every month. The rest of the readership is from out of state we've always had 5050 match up there. And again people are desperate for information so we've tried to meet that that need that has meant that our staff has been overwhelmed on every level. We've always from the beginning tried to make sure that we respond personally to everyone who emails us, for example, and because we have significantly more readers is become increasingly difficult for us to provide that kind of personal attention which we really do like to be involved in so we have instead to meet that need we have had a number of FAQ live events and we'll be having a number of events of this nature coming up in March around COVID and other issues. And so I hope you all can can join us for those will have Tracy Dolan the deputy commissioner in the Department of Health with us on Wednesday, next Wednesday. I also wanted to mention that we did eliminate our comment section which was quite controversial at the time. But the reason we did that was because it became a source of potentially people were publishing a lot of ill advised statements or misstatements about the vaccine about how COVID is transmitted about masks, and we felt that because of the seriousness of this public health crisis that it would be best to make sure that we weren't allowing those kinds of comments to come through. And so we did eliminate our comment section, which was, you know, something we'd had in place for more than a decade before we made that change so it was a huge decision for our team. Ultimately, we were glad that we did that we did start a letter section, which people seem to like. And it's amazing that when readers have an opportunity to reflect and actually write something in isolation away from the bottom of the story. Suddenly, the, the information seems to be more coherent, and people actually make logical arguments as opposed to spouting off. So this gives you a sense of our email subscriber increases. This doesn't show the growth at the end of the year, but we're now at around 47,000 subscribers, which was a huge increase over the previous year. We've also seen a big boost in membership, which is amazing. Readers really responded in terms of supporting us because of the covert coverage. And at the end of the year we actually had about 10,000 members. And this is about, this is a short slide about our future plans and this is the last slide so don't worry, I won't be boring you with more of that. But I wanted to let you know that we will be starting on some pilot projects this summer. What we're going to do with the community listening tour will be really getting a sense of what people need in terms of information local communities because we recognize that there are some places in Vermont that are becoming news deserts and we want to do it we can to make sure that people have the information they need locally. And we also will be partnering with other nonprofits around the country to help further the dialogue around how to continue to make nonprofit news sustainable. And of course we're going to be continuing our reporting on COVID and the economic situation. We're in the middle of the legislative session right now so we have a daily newsletter called the final reading in which we talk about everything that's moving in the house day by day. And we're also going to be launching this Sunday, a series of stories about the Coronavirus and how it's changed Vermont over the past year. So, look for that. That's a day over day series we have 16 stories that will be publishing over a 10 day series along with podcasts and video, and these FAQ live events that I'll be hosting so that's really all I've got and I'm ready to take your questions. So and the questions are in the Q&A at the bottom if you see that Q&A. Oh yes. Yeah, and also there's some in the chats to see when I click on those and then you can read the question. Okay, sure. Absolutely. Yeah, so there's a question from Ben about the Pew Research demographic study and about where people obtain their news and Pew Research is a big outfit in DC and they do independent studies every year about journalism. And then to vary from year to year and in 2016, they took a hard look at social media and at the time they found that most Americans were getting their news either from Twitter or Facebook. My understanding is that this trend is only increased more and more people are getting their news from social media and in fact, I've looked into the stats here in Vermont and about 168,000 people here are on Facebook. That's a huge percentage of the population. So it's kind of amazing. I mean, if you look at the total number of people who are on Facebook worldwide, we're talking about billions of people and it's really larger than that community is really larger than any single country outside of China. So it's really kind of a phenomenal situation. I was going to mention that I don't know if you all saw the news out of Australia with regard to Facebook and Google but the Australian government is basically requiring the two, the big two to pay for local news and through what they're calling the news media code. And I don't know how much Google has agreed to pay. I think that's to be determined but Facebook basically shut down all news posts for a whole day. And the outrage was so great that they reversed that in a few days later so I think that we're going to see some trends globally around this the European governments are also pushing Google and Facebook to pay for local news because I think there's a general recognition by politicians that if people aren't able to get. If they're not able to get reliable news that can have a huge impact on the way governments function so those are some encouraging trends. Somebody wants to know about membership and subscription and what the difference is membership is really a voluntary act. People become members when they donate to VT Digger, and they also can voluntarily subscribe to our newsletter which is free. We have many newsletters actually but but we count our total number of subscribers across different products as that $47,000 at $47,000 number. Other newspapers commercial newspapers sell subscriptions and that's really the only way you can get the news on their websites and we decided early on it digger not to go that route and that was because we wanted to make sure that anyone who came to our site could get access to the news if they wanted to. And this voluntary approach actually has been really important over time it's enabled us to grow the number of people who come to our site. And we have been able to raise the funds we need to pay the professional journalists to do the work so it's really worked out it's some I tell people sometimes that's a little bit like going to church, you know, or making sure the local church functions people make donations and, and, and somehow God willing, people still are able to keep the lights on at the building and and to pay the pastor what's a little bit like that at Digger you know there's a we do our level best to put the news out there. And to do this as a public service, and we're very grateful when people recognize the value of that and contribute so it really is a kind of voluntary exchange on on the part of readers that we deeply appreciate and you can become a subscriber, and that you know, how to become a subscriber and you can do that simply by going to our website at the very bottom in the footer is what we call it the footer, which has that would grain illustration at the bottom. You can see on the far right hand side that there is a list of newsletters, and all you have to do is click on the newsletter you want, and put your email address in the little white box, and hit send, and will you'll be signed up for the newsletter that you wish to receive. We have the daily Digger we have a weekly wrap up, and then we have a number of targeted emails around topics like health care and education and business and so on. And then if you want to find out what's happening in the legislature, or you want our coven email which comes out twice a week, you can sign up for those things too. Kathleen wants to know how community newspapers are doing. My understanding is that community newspapers are really suffering at this point. I have friends, a lot of friends in the industry, and local papers continue to shrink. You may have seen that the Stowe reporter, for example, that news group which also has news, the other paper and the, the other news and so on they ended up having to lay a number of people off, and they are down to really a skeleton crew of folks who are actually on the ground reporting. The Waterbury record went out of business and has been replaced by the Waterbury roundabout which is Lisa Scalodes project. And the St. Albans messenger and the Essex reporter the Milton independent and. Oh, there's one other paper I'm forgetting their four papers in that group, they're really suffering apparently, and have had more layoffs they've gone from about a dozen people producing news and those towns to just three or four people so you know, COVID has been difficult for a lot of newspapers. While we have seen an influx in the number of readers. I think it's been more difficult for the newspapers that are attached to print, and they're using the old model of advertising. It just is a very difficult model now. And fundraising, you know, raising the money is just increasingly difficult in our digger because we receive contributions as opposed to mandating subscriptions in which people have to pay in order to get access to the news. And we've seen growth, because we aren't completely reliant on advertising. So it is, it is a difficult situation for the local newspapers. Well, so we have some other questions I think this is from from Beth. Why are out of status reading digger. Well that's a good question. I like to say that Vermont is sort of like Ireland we have a lot of expatriates out there in the world who love the state. Either retirees or their people who went to college here or they grew up here and left to take jobs elsewhere. We have a lot of people who want to move here. Tourists want to know what's happening with the ski industry and so on. So there are a lot of reasons why people read us. I also think that, you know, people wanted reliable information about coven and my understanding from colleagues around the country. There aren't very many news organizations actually that are providing daily coverage of coven in the same way we have. I was talking to a colleague in province Rhode Island the other day who said that she has had a difficult time there finding out where to get tested, where to get the vaccine. There just is a dearth of information there about coven and so a lot of people are googling for information about the coronavirus and they're landing on our site for a basic information about the pandemic as well. So, could I explain about the Vermont Journalism Trust. The Vermont Journalism Trust is the nonprofit organization that is the parent company of VT digger VT digger is essentially doing business is a DBA of the Vermont Journalism Trust. The the trust really provides oversight the board of 15 people now who oversee digger are involved in making sure that we're doing all the things that will help us become stay and become successful over time so they're a governing board and the staff is involved in in managing the day to day product and the finances and so on. We VT digger merged with the Vermont Journalism Trust in 2011 a VT digger prior to that had a 501 C three pass through situation with the online journalism project in New Haven, Connecticut, and we merged with the Vermont Journalism Trust, like I said in 2011. Let's see what are the biggest challenges digger faces in the future. Oh well, there's so many challenges it's sort of hard to start with that question. We, you know we are continuing to grow which is a good thing, but it's also difficult to manage growth. We've grown very very quickly, you know we had half as many employees as we do now, just three or four years ago. I anticipate that we will have about 30 employees by the end of the year. We're building more capacity in our business office so that we can raise more money through underwriting and membership and grants and so on so that we can hire more reporters and more people on the desk to make sure that our company is in a ship shape, and that our reporting is accurate. We are also investing more in multimedia we have more video and podcast than we did in the past so growth is always a difficult thing to manage wisely, and so that's what is exciting and challenging at the same time. I also think that we're faced with some difficult choices in the near future around how to support local news. As I mentioned before, we have a report for America in Rutland and Bennington counties. We're hiring a second report for America reporter who will help us in Northern Chittenden County and Franklin County, and that person will start in June. We've not hired for that position yet but we're in that process now. And these regional reporters are very important as we try to make up the difference in local reporting. We don't want to big foot in and compete locally so we're trying to only run stories of statewide interest. So we have not tried to compete on the hyper local level with local newspapers because we want to do everything we can to support local reporting. But at the same time, we hear from people who are very desperate for information about some of the bigger stories that aren't being covered and so an example of that actually is Slate Ridge. That situation required months of research and reporting and the local papers didn't have the resources to take that particular project on. The same is true of an investigation that I published in September about Kern-Hatton and allegations of sexual abuse at that independent school. And these were allegations that had surfaced over time over 60 years actually and it had never been covered before. An attorney got involved in representing several of the individuals who have made the allegations and I got in touch with the attorney and then interviewed dozens of people who were impacted from the 1940s to the present. So those kinds of stories require time and most local papers aren't able to provide journalists with the time they need to pursue those kinds of in-depth projects. What changes do you think journalism may realize post pandemic? This is from Carol Hinkel. You know, I think that there has been a recognition by the American public that journalism is important and needs to be supported and that's largely because of the pandemic. I, you know, beyond the election cycle, which was also very fraught and we've seen a lot of polarization around racial justice issues and around politics. And so that can be a difficult thing for journalism groups to navigate. But beyond all that people needed to understand the science and I think most people understood that the pandemic really raised the level of need around accurate information. So post pandemic I think there will be an opportunity for newspapers to again prove their value by focusing on the facts, focusing on information people really need. And, you know, I neglected to mention earlier that as I was talking about the investigations that most of that work that we do at Digger comes from tips. They give us tips every day. They ask us questions every day, either through the tip form at the end of every story or direct, you know, every reporter has their email address on the site. My cell phone number is on the site. I get calls and emails. Our editors get calls and emails. And then, you know, people can submit these questions and tips anonymously through our site. And what I want you to know is that we take those questions and those comments very, very seriously and while we're overwhelmed. We do read every tip we read every email and we do our level best to try to address the questions and tips that people give us and there's a reason for that where we believe in making sure that we're reporting for the public for readers. We don't sit in an ivory tower somewhere and decide from on high what the news is going to be. And that's been what traditional journalism has done for decades, and that's not the way we approach our work. We see this as a public service and that's why we are responsive, and we want to take our cues from readers. And so I had forgotten to mention that in the talk, but I think that that is post pandemic. I hope that other news organizations take that same approach. I'm often asked to give talks to my cohort with AJP with other journalists and I always mention that because I do think that it's incredibly important for journalists to be responsive. One of the biggest reasons digger took off and is flourished. Well, I think that the reason that we've flourished is because we are meeting a need every day. And I think I forgot to mention I did say that we're a daily online newspaper. I think that a lot of organizations of our size around the country are not daily operations and I'm a kind of journey woman I believe in getting the job done. And so breaking news is very important. And I've never turned my nose up at breaking news and our staff doesn't either. You know, we are as interested in breaking news as we are an investigative pieces and public policy pieces. And that's part of the reason why people come to us because they know they can get the news of the day that we have become the newspaper of record through dent of hard work and and we're going to continue to do that. We took off really. There were kind of periods of time in which we grew. And I think the 2016 SEC announcement around J peak was really a watershed moment for us that put us on the map. We were picked up by a number of national publications prior to that we were relatively no unknown outside of the state. In state we were more of a thought of as kind of like a state house reporting shop. We've really gotten beyond that both with the, the notoriety we got as a result of the J peak investigation but also the covert reporting has also bumped us up again and I think that again, it's really because we have been meeting this need. And now someone else is asking about our many young people going into journalism. What is the outlook for the future of the profession. It's a really great question because one of the other jobs that were involved in as an organization is really training the next generation of journalists. We have found over time. You know I showed you that slide about the number of people who've left journalism who've been laid off basically. How do people don't aren't attracted to a dying profession. And so we found that there are fewer and fewer mid career professionals who are available to take jobs at digger. In fact, when we advertise for positions especially reporting positions, we tend to get inquiries and resumes from young people, rather than people in the 30s and 40s who have had an opportunity to work at other newspapers in the region. And so, for that reason, VT digger has become a little bit of a farm team. We have a very robust internship program in which we are selecting people from around the country to work for us. And we provide them with mentorship and training. And we hope that they'll be able to take jobs elsewhere around the country. Many of the interns and young reporters that we've had on staff have gone on to work at the AP at other nonprofit journals and outfits around the country. We have someone who's gone to the Boston Globe to VPR, and seven days and so on. So, we have a former intern who's now at the New York Times as an editor so our people get around. I'm really proud of the fact that we've had an opportunity to work with so many great young people who have gone on to continue to carry the torch for journalism in other places that's really important to the editing staff. Wellch runs the internship program for digger, and he just does an incredible job of making sure that we tend to the, as we put it, the care and feeding of the young reporters. The second question was, well, I guess to go back to our many young people going into journalism, I guess the heartening thing is that when I go to conferences, I haven't been to many lately because of COVID, but in the past when I've gone to the SGA reporters and editors conference or the online news association conference, these are the two, two of the biggest journalism conferences in the biz. We have seen many, many more young journalists going to the conferences I think there's an idealism now around the connection between good reporting and a strong democracy that has attracted thousands of young people to the profession. The question long term is, are there going to be the jobs there for young people as they try to move up in their careers, and that's kind of an unknown. And that's one of the reasons why, you know, I'm so happy that the American journalism project is looking to restore journalism around the country, they are in the midst of working to raise at least $50 million to put into organizations like ours across the country. And ultimately their goal is to raise a billion dollars a year in philanthropy to support hundreds of news organizations across the country, using the nonprofit model. So I think that they're really on to something. And I think that if we're able to figure this out in Vermont. Hopefully, this will be something that can be used elsewhere. Well, I don't know if there are any other questions. I know I was talking a little bit fast there at the end, but, and if you go back to the q amp a and scroll down there are some more. Oh, there are. Oh, let's see. I know I'm looking at the chat. Okay, let's see. Let's see there are a number of newsletters of each digger how are they different from the basic news site. That's a good question so the newsletters are just a convenient way to be reminded of the different kinds of stories we have that digger. So of course you can always look at the website if you want instead I know sometimes people get tired of too many emails in their inboxes I certainly feel that way myself since I get about 500 emails a day. But I do think that the newsletters are helpful if you want to sort of have an archive if you weren't able to go the website one day and you want to go back to it another day. The newsletters are convenient way to find what you might have missed the day before. The thing is that we're producing so much news a digger that if you're not checking the website twice a day you might miss something. But if you're a news junkie. The email is a good way to keep up so that's that's the main difference I see. I've noticed this here's another question I've noticed that seven days is now running full page cigarette ads in their print version. Do you have any kind of policy about advertising. I know finances have been difficult for newspapers. I do receive a note from a reader about this ad in seven days and I am kind of surprised that they are running a cigarette ad but let me talk about advertising it digger I don't know what the policies are seven days. So digger we do take underwriting, and we do have strict policies about keeping the sales operation very very separate from the newsroom so the newsroom never knows what's happening with the sales. We do have many advertisers who we write difficult stories about, including UVM Medical Center and Vermont gas. And we still continue to get underwriting support from those organizations even though we have written stories that are investigative in nature or that are certainly unflattering. We have turned down advertising. We have also last year we wrote a big story about first light about how they were using Huawei technology. And they pulled their contract with us, they pulled their 15,000 tell her contract so these sorts of things do happen. That's one of the reasons why I'm really pleased that we can rely on membership. To me that's a much more democratic way of supporting news in general because we, we don't want to be reliant on one big philanthropist or one big underwriter. That's just a recipe ultimately for disaster so the more people who can support us the better makes makes our finances stronger and enables us to keep going when a company like first light pulls out. Oh, another, another attendee asks in recent years have you perceived any changes in attitudes or behaviors toward journalists in Vermont. For example, accusations of fake news to meaning language such as the failing of an of a news outlet director implied threats and so on. The due attitudes here seem to reflect the current divisiveness over political issues, elections and the like. Well, thank you for this question. I, you know, digger has been subjected to a lot of accusations of fake news. That's a convenient way of saying we don't like what you're reporting. I've never received a live nasty grams around the current hat reporting, for example, people on Facebook often accuse us of, you know, taking a side we did not take a side in that reporting. I, I've been ever backwards to make sure that current hat and had an opportunity to respond fully. The same was true of our reporting of slate Ridge. The conversation with Daniel Bonnier the man who runs slate Ridge I also spoke with a member of the militia in White River Junction we always want to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to speak. And so the accusations of fake news are are fake. I mean, that isn't to say we're perfect we make mistakes, and we have run corrections and clarifications and so on but we do our level best to get it right. Governor Shumlin accused us of being like the National Enquirer when we broke the stories about JP and two years later, the Securities and Exchange Commission vindicated our reporting so fake news is kind of in the eye of the beholder Yes, it does have an impact on us because I think that when people question our integrity in that way. It can have an impact on other people who listen to listen to that. So, you know, when Peter Shumlin says, I, you know, you're with the National Enquirer that's a problem, you know, because he has influence. I also noticed a trend even with our current governor in which when we have raised critical issues. He will ask us, if we've done the investigation, you know why we haven't found you know if we, if we ask the governor's office why they haven't moved ahead with something. We throw it back at us and say, Well, you know, you guys can figure this out how come you haven't gotten to the bottom of it. Well, you know, we don't have subpoena power in case he hadn't noticed. So, you know there's a limit to how much we can do as reporters and so, you know holding government officials to account is part of our job. It's not, we're not trying to be mean. We do that work on behalf of the public to make sure that government is acting in the public interest. Oh, someone wants to know if we keep track of how many times our stories are picked up by other papers. We're not very good about that. We should be better about it. We get picked up a lot. I would say, you know, Well, we have a distribution service with some local papers so it's hundreds of times in a year. We don't get picked up by the New York Times every day though so that's why I mentioned it. That's probably maybe three or four times a year. So, statistics on readership County, but County by County, our largest readership is in Chittenden County, followed by central Vermont. And then actually the largest per capita readership is in LaMoyle County. We have a number of readerships throughout the state, and our readership numbers have grown in southern Vermont to wherever we invest resources, we tend to see an increase in readership and that only makes sense for covering a county closely, more people pay attention and start to read us. So, do you have a Zoom or do you reporters work from home? Right now, everybody's working from home, but we do have an office space. And we hope to be together again. Newspaper ring is is a team sport. And so we have many, many zoom calls. In fact, I have one at three o'clock with the editors and we make sure that we talk all the time, the reporters that they have the support they need. Someone wants to know what the ratio of subscribers versus frequent readers with no subscription might be. Whoa, that's a big question. I'm not sure I can answer that. I think. Well, we have 47,000 subscribers, and we have 800,000 unique readers per month. So, let's see on a daily basis we have about 50,000 readers. So, I guess it depends on, I need to do that data research I don't think I can answer the question. How will we overcome the era of fake news. Oh boy. I don't know. I think everyone has to get off Facebook that would be a start. It would be a good place to and Dan. Good. I'm sorry I didn't get to all the questions. Oh, that's great. We love having you come again soon. Thank you. Thank you. Take care.