 We're going to get started pretty soon. Sounds good. Well, we'll let those people stand in line, too, if that's OK. So, jeez, I mean, I think it's better when we can't ever see. So good evening, and welcome to the bridge's 30th anniversary celebration. My name is Phil Dodd. I'm president of the Friends of the Bridge and co-president with Greg Gradel of Capital Region Community Media, the organization that publishes the bridge. Unfortunately, Greg could not be here tonight, but I gather he is getting some good cross-country skiing in Alaska while he visits his daughter and family. The forecast for Fairbanks tonight is snow with a low of two degrees. I like to ski, but I'm glad we're not dealing with that quite yet. Before we get started, a few details. The bathrooms are in the back corner over here. Use any of the marked exits in case of a fire or other emergency. And if it's raining when we leave, be careful on that white stone walkway up front. You can get a little slick when wet. Finally, please silence your phones for the panel presentation. To start off, I want to offer a big thanks to all of you who came tonight. This is a major fundraiser for the bridge. And if we learned nothing else in the past year, it is how important support and donations from our readers are to the viability of the bridge. Many of you and others not here tonight stepped up in a big way after the flood, which had put us in a tenuous situation. With your help, we avoided being one of the many newspapers across the nation that have had to shut their doors in recent years. It is clear that fundraising is critical to keeping local journalism alive at a time of declining print advertising. So if you get inspired tonight, you were invited to make another donation by stopping by the front desk. A few months ago, the bridge obtained a 501C3 nonprofit status from the federal government. The bridge had been operated as a state nonprofit, but because in the past, 501C3 approval was difficult for news media to obtain. In 2018, we created a separate fundraising nonprofit called Friends of the Bridge, which did get 501C3 status. But now that the bridge is a 501C3, we plan to merge the two organizations. So note that in the future, fundraising letters and the like will come to you from Capital Region Community Media and not Friends of the Bridge. Now I'd like to introduce the bridge's editor-in-chief, Cassandra Hemingway, who has a few remarks of her own and will introduce our panel. Cassandra is a Smith College graduate who worked for the Hardwick Gazette before moving on to other jobs. She continued with freelance writing over the years and returned to full-time journalism when she was hired by the bridge in October 2021. We are very pleased to have her on board. Please welcome Cassandra. Thank you. Before I introduce our panelists, I want to thank the people who sponsored our event. So big thanks to the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, Alive, SR Services, Noel Johnson Insurance, Forget Me Not Flowers and Gifts, Morse Block, Deli, and Lights on Marketing. But also, we had quite a few local restaurants and food vendors donate the food tonight. So special thanks to Albert Sabatini, who organized the whole thing. And yes, especially. And thanks to the Roots Farm Market, Vermont Salumi, rabble rousers, delicate decadence, sarduchies, Red Hen Bakery, Morse Block, Deli, Vermont Creamery, Vermont Bean Crafters, All Souls Tortillas, and Morse Farm. There's going to be some good eats in a little while just after the panel. The other thanks that are due are to the folks who actually organized this event and spent almost every day, weekend, week out, preparing the art auction and all of the details around this. So special thanks to Mary Edmaison, Jake Brown, Dee Dee Brush, Stephen MacArthur. And unfortunately, both Dee Dee and Stephen can't be here tonight. But they were very involved in putting this together. Nancy Reed, who's over there checking people in. Linda Radke. And I said everybody. So I just want to say a word about what it means to me to be the editor of The Bridge. To me, I don't ever forget how many people are involved and have been involved. I'm very aware that at every point in history, wherever we are, whatever we're doing, we are metaphorically standing on the shoulders of those who came before us, whether we know who they are or we don't. In my role here as editor-in-chief of The Bridge, I am standing on the shoulders of half the people in this room, maybe more than half the people in this room. So I truly am honored that you've entrusted me with this precious thing, this community resource. And thank you. There are only a few paid staff at The Bridge, but every issue involves the work of dozens, literally a couple dozen per issue of contributors, volunteers, photographers, cartoonists, many of whom do their work behind the scenes. So I'd like to take a moment to thank them. And the way we're going to do that is we're going to do a little exercise. If you were involved in creating The Bridge in its early days in the 1993, I'd like to ask you to stand up or raise your hand if you aren't able to stand. Where are all our early founders? Yay. And there's Phil. Is Nat Frothingham in the room? There he is. Special thanks to Nat Frothingham. As I think many of you are aware, he spent many, many years keeping The Bridge going. And it wouldn't be here today without what he did for, I think it was around a decade and a half or longer. So please stay standing if you stood. And we're going to ask everybody who serves currently or formerly on The Bridge board to please stand. And anybody who serves now or formerly on the Friends of The Bridge board, could you please stand or raise your hand? Thank you. Please stay standing. Now, here's where we're really going to see some movement. Will everyone who has ever contributed to The Bridge as a writer, photographer, cartoonist, ad sales, delivery, a staff member paid volunteer, or any other capacity? If you've contributed to The Bridge, please stand now. Thank you. Nice. Thank you very much. So with that, I'll introduce our panel, who's been very patiently sitting here. This is our main course. And these folks have volunteered their time to discuss preserving democracy through local journalism, which has always been relevant, but feels more relevant now than ever. And they might send you home with some calls to action to keep local. Just by being here tonight, you are helping local journalism. We'll start with Skye. Skye Barsh is the CEO of Vermont Digger. She joined Digger in April 2023 after an extensive career in local and national media, including roles at the Burlington Free Press, the Barry Montpelier Times Argus, and the Nation Magazine. Most recently, she served as vice president of sponsorships and market strategy for Chalkbeat, one of the largest nonprofit news organizations in the United States. Previously, she served as associate publisher of Vermont Life and was the owner, editor, and publisher of Vermont Sports. And let's not forget, she's also the owner of Alpen Glow Fitness downtown. So if anybody likes spinning or exercise, you'll see Skye there too. Welcome, Skye. And thank you for being here. Now, if any of you don't currently listen to Rumble Strip, get on your podcast app and download every episode now and bring your tissues, because you will cry when you hear many of them. This Erica Halleman is the producer of Rumble Strip and independently made podcast in East Calis. Rumble Strip was named number one podcast in 22 by The New Yorker. And among the top 10 podcasts of 2022 by The New York Times, the Our Show series was named the number one podcast of 2020 by The Atlantic. She is also a reporter at Vermont Public. So she's kind of busy. And we appreciate her. And Kevin Ellis will be our, oh, sorry. Thanks, Erica. And our moderator, Kevin Ellis, is a communications consultant and writer working on the nexus of political and cultural change. Ellis spent 10 years as a newspaper reporter in Nashville, Washington, DC, and Burlington, Vermont, where he covered politics and environmental issues. As a Washington correspondent for the Tennessean in Nashville, he covered presidential campaigns and energy and national security issues. His experience includes senior positions at two political consulting firms where he ran strategy campaigns, crisis communications, speech writing, and public relations efforts for clients nationwide. He was co-founder of Ellis Media Public Affairs and he spent 22 years at KSE Partners LLC, a leading government affairs and communications firm. Thank you, Kevin, for moderating. And now I will move aside so you, oh, before I step away from the microphone, something very important. This evening, we have a silent art auction. You've seen our donations with over 35 works of art up for bid tonight. And I apologize that we underrepresented the number in our social media posts. 23 Vermont artists donated the works of art in the back. Many of those artists are here tonight. 100% of the proceeds from the silent auction will be directly donated to the bridge. The bidding will end at 7.30 tonight and you must be present to win. So if you have bid, if you're the winning bidder, at 7.30, take your winning bid sheet and the piece of art that you bid on to the checkout table over there by the front door and we'll give you one more, a couple more reminders of that later. And thank you to Mary and Maison for putting that together. There's Mary, okay. At some point, if you haven't checked out, we have some of the first copies of the bridge that were ever made over on that table and extra copies of more recent bridges you're welcome to take. And now I will let Kevin and Erica and Skye take it away. Thank you. Thank you. Erica was saying earlier, it's a little intimidating seeing, knowing almost every single person in the audience from one facet of your life or another. And I think we all know each other from different facets of our lives. So it's scary and also kind of fun. Okay, one quick war story. We're gonna go fast here. And I promise it's my only one. So back in the 80s, when you could sneak into the Washington Post newsroom and look at the job ads on the bulletin board when you were a young 25-year-old, I saw an ad for a news aid to the legendary investigative reporter, Bob Woodward. I grabbed the slip of paper and walked, terrified over to the woman who had the job at that point saying that I would like to apply because she was leaving. She said, why don't you just talk to Bob about it right now? And I said, okay. And into Woodward's office, I go at the height of his, this is 85, 10 years after Watergate, he is at the pinnacle of his fame. And he says, you do not want this job. He told me, get out of Washington, get a job at a small newspaper and learn how the world really works. So a year later, I'm a young reporter at the Nashville, Tennessee and covering the police with a walkie-talkie and a police scanner in my car for $18,000 a year, working from 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. And then hanging out on Music Row after that, learning really how the world works. That newsroom was a loud, bustling, crowded, smoke-filled, politically incorrect space with all sorts of journalistic and life lessons being taught and passed down every minute of every day. That's what a newsroom was. And it was a place where democracy was watched and practiced really hard. It wasn't always a nice and easy place, but it was real and a crash course in how government works, how inequality works, how the system works for better and worse, school boards, health commissions, the mayor, the governor, the public works department, unions, the things that make a society go. The Tennessean is near dead now with a carpeted newsroom quiet as a church mouse, the pushy, pestering reporters and scrutiny of government long gone replaced by wine columns, restaurant openings and corporate ribbon cuttings. I tell this story not to depress you, but to fire you up because there is a solution to this problem of news deserts, of a lack of local reporting. We've lost a third of our newspapers. That business model is broken. It's not coming back. So this view that we're gonna revive the Burlington Free Press is a myth. And the faster we move on in my view to this, the better off we're gonna be. And there are many solutions to this problem and two of those solutions are sitting right here. I don't need to introduce you to them because they have already been introduced. So I wanna start with Skye and ask you, what do you do and why do you do it? Is it the high pay, the short hours and the celebrity fame? Why do you do it? It's too important not to. Put the mic up there. Sorry, it's too important not to. I care so much about Vermont and functioning free press is foundational to a democracy and to a healthy society and to get to know our neighbors. And in the absence of that, that's really bleak and not a world I wanna live in. So I wanna be part of the solution. Erica, why do you do what you do? And then we'll get to how you do what you do. But why do it? Why bother? I think my reasons are more selfish. I grew up here and I love it here and I hate it here, which I think is, you know, which is the product of deep care. And I think that I felt that I wasn't hearing this. I didn't, the stories that I was hearing on Vermont Public Radio at the time when I started this show, do I need to move forward or closer? That's our roadie. Maybe if I sit like this, I don't know. Okay. I wasn't hearing this. Do you want me to use the other mic? We could pass it back and forth. No, try it. Okay. You know, I wasn't hearing the sound of where I live on the radio in its all, its sort of idiosy, its ugliness. I mean, I think that media sort of covered, bridge-ifies this place. And I love all the dark parts of this place too. And the second reason that I wanted to make stories is because I had a son who was growing up and seeing me disappointed in myself. And so I had to get going so that he could be some kind of model that I would be failing and succeeding and I'd be striving or doing something that I cared a lot about. I see John Dylan in the audience, so I'm kind of nervous. Oh, I saw him too. Right. I saw him too. Yeah, there's all sorts of people who are making us really nervous. Skye, I think it's important to tell people how it is you do what you do. You gotta sell subscriptions, you gotta raise money, you gotta have a staff, you gotta pay them. You have a union. You have to deal with that. You have to get it right every day. Talk to us about how hard it is. Good question. It is very, very, very challenging. There's no doubt about that. And especially in the times that we live in, there's no, we're not sitting on a pile of cash from advertising like papers were in the 70s, right? Every day is thinking about how we're gonna fund ourselves and what we're gonna do with that very precious funding to best fulfill our mission. And a lot of our thinking is around that. How do we continue to innovate? How do we make sure that we are representing the communities that we cover? How do we ensure that we're not reporting on but reporting in communities? How do we know that we are covering issues that matter to our readers and not just what's happening in the legislature? All of these questions we think about all the time. And I don't think there's any perfect answer or perfect way to do it. I think it takes a lot of, our team is so passionate and so intelligent and it takes the help of our board. It takes the help of our readers giving us tips and feedback for better or for worse and just continuing to move forward and get better and better. What is the biggest mistake that you have made in your tenure? Oh man, I wasn't, I wasn't prepared for that question. How about this? I'll give you a hint. Actually- Who's feeding Kevin these questions? Not mistake, but I want to stay with how hard this is. And therefore the value of the bridge and what you both do. There was a young African-American boy accused of a crime. Somebody ran his picture and his name, I don't know if it's you or not, I can't remember. In my day in Nashville, I had a 350 pound Southern Georgia Redneck editor behind me saying we run their names. We run their pictures, we run their names and we don't care what happens to them. That's changed. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, we chose not to run his name. He was 14 and despite that he was being charged as an adult, he's a 14 year old and I think he's accused at this point, it's not proven. And from the accounts, it sounds like it likely was an accident and that he's a young boy, right? And to publish his name, other news outlets did, it's out there, but we made the choice that it wasn't the right call now. It might be in the future, but I don't think rushing to do that is gonna serve anyone, especially not him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Erika, how do you do, I've gotta read something. A description of Erika Heilman. Where is it? Here you are. In the words of seven days writer Chelsea Edgar, Erika Heilman sometimes sounds as if she's calling from a closet in which she has barricaded herself against an intruder. She wants to tell you she loves you and that she left the check for the plow guy on the counter in case she doesn't make it out alive. You know this? Her voice is an incongruous combination of fragile and brusque, salty and wonderstruck. Her friend Amelia Meeth describes this particular timbre as crotchety northeastern bad bitch and hot college art teacher. And as a Peabody award winner, there's something going on here that you've figured out and your audience has figured out. How did you figure that out? You mean how I do what I do? I don't know. I mean, when I started, I didn't know what I was doing. I just weighed it in. And I think that if you fall in love with people, which I try to do when I interview people, that if you, I fall in love with people and I think that if the other thing is I do believe that everybody I talk to knows something that if I knew, I could get through my day better. And so if you believe that, then you can create a bridge to other people. But I mean, I want people to fall in love with each other. That's the goal. But mostly I want to. So it's a selfish pursuit, first and foremost. But then it's to invite people in to fall in love also. And I think you can't judge. You can do two things. You can either judge or be curious, but you can't do them both at the same time. And so that has to be the motor. So in other words, you can interview somebody who you vehemently disagree with about all things. But if you are trying to tease back how they arrived there, there is a story. And if I can learn it, I'll be better for it, as will we all, I think more than ever, we need to do that. Did that, is that the answer? Yeah. So can I ask about that falling in love thing because you and I were trained not to do that, right? We don't like these people. We're not invested in these people. Our job is to get the news, get it in the paper or online as fast as possible and we don't much care what happens. And her reading about her, she takes an opposite tack. How do you deal with that at Digger? I would say that I personally, when I was a reporter, never had that approach. I think journalists write because they care. And you have to be objective and sometimes you have to have a sort of a personal shield. But the work comes from caring. I think there's a lot of different ways to do it, but I think curiosity, like leading with curiosity is at the heart of everything that any good journalist does. When you, is that what you look for when you hire a reporter? So since I've joined, we've split up who's hiring for the newsroom. And so I'm the CEO and I'm hiring more for the business side. And then our editor in chief, Paul Heinz and Maggie Cassidy who's our managing editor, they're really directly hiring the journalists. But from a strategy point of view, I would assume we all agree that curiosity is very paramount. Erica, can we go back to, I've got the on-farm slaughter woman in my head for some reason, I'm not sure why. Mary. Yeah, Mary? Again, why, I'm trying to get back to why the bridge people do what they do and why you do what you do. Why did, in the beginning, tell us about the beginning of Rumble Strip? What were you trying to do? Well, I think it's important to make clear that what Sky does and what I do are not the same thing. I think what I do is meant to complement. In other words, if I'm not telling the news, the news is critical. What I'm trying to do is add context to the news. So if you're doing a story about the mental health care system in Vermont and how messed up it is, my mom will read about it in BT Digger and she'll care, but she's got laundry to do. She doesn't care that much. She cares, but she's not invested in it. But if you tell the story about what, the guy at Washington County Mental Health is doing with his spider plant in his office, like how's he getting through the day and then who are the clients and who are these people, what are they doing, then my mother will understand that it's part of, these are her neighbors. So I think that these two things go work together. I would point out that when we first asked Erika to be on this panel, her first response to me was, what on earth could I have to contribute to this discussion? So it's obvious, clearly. Yeah, I feel the same way about WDEV when I do the radio show, when I come out of the studio, dripping sweat with having thought that I've had a guest on in an interview that has changed the world. Sometimes it has. And then you walk away and realize, you ask yourself, and I wanna ask you this, sometimes nobody cares. Like they don't call, they don't stop you on the street. Do you feel like you're changing the world for the better? Or do you sometimes go home and say, nobody cares, nobody's writing me a check, and I wanna give up? I don't ever feel the latter. I think that certain stories elicit more response and others sort of take more time for folks to sit with them. I think it all matters. I think part of the work we do is bringing up stories that aren't already in the forefront. And sometimes that it just takes a little bit longer to hit. But if you're working with a good team and you've decided this is an important story worth telling and we're gonna do it, there's a lot of thought that goes into that. Can you describe the financial model of Digger for some who might not know? Because this is not the Burlington Free Press. We're not selling car ads in the salad days of the 1970s and making 20% profits for Gannett. You have a different model and this model has spread the country and it's working. Lest we all get depressed, this is working. You used to be, maybe you still are, the second largest online nonprofit journalism outfit in the country after Texas Tribune. I don't know if that's still true. We're somewhere up, we're somewhere, yeah. Tell us how it works financially. Our financial model is that we're a 501c3 nonprofit and every dollar that we make goes back into our mission. So there's a few different ways that nonprofit news organizations are going about what they charge for but we believe that there shouldn't be a cost barrier to news much like the bridge, it's available for free so folks from all economic backgrounds have access to the information that they need to make informed decisions about their lives. So how we pay for independent journalism is very expensive to produce. It takes staff, it takes public records requests, it takes legal fees, it takes all of the folks who stand up the operations. So we fund that with grants, with major donors who support our work and we have a very healthy membership program so you might be getting emails right now this time of year for our annual fund but we have 9,000 individuals who contribute to VT Digger every year. We do sell ads, it's a portion of our business, it's not the 20% that it was back in the day but I actually see that changing when Google and Facebook first came out and all of the digital advertising revenue, that's where all the advertising revenue went from the papers because they had sophisticated, maybe some people would say surveillance-type technology that can serve you the exact ad at the right time of the thing you were just talking about with your friends, we can't do that but I do see that more and more businesses are being conscious of where they spend their ad dollars and they know that by supporting the bridge or a Digger that they're contributing to their community and they're making the news be available for not their employees and their neighbors and they know that that money is going to a good cause. Erica, what's your business model? My business model, I've been aggressively downwardly mobile since I was 28. That's really how I roll. I mean, my business model is I have a job with the Vermont Public, thank God, and I love my job but I don't make any money. I mean, I make some money but I don't make a lot of money and I haven't tried super hard to make money. Independent podcast producers don't make a lot of money and if I could run ads but I don't really, I don't want to. So there's your answer, sorry. Are you still in the closet? Yes. You're still in the closet? Yes, I am. What is the link? What's the title of this show tonight, Mary? The Call to Action, the preserving local, preserving democracy via local journalism. Again, what's the link between that, between what you do and the democracy? Okay, so I said I wouldn't answer this because I don't, I'm gonna just wing it and then I'm gonna go like that and you take it on, okay? Okay, I wanna read the obituaries. I wanna know who won the basketball game. I wanna hear the really slow, boring stories about the select board meeting. Those things remind me that I live somewhere, right? I mean, I'm obsessed with the national news as I'm sure many of you all here are but I wanna, this is where I live and it seems to me that the bridge reminds us where we live. We cannot lose these institutions that remind us of the kind of granular, sometimes boring, sometimes confusing, frustrating, beautiful, heartbreaking realities of the town where we live. That's what we're doing, you know? I mean, that's democracy, right? I mean, we live in a town meeting culture. We all have to do stuff to make it work here and we need our local newspapers. That was my... This guy? That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Yeah, I don't know, maybe it's just me because I was raised by a mother who the New York Times is like out to the driveway, get it, read it, fight about it, dinner and I still get that thrill when the bridge arrives and you get to pick up seven days at the co-op and you might even sneak in the New York Times. Now you've got the motherload of reading and whether it's the historic building corner in the bridge or Nona Estrin's little nature drawing or the birdwatch or that filled, I keep kidding him, that incredibly long piece by Phil Dodd about post-flood recovery. It was like three pages full, you know, that matters. It might take you three days, but it matters and I think it's, I like to say it's about the democracy because I've got a Trump thing going on back here but there's community in there, there's a place to live, there's roots, there's I'm from a place. I don't know, you talk about it. Yeah, it is the information that we all need to know what's going on, whether it's at our local town hall or at the legislature or on a national level in a free democratic society, a free press is beholden to no one. So it is not state-run media towing the line for the people who are in charge. It's challenging assumptions and it's asking questions that our readers have and it's a way that our readers know when something's percolating that matters to them and they have the information that they need to go to their representatives and ask questions. I can't imagine a functioning democracy without the press. The MacArthur Foundation has pledged 500 million to support non-profit journalism around the country. And I read a letter, I read an email, a blog post by the head of the foundation who said it's nowhere near enough. So can you talk about that a little bit about the, again, back to the financial model? We're trying to grease the skids here for lots of contributions. But 500 million is a lot of money and he's challenged the rest of us to put up another 500 million. I know that the American Journalism Project gave Digger $975,000 a few years ago. I assume that's gone. What's enough? What's enough, Skye? Oh, if your check books out, it's expensive. It's expensive, but it's worth it. It costs a lot to have, but it's foundational to keeping our democracy going. 500 million is gonna be an amazing start and they're hopeful that that is gonna be used in local communities with a match. So what I've been hearing lately is that they want local communities to show that they're gonna step up and support, it's not just nonprofit news, actually, that they said they'd support a for-profit. You know, in the way that we used to have subscriptions for us that we don't have subscriptions anymore. So, you know, sort of at a basic level, if folks read The Bridge or Digger or listen to Rumble Strip if they could think about, well, what would I have paid in a newspaper subscription previously? If that's a wonderful place to start on an individual level. But it is a, there's a big task at hand to figure out funding for the long term. Can you, there's a danger out there. I'm a little more doom and gloom, I think, than a lot of people, but I think the democracy is teetering on the edge. I'd love to get your views on that and how bad you think the danger is. Whether it's lack of, whether the fraying of community bonds or politicians aren't listening because there isn't a powerful enough press, how close are we to, with the authoritarians out there, how close are we to losing this from your point of view? I think we're perilously close to becoming not real to one another. That when you reach a point where other people aren't real anymore because they're notional, they are, it's tribal to the point of, you are only a set of beliefs that are not my beliefs. I think we're very close to that. And so what we exhibit is a lack of, again, a lack of curiosity and humility and a sense of humor about each other, that those three things, I think, could go a long way to saving us, that everybody you approach, you don't know what you don't know, so at least start there that you don't know what you don't know and that you approach people with curiosity and a sense of humor. And I fear that we are close to otherifying each other so completely that, you know, I mean, I don't wanna say it's pitchfork time, but, you know, I mean, and again, a five, a 42nd conversation at the checkout at the store with somebody about the basketball game on Thursday night works wonders. I mean, are you going? Oh yeah, you have a kid, you have a kid, your kid's in seventh grade, oh, I have a kid in eighth grade. Or so are you gonna go to, you know, the show? I'm gonna go to the show. That connection, we have more in common. I cannot take a pitchfork to you if you're going to the show Thursday night. And I mean, it's really that fundamental, I think. Anyway, that was a very abstract answer. Skye, how close are we? I think that we've gotten into this place where social media rewards emotional content. And that emotion a lot of the time is fanning the flames. And it serves you content that reinforces your existing beliefs. It serves you content that's inflammatory. And, you know, I think about the way people talk to each other on Twitter. And would that be the way that you spoke to somebody in line at the checkout? No way. I mean, hopefully not. You know, I don't, I feel like we're trending to this way where like, it's whoever has the latest Twitter burn, you know, is, they're on their high horse. And that is not productive. And it doesn't build community. And it doesn't build understanding. And that's a lot of what's in my feed these days. Can you at Digger withstand the power of the capitalist marketing? I'm looking at Dan Jones here. The power of the marketing weapon that seeks to do divide us like that, thinking of Elon Musk. Can you survive that? Can you survive the algorithm? Hmm. That is gonna depend if there is, you know, who's in charge of these social media companies and what they're allowed to do. Yeah. You know, social media referrals is a good portion of our traffic, but we've been having a lot of discussions lately about, well, how much time is it really worth to spend giving Elon Musk free content? Right? Yeah. Is that time better spent putting into thinking about different ways to deliver our news that we don't even know about yet? Is it, you know, a WhatsApp group? Or is it a print special once a year? You know, there's other ways that we can reach readers other than, like I said, giving you Elon Musk free content. Yeah. Phil Dodd, have we reached the Q&A portion? Everybody want to go to Q&A? I'm having a great time. Or do you want to stick with this? Or do you want to get to the bar and, you know? Okay. Let's get your questions ready. We're not going to move around with a microphone. You just yell it out. We're in Montpelier. We all know each other. Unless we have to do the mic for the... Yeah, sure, I'll repeat the question. Okay. Between the three of us, we know all these people. So I think we're good. Lauren, you have a question. What does it cost to produce Digger and Rumble Strip? Digger is about three and a half million. And the bridge? Three and a half million dollars a year. There you go. And those reporters are not making... They're not buying houses on that salary. Some of them are. Some of them are. Some of them are buying houses. But, I mean, we really want to pay our reporters a livable wage. But, yeah, I wish we had more resources so everyone got paid better. And we had more staff because a lot of people are doing six jobs. But that's what it takes at a minimum. At a minimum, yeah. Erica, what does it cost? I don't know. But I will say that it is endlessly frustrating that when you don't have a building or an employee, people are reticent about giving you money because they're like, oh my God, you don't even have a fax machine, you know? And I mean, I don't know. It's gonna go into your pocket. I mean, God. Right. It's going to go into paying for my son's college is what it goes into. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know what it costs. I mean, I work out of my underwear closet, but it costs a tremendous profound amount of time. And then, you know, website design and yada yada. But I don't know how to say what it costs. It costs a lot of time. Yeah. Yeah, my fabulously lucrative podcast and blog pay me huge amounts of money. Yeah. Oh, it's a good business. Yeah. Yes, sir. Oh, wait, wait, wait, we have to go. Cassandra, what's the budget? What does it take? So do you want to know the budget or what we need? Oh, Justin, who just stood up as our treasurer. Did we, was it a 260 or 275, Justin? 273,000 for, that's our budget for calendar year 24. And that's our skeletal bare bones budget without the writer that I so desperately want on staff. Okay. Putting in a plug. So, yeah. And that's also with, as you are all aware, a lot of volunteer contribution. Lightning question. What would you do with a million dollars? I would, I would hire more staff. I would, again, think about our delivery, right? So not everybody reads email newsletters. I would do a big project to think about how are we reaching people who aren't reading us already? I would do translation services. I would build a bigger engagement platform. So it's more of a two-way street between our readers and us. Okay, Erica, million bucks. Pay for college. But I mean, okay, but I also, I would, I would love to outsource all the social media stuff. I would pay somebody who's a really good sound mixer. I would be less neurotic. And yeah, I think that's what I would do. But I wouldn't do anything different. I'd keep my job. I love my job. And I would keep making stories at the rate and at the size that I make them. Yes, sir, ma'am. What? Oh, million bucks. Okay, and then I'll leave it to you. Yep. We talked about this. Yeah, we did. If we had a million dollars, not my personally, but, and I love that it would make you less neurotic. I think it would make me more neurotic. But I think that in central Vermont, we are losing newspapers and media outlets now. We're seeing them diminish. And I think there's a, there's, I dream perhaps there's a way that we can work together, collaborate more and maybe have some kind of umbrella organization that keeps us all afloat and pays us all current contemporary salaries. Huh, interesting. That's what I do. Okay. Yes, ma'am. Yell it out. Yeah, that's a great question. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. That we're an aging population and what do I know what are the age of our readers and what are we doing to reach younger readers? Reaching younger readers is an age old question. Every publication I've worked for has had an older readership. And some of that has to do with who has time to read the news. But we, the best that we know about our readers age right now is through our Google Analytics and it does trend older. But it's, that is something we think about a lot. And again, I think it has to do with where we showing up for our events, right? So if we're having an engagement event, we did a bar trivia earlier this year. You were there. Yes. Yes, exactly. So something like that where we're doing news trivia at Langdon Street Cafe. Just thinking creatively about being in different spaces like that. But again, I think as much as I struggle with what social media does to society, we know that that's where a lot of people get their news. So perhaps there's a strategy. It's something I've been exploring with somebody at UVM lately about, well, how would we make TikToks out of our news stories, right? Because a lot of people are on TikTok. So keep innovating and keep at that question. Further questions? I have one. Oh, yes, sir. Oh, uh-oh, uh-oh. Here we go. Yell it out, Bill. Yeah. Skye, do you think that journalism should be, in part, funded by government tax dollars? I think that there are pluses and minuses to that. I think that it gets really risky when you could potentially be beholden to political will. But are there ways that government can support a functioning press? Yes, I think there's perhaps tax credits for employing journalists. There's perhaps tax breaks on advertising. There's internship programs. If the Department of Labor could fund internship programs for us, not just journalists, but there are really interesting career paths for advertising and circulation and marketing and journalism. All of those things are just- She turned off the mic. All right, there we go. We could write the best story in the world, but if you don't have a team that's getting it out there, it doesn't get out there. So I think there are ways that are less directly tied to political will. Yeah. Erika, how do you, how many stories ahead do you plan? Two, 10? And how do you decide what to talk about? Mostly zero, but I have five shows. I'm five shows behind right now. So I have five shows in the can that I have not started editing. So I get ahead of myself. And the way I decide is whatever it is I'm sort of preoccupied by. And right now I'm interested in class. I'm interested in all of us talking more about class, that we're getting really, really good talking about race, we're getting really good at talking about gender identity. All of these things are good for us. We're getting better and we need to keep getting better. But if we don't talk about class, if we don't talk about the ills of capitalism, then we're missing, we're in some ways creating more trouble for ourselves or we need to talk about it more. So that's something I'm thinking about a lot and that seems to be something I'm making a lot of shows about for that reason. Let me put Sky on the spot here and then we'll end unless people have more questions. That issue of capitalism, it seems to come up in every radio episode I do. You're talking about a problem or a challenge or an issue it always comes back to there's not enough money and the rich people have all the money. And yet, journalistically, it's almost verboten to talk about it in those kinds of ways because you're a communist and you'll get tarred. And Bernie Sanders has figured this out for the last 50 years. I'm not sure journalism has figured that out. Do you comment on that? So in the work of, so covering that or yeah, we have talked about for lack of a better words, a class beat, somebody who's focused on that and how that really affects people's experience like their lives. So if anyone's interested in funding that beat. But it is, it's really, you're right. It's really important and it's delicate. It's, I don't know that we have the comfortability in the language, right? It can get very kind of weaponized in terms of capitalism and communism. And I agree with something we need to get better at. Yeah, I think that's right. Steve, you had a question. Media bias. Here we go. You are, you're just elite Harvard sort of liberals. And it affects your coverage. So I'm a proud Castleton State College graduate. Both my parents have associate degrees that they got after I was born. I'm a musical theater major. I just want to put that out. But it's, but it's a real issue. It's a real issue. We all bring our biases. We all bring our biases and there's been a shift in how we talk about that. For a long time we said unbiased and I think it's just false to think that as humans we're free from bias. We all have bias. We all have different experiences in this world and we bring them. We are humans. We're not AI, thank goodness, writing the news. So I think that what you strive for is fairness. And I think, again, that takes all of us. It takes our skilled editors like Diane Derby who I just saw in the back of the room. It takes our readers holding us accountable. It takes a lively and healthy opinion section. So our readers can share points of view that were maybe missed in our articles. But unfortunately there are news organizations, especially on the national scale that sort of lean into their bias. And I think that's given those of us who are really trying hard not to do that a bad name. We kind of all get lumped in as the media. But we're doing things very differently within the media. Reader beware. The burden's on the reader a little bit to figure it out, right? You're different than Politico or Axios or whatever. Yeah, does that answer your question? Okay, anybody else? Andrew, will Digger bring back the comment section? Why we can't have nice things is because they could get fairly vile and it's a lot of work to moderate and weed out some of the really inappropriate stuff. So there are comments on our Facebook stories and Twitter, but you're not the first person to ask. I know that that was something that our readers really loved, but maybe there'll be technology in the future that can help aid in filtering out the unnecessary. There was a question right there in the middle, yes. How does your geographic location affect your bias question? That question comes from Nona Estrin, the author of the Digger, I'm sorry, the Bridge Nature Corner, which I'm obsessed with. Meaning that we're headquartered in Montpelier? Meaning that they're in Montpelier and not Bennington? Right, so we have some geographic beats. So we have a Northwestern reporter, we have a Chittenden County reporter, a Burlington reporter, Southern Vermont reporters, but we don't have, for instance, a LaMoyale County reporter or a Washington County reporter. And if we had the funding to do that, we certainly would. We would love to have a reporter in every county, at least, doing specific geographic reporting. It's just the capacity and the funding that we have. We've made certain beat, topical beats priorities, such as healthcare and the economy, and then we have geographical beats, but. Erica, do you address that, do you go everywhere? Yeah, I would just like to say that what is absent here is, you know, the Barton Chronicle is, you know, there are, you cannot report on the select board in Barton if you don't live there and go to every single one, and I'm not doing that, we're not doing that, but there are, you know, the Bridge is doing that. Like if you are focused in one place, you just, you cannot make that up any other way. You cannot, I mean, VPR can't make it up. These statewide places, they're statewide, but they're not granular statewide. You can't get into the, you know, the deep, deep knowledge of the community without being there, and so those are the places too that we just need to support. If there was ever a need for that, it's post-flood. What is this city council and Bill Fraser doing? They had their community meetings, but the journalists need to be there every night slogging through, being there till midnight. I will say another way, so we partner with the Bridge, so we have a community news sharing project, so we run Bridge Stories and Bridge Run Stigger Stories, and we have 13 community partners around the state where we do that, and we make our news available for free to our non-profit model, so smaller papers around the state can have state house coverage at no cost to them, and they don't have to allow us to run their stories to participate, but if they do, all the better, and then we are publishing their stories and giving those smaller papers visibility. Do they get paid? They don't get paid, and we don't get paid. So it's a trade. Yeah, that would be, I mean, that would be the trick, is if, you know, Barton Chronicle gets money, or if there could be some way that everybody's making a little money on that partnership. That would be amazing. There was another hand. There you go. Carl, speak up, Erica. I mean, yes, of course. I agree. I mean, again, I'm not a news person the way that all of you are. I do talk with people outside of Vermont. I just did an interview with Jeff Charlotte. Do you know who he is, everybody? Jeff Charlotte, who does a lot of work on. Great piece in seven days about him. Oh, right, exactly. So, I mean, I interview people outside of Vermont, but I'm not, and in this case with Jeff Charlotte, he is kind of raising the flag, like we all got a worry here about what's about to happen, but I think maybe you're more, it's a question better suited for you. In that, are we covering national issues or just a little unclear about the. Carl, refine your question. Don't we already have lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of national angles, though, and we have far fewer local angles? It seems to me that what we need more of is, I mean, I don't know, maybe, but. I think what we do is the local take or the statewide take on national issues. Because we, if you think about a national cable news channel, when they're covering a story and it's a ticker at the bottom of the screen, it's really distilled, and we try to get more granular about it and talk to people in our community about how national issues are affecting them. I think we need to end it, and I just wanna end by saying thank you to all of you. I think there's 200 people in this room. If each one of those people wrote a check for $100 and gave it to the bridge, I think that would go a really long way, and I'm starting to think about journalism the way we think about the Public Works Department. It's an essential service now. Didn't used to be, it is now. So thank you all, and thank you both to Erica and Skye for being here. It's really an honor to talk to you. And thank you, Kevin, as well. So there is food that is here. I told you all the restaurants that made the food, now we get to eat it. Before we get to the food, we'd like to ask folks to help move the chairs on this side out of the way, and we have some folks who are orchestrating that because we're gonna have music by Nazmo Swing, and these chairs do whatever you want with them. You can put them in small groups, so you could sit around and talk. They don't have to all be facing in the same direction. And finally, just a reminder that the art auction does close at 730, and you have to be present to win. Thank you, everybody, for being here.