 I am George Edson, Chairman of the Montpelier Historical Society. You can hear me. Well, let's see, we've been checking these, we hope they're... Okay, I'll speak like this. How's that? So you'll have to speak the same way. So I welcome you all here. Very glad to have you to this wonderful event. And I wanna thank Vermont State Curator David Sheets for his assistance in having us here today. I wanna thank Cole Hollow, who has donated the refreshments and I hope you all enjoy the cider and donuts. Mark is our moderator and Mark is going to introduce the panel, but I will introduce Mark, many of you know him. Most of you probably know everybody up here except me. And that would be that Mark is a long-time journalist of the Burlington Free Press, Vermont Digger in Seven Days, plus the broadcasting time he has spent at WKDR and WDEV. We have a few enough that you could speak from the audience, if you raise your hand with a question or a comment, something you'd like them to address, feel free to do it. It's going to be a fairly wide-ranging discussion and Mark is in charge. So with that, I guess I have nothing much more to announce and we look forward to what's about to happen. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. George, thank you very much. Also wanna thank Steve Taylor, who's been very helpful in arranging this event here and the folks at the Vermont Historical Society and the Montpellier Historical Society. Our topic today, in case you missed the memo, is that we're gonna talk about the golden age of Vermont state news coverage. And I'm gonna put a big fat question mark after that to start with. We'll see whether or not that actually holds water. The period of time here that we're talking about is roughly from 1980 to 2000. And we have four really great panelists here to help us work through this and let me briefly introduce them. And as George mentioned, we'll be happy to take your questions. I think, and thank you all for coming. It's a beautiful day out there. It's really encouraging to see you folks coming inside here on such a beautiful day. So let me introduce our panelists and I'll start down at the far end. These are all colleagues of mine and I would call them all friends. Diane Derby was a longtime reporter, worked at the Burlington Free Press, also worked at the Rutland Herald. Did some work along with the Times Argus. Then she went and worked for Jim Jeffords. Then she worked for Pat Leahy. And today, I'm glad to see she is back in Vermont Digger, a really great news organization where she has been on the editing desk. Next to her is Peter Martin. Peter was the longtime president and general manager of WCAX-TV, really the number one news station here in Vermont. He began his career, we'll find out a little bit more, but Peter's dad, Stuart Redmartin, started WCAX back in 1957. And as I say, it really was considered to be really the premier station. Peter now has the title of general manager and president emeritus, a title we all, I think, seek to have at some point in our career. Next to him is Steve Terry, whose beard just gets better every time I see him. And Steve is a longtime journalist as well. I knew him from his days when he was the managing editor at the Rutland Herald, a really fantastic newspaper. But he's also had tours of duty. He worked for George Aiken. He also worked for Greenmount Power after his time in journalism. He also is the author of a couple of really great books, one on George Aiken and another on Phil Hoff. Also joining us, our fourth panelist is Chris Graff, who, if you don't know Chris Graff, you have not really been in following from my journalism. Chris was the head of the Associated Press News Service for, started in 1978 and was there until 2006. He also was the host for a long period of time of Vermont this week on Vermont Public Television. And he too, like Steve is also the author of a book, Dateline Vermont. So I wanna thank all of them for joining us. And I would like to begin first with all of you to ask you why you got into journalism. I did just briefly, and then it's not gonna be about me here. I was 13 years old when the Watergate hearings happened. And my mother insisted that I watch the Watergate hearings with her and said, this is history, and I pretty much got the bug after that. Diane, why did you get into journalism? We are of the same timeframe because I was else, you can't hear me. Okay, how about, there. I was also influenced by Watergate, although I was born in 59, so due to the math I was about 15 at the time of the hearings. I went to college, didn't know what I wanted to do, dropped out and found myself reading a lot of newspapers and went back for journalism. And it's just been a wonderful ride ever since. It's been a lot of fun. Alas, I am not of that age. It's older. I was a career army officer. And we decided that probably bouncing around from one army post to the other. We moved, my wife and I, six times in the first five years we were married. We decided no more of that. We came back. Journalism was sort of the family business. My great-grandfather was the publisher of the Richmond Times Dispatch, the Burlington Daily News. I guess I was the fourth generation. It was the family business. You're gonna be louder. You're gonna be louder. It was the family business. Well, I'm a little older, but I actually started journalism as a stringer covering sports games in high school. And from that experience, I kind of gravitated towards journalism. At UVM, I had this idea that, gee, I better earn some money quick. So I went to the public relations office at the university and said, you know what, you need somebody to write stories about your campus leaders and you need to pay me. So that worked out. And when I graduated from UVM, I went on an intern program at the Providence Journal. And I remember very distinctly the Christmas of 1964. And I was back in Windsor at my parents' house having Christmas. And the phone rang and it was Kendall Wild, the managing editor of the Rutland Herald. And he said, you know, we just bought the Times Argus and we're gonna have our own Statehouse Bureau. Would you come back to Vermont? And the answer was, of course, yes. And that was a experience I did until 69. Left Rutland Herald, went to Washington to work for George Aiken. And there, his office was just down the hall from the Watergate hearings. So I spent a lot of my time in that old Senate caucus room. Fortunately, when Senator Aiken announced he was gonna retire, Bob Mitchell, the owner of the Rutland Herald and Times Argus, asked me to come back. And I did for another 10 years in journalism in Vermont. So I had journalism in my family and my stepfather had been a police reporter, worked his way into New York and became a drama critic at the New York Herald Tribune. But my entry into journalism was sitting on Middlebury College as a freshman outside the Student Union when the news director of the college radio station was walking around trying to recruit people to help him cover the funeral of Vermont U.S. Senator Winston Proudy. And no one was going to be covering this procession from the Burlington Airport up to Newport, except for Middlebury College's radio station. And I thought, well, that sounds like fun. And so I did that. The news director at the time was a man named Jim Douglas. And so that's when I got to know Jim and he was the news director and he anchored the evening news, by the way, every night with a wonderful voice. And so I got involved in the student radio station at Middlebury College, was the station manager for two years and I worked downtown at the commercial radio station, WFAD. First is the host of the country Western program of which I knew nothing about. And then as the news director there. And so that's how I got into it. Set the stage for us. And Steve, let's start with you in the 1980 or, I would even argue that maybe a little before that is when things really picked up. What was going on in Vermont economically, culturally? Who was here? Set the stage for us of what was going on in Vermont at that time. You were asking me. I am. Well, in 1980, we had really made a very important change starting really in 1962. And I would argue that when Phil Hof was elected. And I would argue that that change started a very slow, but important change in the culture in Vermont. It changed its politics. And during the 60s, Vermont was a rapidly growing in population as it was in the next decade. So by 1980, we had had almost 15,000 students years of pretty strong population growth, as well as economic growth. We had an economic downturn in the early 1980s. But during that period leading up to 1980, there was a tremendous change, which we'll talk about, I'm sure, in the nature and the structure of Vermont journalism. And that in turn really helped establish a platform for what was gonna happen in the next 20 years. Chris, politically, what was going on here in Vermont? Well, as Steve has mentioned, so Vermont was for a hundred years the most Republican state in the nation from the 1850s to the 1950s, late 1950s. And we think of it now as the most Democratic state in the nation. And we sort of take that for granted. But about the time we're talking about in 1980, Vermont was still pretty much Republican. And we were just beginning to see Democrats move into offices. The Speaker of the House had been Tim O'Connor, but the Republicans still had a majority in the House when he was elected. It wasn't till the 80s and into the 90s that the Democrats began to take over the state offices to win the office clearly of Speaker, President Pro Tem and Governor. But it was the middle of that change. And if you ask people that time, Vermont would have still been seen as a Republican state. Matter of fact, that presidential year, Ronald Reagan would have carried Vermont. Peter, when your father started WCAX, I don't think it's any big secret, your father was a leaned more to the right, shall we say. Tell us what you remember about those early days. Well, the thing that you remember is how rapid the change was, Steve has referred to it. When you look at the population growth, Vermont was going through the most intense period of population growth since the 1840s. Some other things were happening or causing a threat. The interstate was open. The interstate changed the whole sort of time, space, continuum. When I was going to college in Cambridge and we'd come up back here, you either took a train, which was hours and hours, or you drove in the winter for six or seven hours. Now Boston was three hours away. So the changes were really quite extraordinary. IBM, for instance, was on a very steep growth. It peaked at 8,500 employees. So, enormous growth, enormous change, and it was very palpable. Much more, it was a period of change in a way that the current time is not. So, the newspapers, particularly the free press, was a BMOF, from a business point of view. Broadcast journalism or broadcasting was really coming into its own and reaching a kind of a peak of power. Through that period, we saw our revenues just steadily, steadily grow, except for a period in the mid-80s and then it went up. So, we and the newspapers had resources which we could commit to coverage. We had a golden age in Montpelier in part because Vermont is very unusual in many ways, but it is also one of the most centralized states of the 40, no, the 50 states, except Hawaii. People don't think of it this way. We think in terms of town meeting and local control, but the fact is that the state government acts in a way that in other states are done by municipalities and counties. County government doesn't count here. So, Montpelier was, in our view, we were sort of covering Montpelier because it's almost like local coverage because the influence of the state government and what it did was so profound. And so, you know, those were some of the things that influenced what occurred in that period. I'm dying, you and I being significantly younger than most of the other people. Ouch. What was going on politically when you came to town? So, I pulled into Vermont in the late 1980s to work at the Free Press with Mark back in the day. And at the time, when I first landed here, I was covering abortion, daily abortion protests almost immediately where you had 300, 400 people being hauled off by the Burlington police force, put in trucks, being arrested, being taken to Waterbury, they wouldn't identify themselves. This was like, there were all these big things happening when I first got here. And I was just amazed, I was afraid coming from the Boston area that Vermont was gonna be a little sleepy, I'd be a little bored coming through a small state and it was anything but. And I just was so excited to be here and to be covering these, you know, that was a story that grabbed the New York Times attention and from there on out it just felt like there were major stories to be covered in the state of Vermont. So that was really a pleasant awakening for me and then the other thing that really kept me here, I really thought I'd be a year or two in Vermont when I got here and then move on, that was 34 years ago. But the other thing that really grabbed me about being a journalist in Vermont was the accessibility of the major players and as Peter alluded to, Vermont's size of a small city elsewhere, you know, 650,000 people. And so I got here after being in the Boston area market for 10 years and the governor would call you at home or you would have direct access to the US senators or you would have, yeah, name it. I mean, I remember Howard Dean used to call me at home at night to clarify something he might have said. I'll bet he did. Shoot from the left power Dean, you know, and he would, that stunned me that we had that kind of access to and not only politicians but also just people. So that's what kept me here all those years. As Mark alluded to, I went into the political side and worked for Jim Jeffords and Patrick Leahy for on and off for 20 years and now I'm full circle back at Vermont Digger as a senior editor and it is so much fun. It's so different than it was 20 years ago, but it's really fun and we can talk more about that. The access is a little different now than it was 20 years ago, sadly to say. And there are a lot of differences now in journalism compared to when I left the business 20 years ago. But fun to be back. When I first got at the free press, I needed a doctor and Howard Dean was the only doctor that I knew. So I went to Howard Dean as a doctor. First time I met him was down in Shelburne at his office, let's test our theory here of why we're all here that this period, 1980 to roughly 2000 and maybe a little further on was really this golden age of Vermont state news coverage. Steve, let's start with you. Why do we even have the gall to even refer to it that way? Well, in many ways it certainly was. But as I alluded to in my first presentation, it really had its foundation a little bit earlier than 1980 because what really happened during say the period from 68 to 80 was that as Peter said, there were, it was a strong economy lineage in the newspapers was up, advertising on channel three was up. So the newspapers had resources. And what happened was that in 1964, the Herald bought the Times Artists. And then what happened then was because of the personalities of the managing editor at the time, the Rutland Herald guy named Kendall Wilde, he did not want anymore to have the Herald and the free press to have one person covering Montpelier. So that long relationship ended and the Herald and Argus created something called the Vermont Press Bureau. The free press created the Free Press Capital Bureau. And at the time, each of those organizations picked three people each to start covering Montpelier which was primarily the state house. But as Peter said, all of the news seemed to emanate at least from a state perspective from Montpelier. So that really started the competitive juices going which we can talk about in a bit. And at the same time, the AP expanded its operation and then it was challenged by the UPI that had a strong bureau. So there was tremendous eyes on the state house, state politics, but there were a lot of emerging different stories and as Vermont's politics was changing and we did away with local overseers of the poor for social welfare. And then of course, 1965 was the dramatic reapportionment of the Vermont legislature. And that day is still burned in my memory when the Vermont House voted to reduce itself from 246 members to 150. And out of that, tremendous new faces were in the legislature as Chris mentioned, we were starting to be not a quite solid Republican legislature and more and more liberal minded folks were elected. So by 1980, which I think is a good place to start that next 20 years, Vermont was on a roll I mean, we did away with the billboards. We changed the way our court systems operated. We changed our whole education philosophy and in the several years before, we really started focusing on regional planning and economic development. So by 1980, those foundation stones were in place and that just led to much more journalism from all of the players. I mentioned the other day or counted up in the late 1960s, there were 15 individuals from different news media three from the Herald, three from the Free Press, one from WCX, AP had three, the UPI had three, WDEV had one, there were about 15 people in the so-called crow's nest, which is above, well, no longer, but that's where we all were and we were very competitive. Peter, I was gonna agree with most of what Steve has said, but I would just sort of add that perhaps 1970 is a date we ought to be considering because 1970, the 1970 legislature passed at 250. That was a pretty profound move. That's what led us to the attempt on a state land use plan, the emphasis on planning. And as well in that session, they reorganized state government. Up until 1970, the state had a board and commissioner style of government. So you had a Department of Health, you had a commissioner of health and there was a board of health and the governor got a 0.1 third of the board in each biennium. So it would take a governor four years to get quote control of a board. Well, once you move toward the secretary system that we have now, you really fundamentally change the way state government works and it became more modern, more efficient. But that was, those were two very significant things in 1970 that set the stage for what happened in the state and in Montpelier, which we were all covering at the time. So Chris, explain to people that the Associated Press was its own entity, but part of what it did was supplied stories to Steve's paper, to Peter's television station, but you also had this competition with UPI. So talk a little bit about how competitive that was between the papers that you supplied in an organization like UPI, United Press International. It was an intense competition. And it's the type of thing that books have been written about about AP and UPI reporters racing for the phone or cutting the wires of a telephone so the competition couldn't get there. And it was, in Vermont, it was an incredible competition because UPI had the best journalists early on and it took a little time for AP to show that it could compete. People like Rod Clark, Candy Page, and others at UPI were just remarkable journalists. The first thing I did at AP was have to compete against Candy Page and I was just starting my career really in covering the trial of a West German so-called terrorist, Christina Buster, in a trial that was in Burlington where William Kuntzler was the lawyer. And I tell you, I did not sleep well at night knowing that Candy Page, I was going up every day against Candy Page. Let me, as part of the answer to that, Mark, talk a little about the system of news because I think this goes to the question of is this the golden age of journalism? I've never met journalists who did not think that theirs was the golden age of journalism. And I wish if I had a dime for every time that Nick Marrow used to tell me that his was the golden age of when they covered everything that moved at the state house and covered every committee and why didn't we do that? I would have retired many years ago. But I think this is and was the golden age of journalism for covering Vermont state news. If you're to look nationally, people might look at 1950 to 1970 and say, look what the press did in the civil rights and Watergate in Vietnam and the impact they made there. But in Vermont, covering Vermont state news, this was an incredible time. And I think that yes, the stories were there. It was a time of incredible change for Vermont. But I think that there was more than that. I think that this was the time when Vermont had the most resources. And that goes to part of the system when you talk about the AP. When I first started as a broadcaster, WFAD in Middlebury and then as at the AP in 1978, there were 44 radio stations in Vermont. Many of them had their own news departments. Some of them, like WDEV had two or three people at a time working in their news department. John Irving at WDEV broke more stories than many of us. He was pretty an incredible journalism coming out of the radio stations of Vermont. WCFR in Springfield had a reporter, a young reporter out of Middlebury named Frank Cezno, who some of you may recognize who went on to be a CNN major anchor and star. So you had these radio stations feeding the news, covering everything that was happening all around the state. You had very healthy daily newspapers and weekly newspapers doing the same. You had this intense, very large staffs at the Free Press Times, Argus and Rutland Herald. And at the same time, so you had the resources. Never before or since have there been so many news resources in Vermont covering the news as this period. And most importantly, you had the commitment. Vermont had this incredible, incredible heritage of family ownership, none more than the Martin family. What Peter Martin and his dad did at WCAX, no other station in the country was doing at that time. An hour news where they didn't lead with crime, but they led with really political news and they were really doing a tremendous job. But it wasn't just the Martins, it was the Mitchells, as Steve has talked about, and their commitment to news. It was Kelton Miller and his family at the Bennington and Brattleboro. Kelton's family bought the Berkshire Eagle back in the 1830s or something like that and they kept going and it was the Smiths in Caledonia. It was even the Lins later on. The Squires, the Squires and WDEV, their commitment to news unrivaled. The talk shows that Mark did and many before him did at WDEV. So you had the resources, you had the commitment and that made really all the difference because when you have these many resources working and yes, competing, but also really covering Vermont, they were doing and the great stories and the great characters. I mean, you think about Tom Sam and how could you not wanna cover somebody who said the education is the fourth leg of the tripod of our economy or Gilly Godnick in Rutland who had said, you three make quite a pair or we'll burn that bridge when we get to it. You had wonderful characters, as Mark said, Howard Dean. We also had huge stories, national stories, civil unions later than the 2000, but that, well, right at 2000, but that whole Act 60 and take back Vermont, we had a lot of division in things to cover in that right around that 2000 period too. Not to mention Bernie Sanders up in Burlington. So Steve, how was more reporters better for readers and viewers? Well, well, there are obviously much more information that was available for readers and viewers. Perhaps it was overload, but it helped Vermont and its elected officials to be really accountable. And I think that was a strong point of what it meant to be a real democratic small D state. Democracy really was valued here, obviously from town meeting, but just the way issues got covered, I think helped policymakers, it helped voters, it helped people really understand what was happening with their state and government. Mark, can I just throw in there one thing that Steve would remember very well because he's part of it. In the 1970s, the Rutland Herald and the Times Argus of the Vermont Press Bureau, they staffed every campaign every day, and they had a different report. So in 1976, there was one reporter who followed Dick Snelling every day and then another reporter who followed Stella Hackle. Some of us thought it was a little funny because they would both file their stories, they'd be right next to each other. They'd be at the same event, but covering it from a different perspective. But that's the type of resources that the Herald, the Times Argus, would throw at these events. They just poured people into covering stories. Sometimes it may have seemed a little much, but I think that's what we've lost today is the sense of a horse race and keeping everybody accountable like the Heralds used to do it. Well, I think really to add to that point what it really meant to be a reporter in Vermont is that you were not at your desk dealing with just press releases. You were on the road, you were places where people were, you were talking with them. And as Chris pointed out, that actually began a little earlier during the Hoth years and being in a car early in the morning with Phil Hoth when he was a heavy smoker at half past six in the morning was a different experience. And but anyway, that journalism was much more personable then. And perhaps we were over the line at times but there was a lot of interaction between reporters and politicians, whether it was after hours at the Morgan Room or places like that. That kind of personal contact, I don't know, it does not seem to exist. Are you buying this, Diane? As Chris said, everybody thinks their era was the best of times. So I came a little later to all of this. So I was at the Press Bureau for 10 years in the 90s. We were a three-person bureau. I do agree with the person, how we were all over every story. I think looking back at some old clips, you can pick out a few stories that maybe we over-covered or we, there was a little over-saturation perhaps sometimes. And when you're in that bubble that is the state house day in, day out during the legislative session, you think everybody is waiting on your next word. I mean, it is a bubble. And then you step back from it and you find out like just wasn't so. But at the same time, I agree that the competition was fierce and it was good for the public, the readership. And it was good for the politicians to keep them accountable. And I agree with all of that. I'll say, and I agree with the idea that it's not as personable. I mean, we always knew the people we covered. And in policy, you knew every secretary. You knew the administrative assistant for every secretary. You'd call them up and you'd chat for a while and you'd get the secretary and you'd talk directly about policy matters. And now there's rings of, you know, PIO, public information people in every state agency. And you rarely get to talk to a secretary. You rarely get to talk to the governor directly. He still holds weekly press conferences so you can throw questions. But they're nothing like the grillings we used to give, you know, on the weekly press conference on the fifth floor in this building where we would throw anything and everything we wanted at the governor during a weekly session. And I do miss those times. I think those were great exercises in democracy and we always came around with this, away with a story we never saw coming. I mean, sometimes it was just like a slip up of the governor saying something and then it totally turned the tide of what that day's story was going to be. But, you know, I don't want to get too far out ahead but seeing it as I see it now at Digger, it's just so different because we've got deadlines every minute. And back in those, in the 90s, you know, we didn't even have cell phones. You know, you think about it. Cell phones didn't come into play till what, 2000, early 2000s. And now everything is so immediate and you know, it's a lot more reliant on press releases and statements from the governor. And yeah, a lot of that personal connection is kind of gone in journalism which saddens me to no end. But for people that are 25 or 30 or 40 who really didn't know what it was like when we grilled the governor, you know? I mean, it's not that journalists are working any less hard now than they were in our day. It's just that we have deadlines all the time. Digger tries, it's best to be a statewide news organization. And it's really tough covering the entire state of Vermont. You know, the resources that we enjoyed that we're all sitting up here talking about in the 70s, 80s, 90s, you know, they don't exist now the way they did back then. We were a three-person bureau at the Vermont Press Bureau for the Times-Argus from Rutland-Herald and it's gone, it's been gone. I don't know how long, 15 years maybe? Kind of lost track. Just doesn't exist. So we don't have the end AP to it's, you know, through no fault of its own is a two-person bureau that really is looking for stories on the national front, you know, to send national AYR stories out from Vermont but they're not covering the weekly events and weekly news conferences. So yeah, I do agree with everything that's been said and I think I hesitate to use the golden age because I think there is, I just see it a little differently. Things have just changed so much that I don't know if we can compare apples to apples compared to what journalism is now versus what it was 30 or 40 years ago. Well, the entire world changed in the mid-90s with the advent of the internet. But let me stick with this. Our panel here was talking about this familiarity that was going on with newsmakers and newsbreakers and I think some journalists today might be very uncomfortable with that. Did you experience any challenge or difficulty with that in what was really kind of an old boys' club over there? From a gender standpoint, it was just, yeah, I mean, I was one of the very few. It was me, Candy Page, Sue Allen, we were pretty much the three women covering the State House at the time compared to what, 10 or 12, 15 males, which was great for me because it meant I was on Vermont this week, most weeks, because they needed the female balance. But, and they said as much, but it was definitely an old boys' club to some degree, but I don't think I ever let that get in the way of what I set out to do, but I think that's definitely a lot less so now. At Digger, we've got a three-person female team covering the State political world. And I was always on Vermont this week because they needed a short person. Peter, you wanted to add something to that? Just going to two observations about accessibility. 1970 to 73, I worked for Dean Davis, who was the governor, and among other things I was a spokesman. Governor Davis' phone number was in the book. Dean C. Davis, the number was 223-5000. Anybody could call him. And every morning, he'd come to the office with a list three people, four people, however many had called him that night and they had a concern and we had to do something with it. Secondly, because it was so intensely competitive and because the issues that were going on were so controversial, we had a real problem with press conferences because people would come in and then somebody else would come in and it was very difficult for the governor to articulate whatever it was he was trying to say uninterrupted. So I sort of made the decision and we're not going to have very many press conferences. But what we are going to do is, if you get hold of me by two or three in the afternoon, I will see that the governor calls you before your deadline. So a reporter, the press bureau or the free press that really want to talk to the governor, we'd set it up and he'd have a conversation with the governor. Now of course, people don't want to bother the governor about unimportant things, so they would tend to not do this unless they had something really important. But both they and the governor benefited from the fact that it was a conversation and not some sort of gladiatorial combat in the coliseum of the press conferences as they were then, at least from the perspective of the governor's press secretary. All right. So that raised an interesting question. So Steve, I think we all in newspapers, at least I'll speak for myself, felt at times as though newsmakers were currying to the TV because of the power of TV. Did you feel that? It was certainly beginning to change even in the years that I was, from 1965 and for a while I was an Aiken staff, but then came back until 1985 and it was pretty clear that the power of television, especially the fact that Channel 3, as Chris Graff pointed out, I think was the first local TV station in the United States to have a one hour local newscast. And that, is that accurate? Close, I'm not sure. Okay, but that's what I remember. It is now. And it still does, yeah. So that meant a hell of a lot of time on the station was filled up. And people were, even in Vermont then, beginning to understand, especially those who were politicians, that, you know, Channel 3, maybe then it didn't reach Wyndham County or Bennington early on, but it sure as hell reached a broad swath in Vermont. And that became a very important venue, case in point. You can quote me, was a revered institution on Sunday night. And there would be newsmakers, politicians, really wanting to be on that show. Of course, in the old days, Peter, they used to take us out to dinner afterwards, but that helped at the old board. But I know the AP made sure to have a staff member in the office Sunday night to cover that program, as it really generated a lot of news. Is that correct, Chris? And so it was starting to change, but nothing really changed as dramatically once we were in the digital age. And that's when print started its slow decline, unfortunately, but the nature of the economics of the business. And the result was less and less in-depth newspaper coverage. And if you had a two and a half minute story on channel three, that was a lot of time to express your views. Well, let's stick with you on this. So what did change with the economics and why? Why did newspapers all of a sudden see their revenue substantially decline and translating into less reporters, less coverage? It lost its advertising base because of the internet. And so lineage was decreased and that in turn was a very important revenue source for newspapers and it didn't happen all at once, but it slowly drained the life blood away of what was print journalism. So to make up for it, newspapers, including the Herald and Free Press and others had to decrease costs elsewhere. That usually resulted in a decline in circulation because they just didn't want to spend that amount of resources on that part of journalism. And the circulation numbers for the Free Press declined, I think in the late 60s, it may have been daily 60,000. And I don't know what it is now, but it's not much over 10 or 12. And the Herald went from 25,000 to probably now a down to about 12. So you can see that it's no longer publishing every day of the week, Keith. Diane, I remember when you and I were at the Free Press, it was 55 or 50 on a weekday and 52 on the weekend. And now it's, as Steve mentions, it's down around 10. Chris, can you further amplify on what Steve was talking about there on why was it that social media and the internet had this negative impact on advertising revenue? Steve hit the main point, which is that advertisers brought in about 80% of the revenue for a newspaper. Readers only brought in about 20%. And once the internet started, and the first thing it really started taking away were the classified ads, and that was huge for newspapers. The job requests, things like that all sort of went digital. And you began to see things unbundled in the digital age that the newspaper had always been able to bundle. So in a newspaper, you might have somebody who read the newspaper for the comics or the TV listings, or you might have someone who only read it for the sports scores. But they, in fact, they're all buying that newspaper. So it allowed, they didn't have to, you didn't just pay 15 cents to get the sports store. You got paid the whole price and you got everything. It was bundled together. The internet unbundled everything. So you could get the classified ads just by looking for them. So that began to make it harder for the newspapers. And slowly, each of those things began going away. The other thing, and we probably, I don't have the background to talk about this, Mark, but maybe other panelists do, and maybe even you might as well. What we saw in Vermont was the corporations buying the newspapers, first with Gannett. And we saw Gannett at the beginning being a pretty robust news organization and kept the free press going. But then we began to see cutbacks as people began pushing more and more for results on Wall Street. That goes back to what I was saying about the family ownership. I mean, the Martins, the Mitchells, all of those families, they did very well. But they also felt a real commitment to put their money back into the news organizations they owned. They saw themselves as stewards for Vermont. And the foreign ownership, corporate owners who now own most all the papers in Vermont don't have that feeling. And so they don't think twice about cutting again and again and again what happened, the Vermont news sources. And I think that's why, if you think about it, I mentioned Kelton Miller. He ran for Lieutenant Governor. Peter was Dean Davis's press secretary. Steve was in the Aiken office. If you look around the state, well, and Bob Mitchell, of course, he was close friends with George Aiken and Ernest W. Gibson. There was a real tight relationship between the owners and the political world in Vermont. So they knew how important it was to cover politics in Vermont, and they were committed to it. Well, and of course, your dad, Peter, would put on regular commentaries on the news as well. I wanna explore this issue of the corporatization and outside ownership a little bit more. First, did your TV station see this rapid decline in income with the advent of the internet? Because you weren't running classified ads, which would run a whole section. The trajectory for broadcasting was rather different than it was for newspapers. We saw continuing increases in revenue up till about the end of the 90s. And we need to pause here for a little bit and talk what's going on more generally. We're here talking about a golden age for newspapers, a golden age for broadcast. This is a period when, for example, Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America. When CBS News was must watch, it's when the networks themselves in terms of entertainment programming were huge, there were only three networks. So what has happened with the internet and with cable, which has affected broadcast, we have seen the audience fragment. So we don't do broadcasting anymore, we do narrow casting. And that's had a pretty profound impact on how news is covered and how it is delivered. So all of this sort of came together for broadcasting in the late 90s. And then we began to see revenues not go down. The newspapers kind of had like a collapse, slow motion, but a collapse. With us, we saw leveling out, we go up for the political years, then down, then up, but the trend was flat to slightly down. The only thing that has saved broadcasting so far has been what's called retransmission consent, which is processed by which cable companies have to pay television stations to carry the station signal. But broadcasting has eroded very considerably. We in the broadcast business lost the younger generation, as by the way, so did the newspapers. The younger, I guess, how we define younger is a sort of sensitive issue right now for those of us sitting up here. But that audience has largely gone. And the audience has fragmented. Back in the day, we would think like a 10 rating would be okay. A 10 rating means that 10% of the available audience is watching your program at that time. Nowadays, a program on the networks is considered to be number one if it gets seven tenths of a percent. Wow, okay. Think back to the days where we're talking about. You had programs like All in the Family, or MASH, or Hill Street Blues, or whatever. These were huge cultural events. No television primetime program remotely approaches that kind of status anymore. And in fact, now things have gotten so bad that streaming, that is Netflix, Hulu, HBO, now exceeds both cable and broadcast. That means inevitably that broadcast news is not going to be what it was. And even to the extent that you have the resources to put programs on the air, the audience just isn't there anymore because the culture has changed. And of course, fewer eyeballs means you can charge less for your fewer eyeballs, fewer viewers, means less that you can charge your advertisers. Right. Then if I can just expand on that a little bit. The funding model that seems to work for journalism in Vermont is, if you will, the public broadcasting model, specifically VPR. So they are able to support themselves, importantly, with listener contributions. Vermont Digger, I think, generally follows that model, grants and contributions. That's a lot better, by the way, than the alternative, which is none at all. But it does impose limitations on the resources that they have to provide the kind of coverage that was common in this period of the 70s and 80s that we're talking about. Can you amplify on that a little bit, Diane, on how Digger funds itself and how literally, I guess it depends on advertising? Right, so Digger's a non-profit and I'm not on the business side, so I don't have the numbers at my fingertips. It's a whole hodgepodge of funding through grants, journalism, foundations, contributions. We have ads on the site, we have advertising. But I think, to Peter's point, so I think the big issue here is that when things are on the internet, they're fair game for anybody to see and there's no buy-in from people. I mean, I don't know what VPR's saturation rate is for contributions, but it's a small percentage of Vermonters who've listened to VPR and I'm not even gonna hazard a guess. But most people think it's free and it's not free. It costs a lot of money to put on VPR to create and keep VT Digger going. And there's a disconnect that didn't exist back when people paid subscriptions for their newspapers to be delivered at the door. There was a buy-in, I think, of people, it was like a contract between the reader and the product. I'd pay my subscription fee and I'd get a newspaper. And now there's pushback in readership thinking that it's free, that it doesn't cost anything. And how, you know, it's a real challenge now for media, like how do you get that buy-in from your readership to have them contribute? And you don't wanna be hitting them over the head all the time every time they open up to the Vermont Digger site saying, please send us money. So it's tough, but it's this notion, and I think it's largely in the internet sphere that everything is for free and you just go in and log in and you get the product. And that's a challenge, I think, for a lot of online newspapers. I'll also just say, I wanna just, this is a little off topic, but it's not that there's less news available now. There's more news available now than there has ever been in our lifetimes. I think what's kind of scary about the availability of all kinds of new sources is, back in the day, we fact-checked. We went to journalism school, we learned ethics, we learned, you know, there was a lot that went into being a journalist. Now any blogger can be a journalist and then you've got these sites appearing as journalistic sites, you know, the Info Wars and the fake news and people gravitate to the sites where they that reinforce their political beliefs rather than watching Walter Cronkite and hearing the news from a trusted source of what was news-based reporting. And I think that's the real danger to journalism right now is that, anybody can gravitate to a site and we all know what has resulted as a, because these fake news sites, just people gravitated and thought it was news and followed like lemmings. And I think that's the real danger to journalism right now is that the high standards that we all tried to live up to in reporting, you know, just aren't upheld as journalistic standards and anybody can be a journalist and put out fake news. And I think that's, you know, beyond just biting into newspapers revenue, to me, the internet, there's more news than we've ever had. You know, I subscribe to the Washington Post, the Irish Times, the Boston Globe and several others. So I get these headlines just throwing at me every morning when my computer flips open. And it's wonderful. Like I could have never done that 20 years ago. So from the golden age of journalism perspective, we're all getting flooded with news and you can pick and choose what news sites you want to read every morning. But like I say, to me, the real danger in journalism in this day and age is the fake news. I think you make a really good point. I think the flattening out that has happened as a result of the internet, you open up a site and everything looks quote unquote equal on the internet. You actually kind of jumped ahead to one of the questions that I was gonna ask, but let's talk about it now. And that is, you know, why is not now with the immediacy of the news that we get, the proliferation of news that we get, why this isn't the golden era? But first I wanna ask Peter, we talked about the importance of local ownership. Your family, and I hope this is not, you don't take this question the wrong way, but in 2017 your family chose to sell your station to an outside corporation. Was that because no one in Vermont, no other family wanted to buy it? Why did your family make that choice to gray communications out of Atlanta? The world changed, and the business model that we had was clearly unworkable. We were the last freestanding, independently owned CBS affiliate. The very last one. There's one other company called Midwestern TV that has two CBS affiliates. The technology, all much of what we're talking about how newspapers work and broadcast work have the roots in technology. They are distribution systems. And the internet and fiber and all of those things have completely changed the whole pattern of how you distribute. And there is a thing called the network effect. And the network effect is when you put these networks that we're familiar with together, you are driven to size, to scale. Because, for example, we were freestanding stations so we had to have HR and admin and finance and accounting and so on. Well, with the internet you can centralize those functions. And so that's a desirable thing from a business point of view. After a little while, it becomes a critically necessary thing if you are going to survive. We were the 105th station that gray television acquired. They now have, I don't know, 155. Local television has become a business of scale. It had to become a business of scale because advertisers got bigger, program distributors got conglomerated and you just could not survive against them. So we made the decision that, A, we would sell because the future was pretty bleak. And we were very careful to pick a company whose business model is to buy the number one or number two station in its market and to tell that station to keep doing what it does well. That's not necessarily the way business model of some of the other big chain broadcasters. The newspaper business has also, in a way, become a business of scale. The Burlington Free Press, for example, is laid out, I think, in Perth, Amboy and New Jersey or some such place. And it's actually printed in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Right. The whole thing is computerized. So the local guys, the Free Press, who used to be on College Street and then they had a floor in a building in downtown Burlington next to People's Bank and now are out in, I think, Industrial Avenue. Smaller and smaller. But the paper, those all stories, they're all shipped down to Perth, Amboy and they lay the paper out there. You think that's a bad thing. Well, it's still publishing. A lot of places aren't. But, I mean, there's some days it's down to 16 pages. I mean, my high school newspaper was bigger than many of the days that the Free Press is publishing today. Steve, let me ask, well, go ahead. No, I just want to say there is one part of journalism in Vermont we all ought to be happy about. The weeklies are actually stronger than the dailies. By and large, Addison, Indy, Pendant, Randolph paper, obviously seven days is a strong, I don't think seven days, in fact, I'm almost positive, it's never since the day it started, it's never had a losing, money-losing week, which is remarkable for a startup. And maybe during the pandemic. Maybe during the pandemic, yeah. But what Diane and Peter were talking about, some of the weeklies in Vermont have started, even though they're privately owned, have started to look at ways to encourage charitable donations. Now they have to create some different business models, but that's starting to happen. And still in Vermont, you can go around the state and whether it's the Barton Chronicle or the Manchester Journal, these are weekly papers that more and more fill the need that is not happening with the dailies. And they can also do, if they're micro-local, then they can even get advertisers who are local too. Anything you wanna add to this? Couple things, one thing that we've left out so far is talk about in the Golden Age, that all of the daily newspapers and from many of the weeklies wrote editorials. They had, I see Nick Montzer out here and that's what made me think of it. The Rutland Herald won the Pulitzer Prize for its editorials on civil unions. It used to be, if you were a political candidate and you had to go before the editorial board at the Burlington Free Press, you went and you hid for a couple of days and got all ready for it. It was something you really prepped for like presidential debates. There's nobody except the St. Albans messenger now who are doing those local editorials and that's by somebody who's editor emeritus and no one doing endorsements except the St. Albans messenger. So that was another sign of the life and vitality of the organizations as they existed in that period. The part you're talking about, Mark, about what we're missing today and shouldn't we be saying the digital age is the golden age. I think it's a couple of things. One, it's the resources that are lacking. If we had, and I can't add it all up but I just think about the Herald, the Free Press, CAX, their staffs would have been a couple of hundred people. If we added it all up and added the wire services and everything else, it was an incredible amount of resources to be covering Vermont and that's not here today. VT Digger just can't fill that void all by themselves and they really don't try. I think of what we're missing in the political campaigns. I thought in this last Democratic race for Congress, it was like it happened in a vacuum. We had no real sense of it like we used to when the Herald covered or the CAX was on them all the time. When Jim Douglas, Con Hogan and Doug Racine ran for governor in 2002, they had 36 forums that they had where they met with voters. The AP made sure that we covered, if not in person but through a stringer, every one of those because it was important to be there and be giving that sort of coverage and I don't have a sense that we have that sense this year with any of our candidates and our campaigns and some of that is because it's on social media and you're sort of watching the candidate you like from the beginning. So you can see Beckabale and went on a seven day, 14 county business tour and you go, wow, isn't that great? Well, if there were a reporter covering her I think the reporter would be writing, really? You can know business in Vermont by going and go 14 counties in seven days. I don't think so. We don't have that level of depth coverage that we used to and that's what's missing with the digital age today. But is it the coverage or is it the audience? Do you think the people who were all living on our phone? Do you think the people would actually watch twice as many forums? Yeah, I think you've raised an excellent question and point, Mark. And I go back to Diane, she said internationally she can get on her phone, I can read the Guardian, we can see the BBC, we can have access to things internationally we never could before. But with the digital age, we could also have access to the candidate forums. If we wanted to sit down and watch them, the VT Digger forums or whoever might be doing it we could, we don't. Do I watch my city council meeting in Montpelier? Sorry, I don't. We have these ability to do that and we don't take advantage of it. So I think that you've raised a real important point that when we had the newspaper, we all sort of read the newspaper and now you have to work to find the things and take time and you don't do it. Along the same lines, why is it Diane, picking up on Diane's point, why is it that the Rutland Herald and the Burlington Free Press or whoever, that there aren't more Vermont diggers, that there aren't as many reporters covering Montpelier? I mean, the cost is substantially less when you think about Steve, what your newspaper spent to cut down all those trees, the printing presses, you don't have to do that anymore. You can have a WordPress site and quote unquote put out a newspaper. So why aren't more people and why aren't there as many reporters covering Montpelier today given the cost reduction that a newspaper doesn't have to deal with? Well, there may be a judgment by the owners that the readers or viewers are not interested. And this is why I say the smart. Earlier this week, I was at a dinner with a very close friend of mine who teaches at the University of Vermont. And he teaches a course on public policy, very experienced lecturer and he told me something that absolutely shocked me. He said he asked his students and in his big survey class, about 100, what do you read or what is it that you, where do you get your news? And for the most part, most of his students put their head down and could not answer that question. So that tells me that we are in another changing environment that I guess I don't understand, but I guess future owners of journalism enterprises are gonna have to figure out. And I don't know what the answer is. Here's another thing too. I think that the number, there's not only a question about audience and what they're looking for, but going back, Diane and I were products, we all wanted to be the next Woodward and Bernstein. Is that fair to say, right? Is that when we talk about Watergate? And I was gonna teach a course at Champlain College. There were no students that signed up for journalism courses. Do you, as the youngest person on our crew here, do you get that sense too that there's less interest in wanting to become a journalist today? You know what they took instead of journalism? Finance. Gaming. Yeah. Champlain College is huge for its gaming courses. Yeah, exactly right. If you look at coursework now in colleges, it's altogether different than what it was. And they all major in finance. They all wanna go work for fidelity. Or that. Or I heard on NPR the other day that there's a college course on Taylor Swift now. Who would have known? It's just, it's a very different world. And I think you have to just consider how many competing interests there are for people. I mean, how many hours do people spend on their cell phones every day? I don't even spend much time on my cell phone and it tells me every day that I'm up to like two or three hours a day. And I don't even think I'd spend much time, but that's three hours a day. I'm not reading something. And when you think of Netflix and Hulu and all of these options that people have now, I taught a journalism course in the early 90s at St. Michael's and I had a hard time back then getting students to read a newspaper. I had to give them a pop quiz to see if they were reading their journalism students and they couldn't, they weren't reading newspapers. I felt like such a mean old teacher but I was like, okay, you know, what major international figure was assassinated this weekend? They couldn't tell me. So I think that maybe the college age isn't really a good indicator. I would argue that I didn't really get as deeply involved until I was an older student because I dropped out and my first internship was at the Boston Globe and then I was totally consumed. But I think for the average readership, I think we're probably talking an older audience anyway with newspapers. I wish I lived long enough, or will live long enough but I won't thankfully to see what comes next because I think when people are sitting at this table talking about golden age of journalism for the year 2040, it's gonna look a whole lot different. Fewer journalism jobs out there too. That's another problem. Peter? I was going to say that in the period we're talking about being a reporter, a journalist was a fairly high status. Kids wanted to do it. This in part of course was because of all the president's men and Woodward and Bernstein. But it was more than that. We would have just these kids flowing in all the time. You had to beat them off with a stick that wanted to break into journalism because they wanted to make the world a better place or change the world and so on. By after 2000, that was no longer the case. That it's not an attractive career in the way that it was. And there is of course the problem of pay. You know, if you're a youngster and you're coming into the career after a couple of years you're probably gonna want to get married. They're gonna probably want to have a house and have children. And it is exceedingly difficult to do so on what would you get paid. Vermont's problem is pretty, not severe, but constraining. Vermont as a market is a place to start. It's a small market. And it's very difficult I think nowadays to make a career in journalism the way say Chris did or Mark did. Because there just isn't that much room in the senior ranks. And so what we have now is a great deal of turnover. I mean, you really see it, I think it's probably a problem for Digger. I know it's a problem for VPR. And that all kinds of comes back to the question Mark, you sort of raised, which was, why don't we have more, if you will, digital outlets? Well, the reason I think is because, although you don't have printing costs and the heavy capital costs that one used to have in journalism, you still have to pay people. And we are a state of 640,000 people. It's very small. Minneapolis St. Paul is 2,600,000. So one way or the other, as you sort of look at the thing as a business model, if it's gonna be advertising, there are only so many people that you can reach. And by the way, they're all looking at something else. There are only so many people that will pool in which you can fish if you're Vermont Public Radio or Vermont Digger to get contributions. So the resources become very limited and it becomes very difficult, I think, to hire young people who have the skills and the talent and the resources that you're gonna get them on board and keep them for at least a couple of years because it takes time to learn the craft. There is a service this afternoon for one of our broadcast colleagues, Catherine Hughes, and I know Diane is planning on attending that. So if you see her very casually scoot out on us, it's, that's the reason why. And I think Diane really laid out what I wanted to be. My last question, which is, what have we lost in not having this golden age and your greatest fear really about for my journalism as we go forward, you talked about this appealing to base interest, the credibility of what we read. And Steve, why don't you pick up with what Diane talked about and tell us what your greatest fear is and then we'll get to some of your questions. Okay, and one of the things though I do wanna say during this era, and maybe starting a little before 80, Vermont journalism has proven to be a tremendous training ground for people who have gone on and became real journalism stars. The first person I hired as managing editor of the Rutland Herald in 1977 was this young woman just out of Yale named Jane Mayer. And Jane stayed at the Herald maybe a year or a year and a half and moved on to an amazing journalist. And thankfully she still has Vermont roots and is on the digger or Vermont Journalism Trust Board. I, what was your question? You're great, Diane talked about her great fear in the future of Vermont Journalism, having now, if we accept the premise we've lost this golden age. Well, I don't think we will be what there are in many other parts of the country. I hope not, something we call news of the deserts. I have a habit when I'm traveling around the country, well stop in some small town in the Southwest as I did about a year ago. And I would just say, do you have a local newspaper? And I would get a very quizzical look often, especially in that part of the country. No, well hopefully that won't happen here. We'll still have some form of journalism because Vermont citizens seem to demand information. Now, maybe the younger ones don't as much but maybe it's a very different kind of information. And as Diane said, over time they may, after college, grow into especially wanting to know more about the place they live. So I guess I don't think we will be a news desert but we won't be a news oasis either because I think we're gonna have places and we're gonna have spotty coverage. And I think that more and more we will see the evolution of the nonprofit model that will provide information. And hopefully there'll be room for young people to come and still learn the journalism trade. Which your biggest fear, Peter? Peter, what's your biggest fear in the future of Vermont journalism? Well, the economics of it are very difficult. The issue of staffing is gonna be really important. You know, to do the work and do it well requires a high degree of intelligence. It needs experience, it needs perception about people and issues. And that's really hard to do when your staff consists largely of people who are two years out of college. That doesn't mean they aren't going to develop into good journalists but the way it works with the network of the internet and so on is that the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and a couple other sites will become very dominant and pervasive and it will become increasingly difficult to provide the kind of journalism that we have been accustomed to in this state. Before we get to Chris, it looked like there was something you wanted to add. I just don't want to leave the impression, I think it's all doom and gloom. I work with some very, very talented young reporters and it just impresses me to know and what Digger's done and I'm really happy to be a part of it and I just think it's different. It's just very, very different. We're not covering it on a micro level, we're covering things on a more macro level just because that's how we have to do it but I still think there's real talent. I think we also have to just acknowledge there's so many different forms of media now. Podcasts, like so many younger people get their information through podcasts. You haven't seen the New Yorker this week, there's a great story on our panel and then her podcast, Rumble Strip, which I think is one of the really more creative pieces of journalism in Vermont right now. It's not the hard-hitting journalism that we all cut our teeth on. It's just different but I don't wanna leave this notion that I have great fear because I work with some really, really talented young people. Amen on the Rumble Strip for Mon. I mean, Erica is not somebody who covers politics but she covers issues that matter. What's your biggest fear? I think that when you look at what makes our, why Howard Dean caught on as a presidential candidate and why Bernie Sanders caught on as a presidential candidate and why, you know, when Jim Jeffords became an independent, why these folks have caught on with America, with the rest of America is because there's something we have here that's very special and we expect our politicians to be authentic, we expect them to be human-scaled, we expect to see Pat Leahy at the Montpelier Farmers Market. We expect all of our politicians to be held accountable and I think we've managed to do that because of the press that we've had covering them in the State House. You know, you talked about Howard Dean's press conferences and what it was like. You know, he would stand there until every question had been answered and when you had your talk show, you would be getting questions from ordinary people to the governor and they'd have to be answering those questions in a very simple, understandable way. You can't be, you know, so what I think we're losing is this accountability that we've been able to have that has forced our politicians to sort of be real people like Dean Davis's phone number in the telephone directory. Nobody has a telephone directory anymore, but if they did, all of our governors, at least through Governor Douglas, had their phone numbers in the telephone directory and they expected that, so my fear is, and some of it is from hearing what Diane was saying, that our politicians today are more standoffish and working through public relations people. They don't have to do what we've required them to do in the past. Thank you for a nice lead in for us to take some questions from you folks. But first, let's give a nice round of applause to our panel that will liberate you if you want to. So, you're good, okay. We have time for a couple of questions if you folks want to far away a question or two. Ma'am. Optimistic as you are. I think Vermont is, in a sense, an island unto itself, but the societal implications of what all of you presented with regard to the state of journalism is very great because the trauma that we're going through as a society today, the implications were that to a great degree, the journalists were holding the fort on what is the truth and what is honest. And you talk about fake news or whatever. If we don't have clear sources and information upon which to make enlightened decisions, our democracy is so fragile. Right, lights out. Let me get somebody on our panel to comment on that. Who would like to take that jump ball? Steve? Well, my wife asks the question. Oh, hi. All right, conflict of interest, shall we say. Chris, why don't you take that one? So, it is very scary indeed. And it gets to a point, I think, Mark made somewhere in there about the splintering of the audience. And when Peter was talking about Walter Cronkite as the most trusted man in America, we always used to work from the same set of facts. We had one set of facts and it might have been spun just a little here and there. But we either heard it from Walter Cronkite or John Chancellor, whoever it might have been or we might have read it in the newspaper by a great baronner, Walter Mears, AP writer. But what has happened now is we don't even agree on the set of facts. So you can have Fox News. So people are watching, they can be watching and obtaining information that reinforces their own point of view. And it's a very scary thing for a democracy. You've raised a great point. Well, Diane, pick up on that because you've talked about how, I think journalists have changed too. You know, when we all covered the news, it was just the facts. But now I think many journalists feel as though they need to be in a sense activists. Am I wrong on that? I think it all depends what source of news you get and listen to. So I don't want to weigh in too much. I also just want to clarify that I'm not trying to be rosy and optimistic where I can't be. No, I'm just saying I don't want to sell short the younger reporters who I work with because I think they really work hard and do a good job. But to your point, I think we also live in a bubble in Vermont where a lot of people think the way we do. And then you get outside of Vermont and you go to the Midwest, you go to other states and you realize, like, whoa, people don't think see the same facts the way we do to the point of facts. When I lived and worked in DC, I would get on elevators in the Senate, the Dirksen building, and listen to these conversations from people from other offices that weren't of the same party necessarily. And I'm like, whoa, they think differently. You know, they see it, they see that floor vote today a little differently than I do. So I think, you know, it's just, there's not one, there's not one way that people see these things, you know, other people just don't see it the way we do. And so they, no, I, yeah. But I think after January 6th, we all feel who could have guessed that we would come that close to losing a democracy? I mean, I believe, I know, believe me, I agree. And I think what largely, you know, the hearings have done great work, but the fact that Steve Bannon got only four months in jail and he'll be out and he'll be a martyr. And, you know, I don't want to get too down the rabbit hole in the politics here, but you know, there are people who think, who just see that day so much differently than we do. And don't believe that the election was actually won by Joe Biden. You know, and don't believe the insurrection was an insurrection. Right. You know, you saw it on television. You saw it on live news. How could you think it wasn't what it was? It's mind boggling. So I agree with you. I just didn't want to leave the impression that I'm all rosy about the future, but I think it's a lot more than just on the journalists. It's on people to be well-informed citizens and use facts. But I don't hold out a lot of faith that people in other areas of the country will let the facts stand for themselves. And that's certainly at the heart of where we could falter. Another question or two, ma'am? Because I got to read your stories that you were writing when I was writing up. I think I started from this paper when I was maybe 10. You moved to Montpelier when I was 10. You lived in Montpelier when I asked you to move to Montpelier. And it really mattered to me. They were really interesting. And they simulated my mind. And they probably really affected my interest. And I thank you for that. And I thank you for leading with the kind of substance that you did lead with. Like somebody said, you know, leading with. Somebody said that you led with politic Ramon issues more than with crime, which is a good thing. Because I read some pretty horrific articles, too, that were not real happy reading when you were a kid growing up. But I also read a lot of this interesting substance and got to know a lot of characters from living in Montpelier and from reading newspaper articles. And I really appreciate that. And I want to say thank you all for that. And then the other question I have is, it's a question. Have any of you been familiar with Con Hogan? Left some books behind? He had like a series of three or something called Met Along the Way. Also Met Along the Way and one other one. And so if you know about that. Yeah, yeah. I was, I consider myself a good friend of Con over the years. And this is just a quick way of example. He used to pick me up at least once or twice every year. And we'd go for day-long rides, where it was all off the record. He just wanted me to see programs that were working. We'd get a hardwick. We'd go to Newport. We'd go to Fairfax. We'd go all over the state. And you know, it was just, that kind of thing just doesn't happen anymore. I had the secretary of the agency of human services put, you know, take me all over the state. And we just had such a nice time. And you know, Con was a guy, if you remember his big catch word was data and we need the outcomes. We need outcomes. And that agency produced a data book this thick every year that I used as a Bible as a reporter. And you don't see that data anymore in state government. You get reporters don't have access. So I'm glad you brought up Con because he was a very good man, very dedicated civil servant. Let's take one more here. Toby Talbot who worked at the AP. Is photojournalism dead in Vermont? Photojournalism? Oh, photojournalism. Don't tell Glenn Russell that. The question is, there's a couple of exceptions. Yeah, photojournalism isn't dead. Diane, you're still in the business. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, it's very minimal compared to what it is. I mean, I think there's still some very good photographers still working for news organizations. Jeb Wallace Broder here in Montpelier. You know, he's a phenomenal photographer. But what you don't see as much in the Times-Argus compared to what it was 15 years ago was a news story accompanied by a photograph or a spread of something that's really photojournalism. But it's not criticism of Jeb. I think it's the lack of ability, the lack of capacity of a newsroom to plan more than a day ahead to say we're gonna do a big photo spread with journalism and combine the news story with the photographs. You see less and less. Glenn Russell is the main photographer for Vermont Digger. We all go way back. Glenn's been around for a while. And, you know, I know that we do our best to kind of set him up a few days so we have some art to go with stories. But certainly not the way it was Rob Swanson, Toby Talbot and, you know, Karen Pike and Adam, all those days. You know, it's not the same. I wouldn't say it's dead, but flip that to say we also have a lot of multimedia stuff now that has kind of taken the place of just still photos, if you will. So... You know, people like Mike Docherty who do podcasts and there's been a whole... Yeah, he does a really nice job. I lied. Let's take one more if anybody's got one. Bill, I saw your hand up. Anything you want to add? No? Okay. All right, on that note, let's thank our panel again for, I think, a very great, robust discussion. Thank you. You want to, George, you want some final words? Come on over here so that people can actually hear you. I just want to thank everybody for being our excellent panel. Mark for moderating it. And I'm going to comment on the last question about photojournalism. And that is, it's a paper that's sort of a Vermont paper and that's the Valley News. And the Valley News in Lebanon and White River has unbelievable photojournalism. They're just really doing a great job at it. Maggie Cassidy was editor down there. She's a digger now. We miss Maggie. And so just to comment there. And thanks again. And we've already thanked our panel and our moderator. And thanks to our friends at ORCA for being here. Yes. Thank you very much.