 We're going to start just a minute. I have two important announcements. Cell phones, turn them off, please. Feedback forms. The lucky people that found them in their seat, please fill them out. They are so important to the program committee. And now Dorothy Lovering is our publicity chairperson, and she wants to say a few words. One of the things that publicity is doing is making sure that our brochures are out in the libraries, the retirement centers, and the senior centers where we send them out. So if any of you are interested in doing that for us, just go in and check them to make sure that they still have film heads that even resupply them. That'd be great. We've got quite a few volunteers locally, but if you live out from the rooms in the south and you see Wilson, that would be helpful. Thanks. Just come and see me. I'll be up at the membership table afterwards. Thanks. And now Michael will introduce his speakers. Thank you, Betsy. Good afternoon. Today I'm very pleased and honored to introduce Khan Main. He's the news editor and VT Digger, the influential statewide news and public policy website. And also to welcome his wife, Sukin. Thank you for joining us. Colin grew up in Topsom, Maine. He earned his undergraduate degree from the Dill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Colin has spent most of his career, far from Maine, in Cambodia. He was a reporter and editor at two English-language newspapers, the Cambodia Daily and Phnom Penh Post, and also an editor at Southeast Asia Globe, a regional current affairs magazine. Fortunately for us, Colin recently returned to New England and took up a key position earlier this year at VT Digger. Today he will be sharing some insights with us on such issues as real news, disinformation, investigative reporting, and the challenges and opportunities facing journalists in Vermont and perhaps beyond. This is his first visit to Triple E. Please join me in giving a very warm, Triple E welcome to Colin Main. Good afternoon. So can you hear me in this? Or should I talk in the microphone? Yeah. All right, great. Yeah, so thanks a lot for being here and starting to take you away from the vote on the cabinet here. And maybe we can get some live updates into the presentation. Yeah, so I was, as far as what I'm sort of going to talk about, all I, this was basically the title that was sent to me in the speech. It's quite a title, as you can see. How the disappearance of real news has led to disinformation, mistrust, rigid thinking, and our democracy instead of shared values and real problem solving. So this is like a pretty huge question. We're basing the media. Pretty huge question. We're basing society, obviously. So I'm going to sort of start on a national level and sort of what's going on there, even a global level, and then sort of work our way into Vermont. And then I'll talk a bit about what's going on at BT Digger. And hopefully we'll have like 20 minutes or so to take questions and talk about whatever I didn't cover in this presentation. And I'd like to say before I get started that Ann Galloway, our founder and editor, he may know of, she's very sorry she couldn't make it. She's in Texas this week at Trip Fest, which is hosted by the Texas Tribune, which is one of the most successful nonprofit news organizations in the country. Started by a guy named John Thornton, who invited Ann to go down there and sort of talk about some of the bigger ideas of what's going on with nonprofit news and how we can expand what we're doing at BT Digger, both in Vermont and elsewhere. So she's sorry she couldn't make it, but she's quite in a good fight in Texas at the moment. All right. So I'm going to sort of break it down one thing at a time. First, the disappearance of real news. Obviously, at BT Digger, we very much do not believe the real news is gone altogether, right? I mean, we're trying to make real news happen every day, but certainly the amount of real news being generated at a local level is seriously diminished compared to even what it was two decades ago. So just some of the basic figures that the amount of money going into print outlets through ad revenue just from 2000 to 2015 has gone down from $6 billion across the country to $20 billion across the country. So we're operating on a third of the budget that we were just 20 years ago. And from 1990 to 2016, the number, total number of people employed at these organizations has gone down from almost half a million people to 173,000, and the number of daily newspapers has also seen a precipitous decline, although not as significantly. I think that it's important to note the number has gone down from 14 and a half to 12 and a half thousand, but the actual, those organizations are far less robust than they were in the past and get into in a bit. Some of the bigger Vermont news organizations, the extent to which they've been gutted. They still exist, but they exist in a far, far diminished way. And then talking a bit about news desert. So you may be familiar with the term, this is places where basically there just are no journalists covering what's happening in these places, right? So I mean, I think that you can think around Vermont. Can you guys hear me okay? Yeah, yeah, all right, cool. Around Vermont, a lot of places that once had strong coverage. So a lot of jobs, even the jobs that do exist have shifted from local places, from sort of blanket coverage in the United States to pockets in the East Coast and the West Coast, right? So areas around New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles, that still have very strong coverage. So this is sort of, as things have shifted from print to digital, the jobs available in digital media are very much focused on the sort of urban centers. So just to use that sort of, the number of jobs in internet publishing has gone up from 77,000 in 2008 to more than 200,000 in 2007, 17. But 73% of those jobs are concentrated in these areas. And then this sort of shows where you see the darker colors down in Southern California, around Chicago, Illinois, and in New York, a little bit in Florida. Those are places where lots of journalism jobs, lots of coverage, very robust. Obviously, if you look here in Vermont, you see a much lighter shade, which would suggest there's just not a lot of folks doing journalism here. And particularly, interestingly, sort of central Vermont is the lightest color, which is kind of surprising. I think that things like the Caldonia record, the Rattleboro Reformer, that those sort of give a slightly brighter view to some of the other parts of the state. And then a bit about fake news, which obviously has become, we've got some thumbs down in the audience. And fake news has become this very broad term. At some point, it might have actually meant things that were intentionally fake. It's come to mean something, a lot of different things. It's often used to describe news that people don't like, such as the Russia reports. This sort of clickbait, which is maybe sort of true in some way, but is meant purely to bring as many people onto the website as possible, so it has very little value. And then actual fabricated news, such as Katy Perry resolving the ISIS conflict. So it's sort of a broad swap of things as far as what means fake news. But when we talk about, and I think it's important to talk about fighting all these things separately, but to see each of them as being a separate problem in themselves. That fake news, actual fabricated news, is some problem, clickbait is something that sort of the internet business model has driven, just to try to get as many people on your website as possible. And news people don't like, that's obviously another issue. And then just a bit about another thing is fake news is not news that are mistakes, right? We make mistakes. Does this work? Yeah. Oh, it's a pointer. No. No, it's a pointer. This new fangle technology. And then mistakes also not to be confused with fake news, right? That news organizations get things wrong and sometimes when you get things wrong, it's a huge liability for the news organization. I don't know if you guys saw the New York Times story recently about Nikki Haley's curtains cost $52,000. She didn't make the decision to buy the curtains. The Trump administration didn't make the decision to buy the curtains. So it was sort of framed in a way that made the Trump administration look very bad. It was actually a decision made by the Obama administration and a lot of conservative pundits took the New York Times to task and said this is proof of their liberal bias. So mistakes sometimes, maybe they're not, whether or not they're well-intentioned, badly-intentioned, they blow up on the news organization and they fuel this sort of fake news narrative. And this isn't new, right? So Jonathan Swift said a few hundred years ago, falsehood flies and the truth comes limping after it. And this is proven very much true in the social media age. A study that was published in Science Magazine found that falsehood diffuses significantly faster, farther, deeper and more broadened in truth. And on Twitter alone, falsehoods tend to spread 70% faster than truths. And then it's not just robots that are doing this. There's an idea that these sort of algorithms that are generated by the social media sites are somehow responsible for spreading this fake news and it's actually us that are responsible for fake news. There's various theories on why that is, but that humans are the ones who are spreading this news and not the bots most of the time. And one solution to all this, and this goes, this is less about fake news than it is about what I was talking about with the news deserts and that sort of thing, but that the advertising model is, it's becoming very clear that it's broken, right? The New York Times, the Washington Post, who have millions and millions of readers a day, they can generate enough money to actually have sort of a standard funding model for their news organizations. For local news, that's just not possible anymore. It's very clear that people who are still sticking to the advertising model, they can hire a few reporters, a few editors, but they're really struggling to get by. And what Ann Galloway did a few years ago after being laid off from one of those newspapers from the Times Argus, it has started website and try a whole different model for how local news can be done. And it's not just happening at BT Digger, it's happening across the country. Like I said, Ann's at the Texas Tribune right now. They're doing it about as well as anyone are. There's Mississippi Today, there's a website in Connecticut, there's a pew in California. So this is, the idea is starting to spread a bit. And there's organizations like Institute for Nonprofit News which brings together, I think they have 140 members around the country who are talking about ways to do membership models of journalism so that the readers are essentially paying for as much as possible the content that they're reading. So you have a much more direct connection and you no longer rely on advertising. Lion Publishers is the same thing, that's local, independent online news. They also have hundreds of members. News Match is an organization that gives matches local donations so that it sort of helps fund these operations. And as I mentioned, TriVest is this, I would encourage you to check out the Texas Tribune, they're doing some pretty cool work. So rather than just talking about how bad things are out there, Ann talks about going to conferences around the country and journalism and just how depressing the experience is that everyone's saying everything we knew is gone and the end of news is near. But that doesn't have to be the case, right? There are people who are actively coming up with ways to fill some of these news deserts. There's a thing, I believe it's called News Corps that's sort of like AmeriCorps where you hire young journalists and send them around the country to some of these places that don't have reporters. So people, we, BT Digger, are part of a broader effort to actually fill these news deserts and create a model that's more sustainable than this. And then a few of the ways, so as I mentioned, it's a membership model largely. I'll get in later to sort of how BT Digger is funded, but the idea is that people are moving towards a system where if you want the news, you pay for it and you don't pay a rate necessarily, you pay as much as you can afford. And the NPR affiliates really, I think, are the standard bearers of this model. They did it decades before anyone else did it. So BT Digger is not reinventing the wheel here. A lot of what we're doing is very similar to what the NPR or other NPR affiliates does, which is they say, if you appreciate this programming, if you appreciate the work we're doing, then help support us. And it's also mission-driven. So on my clickbait that we were talking about before, you don't need to put out the news that's going to, you don't need to put out Half Naked Woman, you don't need to put out this kind of thing that you're doing stories that are part of a broader mission. So, you know, at BT Digger, we're doing government accountability work, we're doing, obviously, democracy, environment, I mean, all the things that you see on our website that this is part of a broader mission to contribute to important public dialogue. And, you know, most importantly, sustainable, that we're not relying on advertisers to continue taking out ads in BT Digger, that we have a membership base who appreciates what we're doing and will keep supporting. This is not all gonna be a pitch for BT Digger, by the way. Most of it is more broadly focused. So back to the title, you know, talk about disinformation and now mistrust and rigid thinking. So the Pew Research Center just did a general study into people's opinions about their government and it was pretty depressing. Yeah, at the moment, 18% of Americans trust their government to do the right thing most or all the time. In 1968, that number was 62%. And even during Watergate, the number was 36%. So it's a pretty dire situation. And this sort of helps explain why they're so low. So low of trust in the media right now. So this shows from left to right, liberal leaning media to right leaning media. And this variations on this are sort of kicking around the internet. I don't really want to get into the methodology that they use or whether or not, sites that they call are neutral or not. But I think it helps explain the general sense that there's not a lot of this sort of partisan divide in the media at the moment, right? But you see down the middle, you have NPR, BBC, Washington Post, New York Times. Obviously some people, including our president, would disagree with whether they're playing things down the middle. But it's hard as a news organization right now to not be seen as, you know, when there's such a partisan divide, so many people are distrustful of the government. Then how does the media sort of be trusted? What is the vertical? This is clickbait down at the bottom. So websites that are just generally trying to get as many people onto the website as possible. Sensational and clickbait is what it says down here. And then up here is complex. So more like intellectual news outlets, the Atlantic, the Economist, things like this. So you see CNN sort of plays it down the middle, but it's panders a bit more. Yeah, so that's the idea of this graphic. And I'm sure that many different people using many different methodologies would place different news organizations in different places on this. But just to give a general sense of the sort of how the media is caught up in a lot of the partisan, at least the perceptions of how things are. I saw one of our reporters who said this weekend, someone came up to them and said, so where does BT Digger fall in the political spectrum? And she was trying to say, we don't, right? That we're reporting the news, we're reporting both sides of the story to the extent that they are sort of legitimate and have something to contribute to the conversation. But there's sort of a sense that news organizations wield a political stick in the same way that others do. And part of the problem is that a lot of news organizations do try to do that, right? Obviously Fox News and MSNBC and these organizations have their own agendas, I guess. So what to do about all this? There's sort of a reactive approach. I just took the example of Indonesia's government, which is gonna start having weekly press conferences where they inform the people about what fake news is. You can see how this would be pretty easily abused obviously when they start, I mean, leaders tend to have different views of what's true and not true than journalists and that sort of thing. Obviously there's a more extreme reactive approach, which is that if leaders or people don't like the news then you can put people in jail. There are lawsuits in Cambodia where I was reporting for a long time, near the end of my time there, the government was cracking down quite a bit and some journalists ended up in jail. So the reactive approach from governments can be extreme or it can be just having news conferences to try to clear things up. And then there's a more proactive approach to how to deal with fake news, which is to teach people how to read the news, right? That to not take it for granted that people, young people, middle-aged people, other people will be able to differentiate when they're looking at Facebook, when they're looking at Twitter, when they're online, what's real and what's not, right? What can be trusted, what can't be trusted? So to take news literacy as another skill that you need in order to engage in civil debate, in order to be a sort of functioning citizen, and someone who's sort of been pushing this quite a bit in recent years is our governor in Vermont, Bill Scott, who in April when he stood up and signed those gun laws he made sort of a surprising and impassioned plea for people to be more decent, right? To try to sort of, that the level of dialogue happening online in particular was just in such a way that no one was even having a conversation anymore. People were just yelling at each other, insulting each other, and it wasn't really getting us anywhere. So I think that he deserves some credit for, you know, at least raising this issue and talking about it. He wrote an op-ed on, wrote an opinion piece in BT Digger recently. You know, I don't know that he's come forward with any particularly innovative ideas for how to integrate this into school curriculums or anything like that, but perhaps that's to come. All right, so now I'm gonna shift the talk to Vermont a bit. Well, for the rest of it. Here's our team at BT Digger. It's changed a bit since this photo was taken, but just to briefly give you a sense, we have environment reporters, this is Ann, by the way. We have a web editor, Mike Docherty, a columnist, John Margolis, and then a number of B reporters over here, criminal justice, healthcare, politics, energy, environment. This is Jim Wells, she was a former editor at the Burlington Pre-Press, who's now our special projects editor. Yeah, so we have about 20 people on staff when we're full. We have a couple of positions that we're hiring for right now. Just to give you a sense of that. And there's sort of an anecdote that I think helps explain how much things have changed in the moment right now in Vermont media now compared to 20 years ago and sort of the role that BT Digger is trying to play in Vermont media. When the state house was adjourned this last year and everyone was sort of on a deadline, this is, it's been compared among political journalists to like the Super Bowl. Is the final negotiations, it's been four months in the state house, this year was almost six months in the state house, and this is sort of the big push at the end. It goes until midnight, hard negotiations, backdoor negotiations, grandstanding on the state house floor. And this year at the state house adjournment, there were three news organizations there. Seven days had one journalist, NBC Five had one journalist there, and BT Digger had five journalists there. So I think that sort of gives a sense of, that we're a mission-driven news organization that sends all of our, whatever available resources we have, we send them to cover state politics. And I think that for a lot of other news organizations that don't have a lot of reporters, it just ends up sort of falling, it doesn't become a priority, right? You have to, for TV stations, they have to cover Prime, they have to sort of cover your classic TV news. So when you have three or four reporters, you just don't have the resources to really give state politics the coverage that it requires. And just a sort of example of this, just wanted to talk a bit about the Rutland Herald and the Burlington Free Press. The Rutland Herald are their news editor for 15 years. His name was Alan Keyes. He now works at BT Digger. The reason he left the Rutland Herald was because they were in deep, deep financial troubles. And as the news editor, he felt like it was his responsibility to report on that. And the publishers weren't very happy about his reporting. And he was shown the door after 15 years. And Ann Galloway, as soon as she found out about it, she called him and hired him. So he's our criminal justice reporter now. But when he showed up at the Rutland Herald, they had a three-person state press bureau in Montpelier. They had a four-person Southern Vermont bureau, and that's not including Rutland, that's the rest of Southern Vermont. They had six people covering Rutland City. They had one person in Bennington. They had a Sunday reporter who just wrote for the Sunday newspaper. They had a number of freelancers and stringers. They had an art section. They had a business section, each with dedicated reporters. And then they had nine to 10 editors. They had two city editors. They had a managing editor, an assistant managing editor, an arts editor. So that's 1995, and now 23 years later, they have no press bureau. They have no Southern Vermont bureau. They have no Sunday newspaper. They have four reporters, period, four news reporters, and two editors, although one of them was just let go, so currently they have one editor. Again, like the comparison is just remarkable. They had more than 20 reporters. They had nine to 10 editors. Now they have four reporters and two editors. So that just gives you a sense of when you saw that number early in the presentation about how many newspapers still exist, they may exist, they may publish, but it's in a way that is, just the amount of work they're doing is almost incomparable. And then the Burlington Free Press still fits out these papers some days. In 1990, they had 48 full-time editors, reporters, photographers, photo editors. They had a four-person state house bureau. I apologize for the misspelling there. They had correspondence in 10 out of the state's 14 counties. So these weren't staff members. These were correspondence who wrote, pretty regularly, wrote about city halls, wrote about news in those counties. So that's separate from the 48 full-time editors. That's another 10 people in counties around the state. And they had a Sunday circulation about 70,000 newspapers. In 2018, they have 12 editors, reporters. They have one person who's both a photographer and a videographer. They have no correspondence around the state. And they have a Sunday circulation of 11,000 newspapers. So that's compared to 70,000. So I think that when you get down to how, what's actually happening in these newsrooms, you really get a sense of, even where the newspaper is still coming out, it's a very different operation indeed. And Vermont still has a number of dailies. The Caldonia Record, Valley News, which is both New Hampshire and Vermont. The Times-Argus, the Bennington Banner, and Bralover Reformer. Valley News, Bennington Banner, and Bralover Reformer are all partners at BG Digger, which means that we share content with them. We share some coverage with them. We share reporters with them in a couple of cases. So they're all publishing still. But again, they, on a smaller scale than the Rutland Herald and the Burlington Free Press, have had their newsrooms gutted as well. And actually a number of our reporters previously worked at these newspapers, but amid downsizing, needed another job. And then there's BG Digger, led by journalists and powered by the public. In 2009, Anne was the only employee. People at the State House recall her with her computer. And that was BG Digger. Anne Galloway with her computer at the State House. She had no budget. And then she got a grant from the Knight Foundation, which kind of kick-started it as something a bit bigger than she is, allowed her to hire someone to start actually looking at how to turn it into a business. Today we have 20 staff in an annual budget of $1.5 million. And our main competitors are not the newspapers. Burlington Free Press continues to be quite competitive on a statewide scale. But otherwise, we think of Seven Days and VPR as being sort of our main competition. Seven Days, they have about three dedicated reporters who do a lot of daily news coverage, politics news coverage. They scoop us, we scoop them. It's a healthy competition. We hate them, they hate us, et cetera. VPR, they do radio very well, obviously, but they also have their reporters do stories online. So if you go to vpr.org, you can find longer versions of what they're putting on the radio. Our proper news reports, they talk to lots of sources. Essentially, they're trying to do the same kind of thing we are, but not the traditional newspapers. So it's a very different media environment. And just a bit about sort of how BT Dagger operates here. So we're online only, and I think one of the most important parts of that is that our business model doesn't include tens of thousands of dollars every month on printing a newspaper, right? It's very, very expensive. So we've sort of, by cutting that out of the equation, almost all of BT Dagger's money is going towards people, people and reporters, business staff, et cetera. And obviously, more readers are moving online too, so it makes sense to go where the readers are. This talks a bit about who our readership is. So as far as ages go, more than half our readers are between 55 and 74, about 10% between 18 and 34. Education level, majority, 86%, have a college degree or higher. Income level, about 70%, earn over $60,000 a year. And the other metric that we have in our media kit is how many of our readers vote on a regular basis. And as you can see, a very slim part of our readership is not voting. So the idea there is just to show that our readers are engaged. And then this just talks a bit about our reach. Talked about some of the biggest newspaper in the state, Billington Free Press, is distributed to 11,000 people on a Sunday. So we're getting online reaching every month, almost a quarter of a million unique readers. Monthly page views, almost a million. And that number is steadily going up, although probably not a huge amount of going up to do, right, Vermont's not a huge place. The amount of interest in nitty gritty Vermont news outside of Vermont is not huge. So it's not the kind of operation that can sort of scale up forever, but we're getting to a point where we're getting a significant number of people in the state reading B.T. Digger. And then talking a bit about the sort of coverage we do, we have about 12 reporters who are broken up between Beats Bureau's and partnerships. Beats are reporters who are focused on, we have healthcare, criminal justice, politics, environments, and others probably. We have a Burlington reporter as well. We have an education reporter. So sort of the classic news Beats. And then we have some partnerships with the Ralph or former of the Bennington banner where we share reporters with them. So those reporters are reporting in those places, but they're trying to report stories that are of statewide interest to people who might be reading B.T. Digger. And we do a mix of news and investigation. So one thing that Ann has talked about about when she started is she was doing about three stories a week. And really deep stories, very insightful, groundbreaking, et cetera. But there just wasn't enough stories going up to bring people back on a regular basis, right? So we tried to strike a balance sort of between the daily news grind, which is just covering what's going on on the given day. And then deeper investigations, which is really where we think we deliver the most value. But in order for people to get constant value out of the news that we're creating in order for them to come back on a day-to-day basis, in order for them to deliver value to the underwriters, there's a certain amount of news that we have to create. So I'm the news editor and I'm always like pushing people to report what's going on that day. We try to reach, we try to do eight to 10 stories a day, which between 10 to 12 reporters is, we're busy. But also trying to balance that with investigation. So trying to give people time to really dive into issues, to pour over documents, to do interviews on the record, off the record, just to try to find out about things that other people aren't reporting. We've started doing more podcasts and videos. Our podcasts, our sort of flagship podcast is called The Deeper Dig. And that's produced by Mike Docherty, who is our community editor. And he does a pretty fantastic job if you're into radio and to podcasts. So I would certainly encourage you to check it out. It's a weekly podcast where he, for an hour, sort of explores one of the bigger stories of the week, but sort of talks to some of the people who are part of that story. He talks to the reporter who's been reporting it and sort of go behind the story and find out about what's going on in a way that you wouldn't in a news story. And then we've been doing videos as well. Things like today there was outside burning Sanders office. There was a rally against Brett Kavanaugh. So things that sort of people might want to see but couldn't turn out for would be the kinds of things that we might try to give a video for. And money. Still important, even for a nonprofit news organization. So this is from, this is a year old, I apologize, but it's the freshest one that I could find. It sort of shows the breakdown in our revenue, about a third of our revenue comes from grants. So that's from organizations like the Knight Foundation, Neiman, people, you know, national organizations who support local news operations. Oftentimes through a donor match. So if you visit our website twice a year, we do fundraising campaigns and oftentimes we'll do news matches. So whatever we can raise ourselves will be matched by a group like the Knight Foundation. Underwriting is about a third. So that's a fairly classic advertising model where we're reaching out to companies. Right now we're reaching out to political candidates to try to get them to advertise on our website. So pretty much anyone who has advertising that they want to place, convincing them that BG Digger is the place that they want to do that. Contribution, so this is the membership model coming from individuals, coming from pretty much anyone who, you know, the pitch here is, if you believe in what we're doing, then support what we're doing. And news revenue, that's coming from our partners, the Ralbert Reformer, the Bank to Banner that I talked about. And then we have about 20 other weekly newspapers around the state who use our stories for their sort of statewide coverage. So places like the Colchester newspaper newspaper and just a lot of sort of smaller community papers who still want to have some statewide coverage. And events, 1%, not huge amount of events and then expenses, as you can see, 81% is going towards program expenses. So that's essentially staff, staffing costs. So 80% of what we make is going towards that. We spend about 16% on fundraising and 3% on general administration. So a huge amount of what we make is going into the people who make it, which makes it a very lean operation and different from a lot of legacy organizations who are spending a lot of time. And then a few things about what we're working towards. A partnership with UBM, which is working with them to set up journalism classes and to train journalists hopefully who will then stay in Vermont. I think that's very important to us. Radio news briefs, this is a syndication that we've started doing last month with WDEV and we'll start doing with VPR where we send them the news that we're working on today so that they can broadcast it in the afternoon. As sort of similar to an AP relationship, the AP is sort of on the decline, at least in their Vermont coverage. So sort of trying to step into that void and give radio stations some fresh news for the afternoon primetime drive. Politifact is an organization that does sort of fact-checking of what politicians are saying. We're gonna become Vermont's Politifact partner. And then we've also set up a growth fund, which is sort of supposed to take BT Dagger to the next level to create a what's the word for a lasting fund and endowment, there we go. An endowment that will sort of bring some stability to BT Dagger and hopefully turn it into something more like the institution rather than being a starter. Yeah, so the website's btdagger.org and thank you. Yeah, so I'm really happy to take questions for 20 minutes. Yeah, so please. You date the podcast, but the Deeper Dig is it spelled BT Dagger? Nope, just one. And if you go on our website, it's over on the right side of the website. There's a link that goes through to Deeper Dig. The question was whether Deeper Dig is spelled with one G or two. And then I was saying that it's also available. The podcast that I was speaking of. If you look over on the right side of the homepage, you can find it there. We have a microphone system, so bear with us. Yeah, no problem. During the Ronald Reagan administration, I believe he either by himself or through the Federal Communications Administration eliminated what was called equal time. And that was before cable news, cable TV. But it was designed to ensure that a program would have somebody on one side of the spectrum and somebody on the other side of the spectrum and have equal time. He would either appear on the same program or back to back or something. What effect do you think that that has towards where we are today? What is big news and disinformation and partisan politics? I think it's a big question. I mean, I think a lot of news organizations still sort of uphold that principle because they don't want to be seen as partisan themselves. So if you look at BPR, our coverage, we, I think currently six candidates for governor and Vermont, you might not know that because a lot of them are independents. There's some sort of Earth Party as well and the Liberty Bell Party. So we don't admittedly give much coverage to the two independents and the others, but as far as Phil Scott and Christine Holquist, it's important to us to cover both equally because we think that that is what makes readers trust us. So I guess for news organizations like us that are trying to give unbiased news, I would hope that they're upholding the same principle that the fairness rule had. It certainly allowed a lot of work, I mean, it certainly give organizations the freedom to break with that trust and to pursue a partisan agenda, right? I mean, I don't think that, I mean, there are news organizations on both sides who certainly see themselves as an arm of certain political philosophies as opposed to sort of being in the public interest, I suppose, you know, I guess personally I, yeah, I mean, it's opened the way for much greater partisanship and political coverage. I think that's absolutely true. And I think that there's probably strong debates to be made on both sides of that issue, whether or not the government should be dictating to media outlets, what they cover, but not in the back. Oh, sorry, I want to take one from the front first. I think you also have a spot on PBS. I usually miss it because it's just as I'm switching from the news on EPR to watching the evening news on PBS, and I sort of had to go on to do other terms at that point. That's right, it's called The Digger Minute. It's once a week that our community editor, Mike Docherty, goes on and just sort of gives a rundown of a minute in the news, and they do the same thing with BPR once a week, and I think it's an effort by Vermont PBS to just engage some of the other non-profit news organizations and sort of, you know, create some sort of culture collaboration between those organizations so that we're not all just doing our own thing, yeah. It's great for us because then people like you who might not see a BT Digger online, you know, become aware of us at the very least. So yeah, Mike, if I understood you correctly, the legislature of German, none of the daily newspapers had anybody there. And I'm just wondering with the news coverage, do you think that has encouraged any misbehavior by public officials? I mean, do you think that they are using that lack of scrutiny to do things that they might not do with those more coverage? Yeah, I mean, I think at the statewide level, there's still enough coverage and enough scrutiny that there's not a sense that nobody's watching. But there was a really interesting study that came out about a month ago about how in places, in these news deserts that I'm talking about, places that have lower news coverage, taxes are higher. That decisions, and there's been some studies on accountability in other areas, such as corruption and that kind of thing, that just sort of shows that at a very local level, where there's literally no one covering it, that there is a direct relationship between that and decisions that might raise taxes, decisions that might sort of create fuel on accountability in some other ways. So I think that at the statewide level, there's still up in the media box in the state house, there's still a few people watching, it's still clear that we're there, whether or not, if there was literally no one there, would that sort of cause lawmakers to misbehave? I'm not so sure, but I think that it's probably more important at the granular level at select board meetings, or the lack of select board meetings, because you can make decisions without any accountability whatsoever. So yeah, I mean, I certainly think that there's a direct relationship there. So I noticed your demographic numbers there. They skew highly to people like us in this room. That's right, thank you all. And I wonder what are you doing about the population that gets almost all of their news from the internet and how are you addressing that, or is there another organization like you that they go to? I think that's a very important thing for them to get news like you present and do that, but what do you do about that? Yeah, I mean, that's probably, I would say the most important question for us right now is how do we not, we're very happy to have high levels of readership among older populations, but we'd like that to be a bit more level, right? And I mean, one thing that we're doing is trying to engage more through social media. That's not a very novel approach, but there's many different ways of how to do that. There's another thing called search engine optimization, which is using Google essentially and making sure that when people are searching for news about Vermont that they're finding BT Digger, you mentioned that we're trying to engage with people who are getting their news online or an online only news outlet. It seems like those two things should go together fairly well, but so one question for us is to what extent are younger people reading the news at all? Are they sort of engaging with national news and not really paying much attention to what's going on on a more local level? Is it sort of, I think there's a lot of studies also showing that general engagement, I mean, if you just look at voting, the sort of the turnout for voting is dropping drastically as well. So, is it part of a more general trend of not caring that much about the decisions being made in the state? Do we need to engage on an issues basis as opposed to a sort of broad coverage that all people want? Should we be focused more on the clean energy movement and sort of try to focus on that? There's a lot of questions that we're pursuing to try to answer that question of how do we get a younger demographic to care about the stories we're telling? Or is it a way that we're telling the stories? A lot of our stories we still tell mostly through typed words, right? That we often write 800 to 1,000 words about the issue of the day. Should we be focusing our resources on trying to make videos that tell those stories? Should we have just data graphics that tell it rather than trying to sort of tell it as a written narrative? Yeah, but we're all very used to that format, the written narrative, so that's sort of what we're most comfortable producing. Shifting to something where we're telling all our stories in a video format or something like that would be a huge decision for us. And maybe it would, all the people who do appreciate what we're doing right now wouldn't want it in a video. So, and then do we have the resources to do both? Can we do a video and print? And the answer to that probably right now is no, so great question and let us know if you've got any ideas. Yes? Yeah. I'm sorry, could you speak about your experience in Cambodia and who you were a journalist there, who were you writing for and was it any English and what was your most significant experience there? Yeah, sure. So, I started there, I taught for a year, I taught like six to nine year olds, I left right out of college, something to do. And I hadn't been out of the country much, so just sort of trying to broaden my horizons. And then I started writing for the Phnom Penh Post, which is one of two of the major English language newspapers in Cambodia, the other one is the Cambodia Daily. I started a weekly news magazine for Cambodians that was bilingual in combined English that was sort of meant to do something very similar to what you're talking about, which is tell the news in a way that younger people would want to read it, so more pictures, smaller sort of chunked stories rather than long stories, just trying to engage young folks. We had an online platform for debate, that kind of thing. And then I moved over to the Cambodia Daily, I became the politics reporter during the 2013 election, which was a very exciting election in Cambodia. The opposition was very strong. The opposition leader came back from France a few weeks before the election. It was electric, the opposition had never been stronger. They won almost half the vote. The ruling party declared that they won. There were mass protests throughout the city and I was covering those tens, perhaps more than 100,000 people out on the streets at the same time. So that was as far as the most interesting thing that I covered at that period. That certainly, I may never cover anything as exciting as that, maybe not in Vermont, I don't know. It's hard to envision exactly what might reach that level. And then the ruling party declared victory, the protests died down a bit. The ruling party got very sort of heavy handed. Over the past five years it's sort of been a quickly deteriorating landscape there. The opposition leader was put in jail. He was recently released to house arrest. The media environment, the newspaper that I worked out, the Cambodia Daily is closed now. They still do a bit of online stuff, but we had something like 40 staff members, including 20 journalists, and those jobs have all been lost. So the newspaper does not exist as the newspaper anymore. Our competitor was purchased by a friend of the prime minister and has been watered down very much. So the media environment is really struggling. Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, which are both funded by taxpayers, are sort of the most robust news organizations reporting on Cambodia. And that's great, although they don't quite do the sort of robust daily coverage that we were doing. Yeah, and then I moved back with my wife, Su Kim, and our son in exactly a year ago, we moved back to the States and moved to Vermont about nine months ago. Is that enough? Yeah, I know, I have a question about how you have such good in-depth coverage on political matters and what's happening at the state capitol. I wonder is there any way you can sign that into doing something with WCAX? I understand. So then people are asking you what's up. But there is, I'm just asking you if there's a possibility you can find some opening there for that kind of reporting is very well done. Thank you. So Neil Goswami, who you probably recognize if you know CIX, he's a pretty great reporter and he knows what's going on. I mean, he's got a great understanding. He came from a print background. I don't know if you knew that. He worked for the Times Argus as well. And he has talked to my colleagues about just sort of TV as a medium just doesn't allow for in-depth storytelling. It allows, he gets like, he'll cover the state house for a day and he has to describe what happened in a minute and a half. And it's like, how do you really explain what's going on? So, I don't think for him at least, I don't think it's the quality of reporting. I think it's the decision being made by producers as far as how much time they wanna give those things. So whether or not BT Digger could convince CIX. I mean, the other thing is they could do like, after this I'm actually going to Vermont PBS to do Vermont this week, right? Which is they choose to give a half hour of their programming just to talk about state politics. So if CIX felt like, if they did something like that where they actually had like a Vermont politics show that seems like that might be, but it doesn't seem like that's the direction they're moving in. I think they're giving less and less time to what's going on in state politics. And I'm sure that has to do, I describe what's going on in print media but the same things happening to CIX. They've had a ridiculous number of layoffs in recent years and they're a very diminished organization as well. Thank you. Yeah. You said something about the stories that you've covered. Can you tell me what, what do you define as the stories you would cover because the example you use where you don't cover the other candidates you just covered the main ones. I mean, I would like to know about those other candidates. And by covering on certain candidates that gives them exposure and people don't even know about the others. So you would just kind of gear their votes to those that are in the, you know, exposed. Sure. And there's been, I don't know, do you know Charles Laramie? He's one of the independents running this year, but he's been very sort of forceful sort of pushing this issue that he should be getting equal coverage. I mean, and, you know, I could probably, it's quite a can of worms to open up to talk about this because the main reason we see is that if there are six, it's very easy to sign up. You need 500 signatures in Vermont, right? So if you can get 500 signatures, then you can enter the race. And then whether or not we're being unfair by not covering them, I think that, you know, we're trying to give people information that will help them decide who will be Vermont's next governor. So I don't know whether or not, nothing against the earth party, but I'm not sure that the earth party candidate has a chance of becoming Vermont's next governor. And do we wanna give them one sixth of the time or one sixth of the space on our website because they managed to get on the ballot? And perhaps the answer is yes, but we also, you know, covering six campaigns takes a lot more resources than covering two campaigns. We will do stories on the independent candidates before the election. We're including them in our voter guide, which is a guide that you can go to to find out about every candidate in every race across the state. The way that we do that is we send emails to the candidates, ask them the same questions, basic questions, what are your stances on the sort of important policy issues of the day, tell us a bit about yourself, and then that information will all be available to our readers so that you can see whatever the six candidates have to tell you about their positions and who they are. As far as our day-to-day news coverage of the campaign, it will continue to be focused mostly on those people unless one of the independents, I mean, I think Bernie Sanders is a great example that if you make, I mean, he went through so many elections where everyone was ignoring him, right? Like, I think he lost like 12 elections before he won one, something like that. So, I mean, if you're an independent candidate who turns yourself into part of the story, who's having campaigns, who has supporters who's coming out and showing that you are part of the conversation, then both Digger and TV stations, everyone will start covering you, right? So, I mean, there's no clear answer, and I think that's part of the problem. And we've been talking this year about trying to come up with a coherent policy to say, we don't have the resources, nor do we think it's valuable to cover every person who's on the ballot. We will make sure that information about those candidates is available on our website for anyone who wants it. But here's how we're gonna cover the campaigns in a way that's both fair and allows people to sort of see the competition between the two people who, by all accounts, seem to be the only real candidates for who's gonna be coming up. I don't know if that was satisfactory, but it's something that we're thinking a lot about, and I think it's a very fair question. If there is maybe one more question? Yeah, this is something that's been on my mind. I like watching our reading on the internet of various news sources from my figure, but also New York Times, Washington Post, other news organizations. But I don't subscribe to these ones like New York Times. New York Times and Washington Post and others limit you to a certain number of views per month. And of course, I violate that like lots of people do by deleting the cookies and then go back on and just re-anxiety. So, okay, but I guess I'd like your comments, but I wish there was a way that you could put an umbrella organization or something like that, that to go to New York Times to read a few columns a month, it would be $150 a year or more. I, that doesn't fit, you know, and then I want to read Washington Post again. I wish there was something that I could go on to that would credit me so that I could give to them. I don't really, you know, have a reasonable way. Well, like a coalition of like 10 national news outlets that you could put a certain number of views between all of them. I just kind of wish there were something like that. I know there are a lot of these organizations that are hurting, but those of us. Yeah, I mean, part of it is that it's a doggy dog world out there, right? And people need the subscribers and the idea of getting a few pennies from a subscriber who is buying 10 views a month across 10 websites is not gonna help anyone's revenue generation. But you know, what I think my argument is, I'm not talking about a few pennies. If you look at the number of people that are doing the same thing I'm doing across the nation, who would probably have 10 thousands is not more. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a fantastic idea. I support the idea. And I'll mention it to people when I meet them. I wish there was something we could have never heard of. I mean, I'll admit that I subscribe only to the New York Times. It's like, because I can afford to subscribe to about one website, so that's the one that I do. If that could give me some access to the Washington Post, I'd be much happier because then I could repost, but at the moment it's choice-forwarded. Thank you, very much. Thank you.