 Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome everybody. I'm Richard Watts. I'm the co-director of something called the Reporting and Documentary Storytelling, which is a new program here at the University of Vermont. And one of the co-organizers of this event with Fran Stoddard and Kate Schubart, who is here somewhere. Kate, thank you. So Fran and I are just going to say a few words about how it could be structured, how it is going to be structured today, and introduce a couple of folks, and then just jump right in. The agenda, and by the way, UVM rules, masks, but when you're speaking, you can take your mask off. So, which is great. And I think while you're eating, you're welcome to take your mask off also. All right. So it's really great to have so many people here. The idea of this conference is to focus on local news. What we can do to buck national trends of what is happening with local news and support and energize and help local news survive and thrive. And it's so important for so many reasons that people in this room know well, but allowing people to know what's going on in their communities, engaging citizens in their communities, and holding local government officials accountable. So many of you have been doing this work for so long. It's really great to have you in this room. The impetus for this conference, apparently three, four, five, six years ago, Mike or Kate or others will know something like this used to happen every year, but it hasn't happened in a while. And so part of the whole reason for this is just to allow people to get together and exchange ideas and talk out loud about what's happening in what you do and how what you do can help others think about this issue of local news and how we can help it survive and thrive. And universities, universities have a role. We have a role with our students, but also the other resources we have and space and things like that that we need to be engaged in bringing to this issue. So because a big part of this was just to get people together. And we've designed and Fran and I will go into the agenda a little bit and you should all have one. We've really tried to make it lots and lots of space for everybody to engage and participate and we will do a report at the end and we are going to gather collect some of the materials that come out during the day. So some kind of outcome here so as you're here during the day think about what are the recommendations what are the things you think that we can do collectively to help support local news. And because it's about engaging can we just maybe just take a minute. Initially when we designed this conference we're in a smaller room we thought 30 people be here. We probably, we probably have over 70 or so. But if we could just take a minute at the table if you haven't already done that just go around and say hello to your neighbors and. Okay, keep doing that all day long some minor logistics. There. There is a guest password, which is on your table if anyone hasn't figured that out it's this card here that will explain how you can access the Wi Fi. And there, we're lucky to have a manager of the building who's just down the hall here, Adrian, and he can help you access the Wi Fi if that doesn't make sense. We also are lucky to have tech here all day on the microphones as we pass them around is because again everybody's going to have something to say we hope remember to turn off the mic. It's just a simple on simple on off but bathrooms just across the fireplace there there's an elevator of course. Parking I hope that worked out for people we if you didn't print out this one of these passes and you want to run and put it in your car but on the UVM campus is unlikely that you would be towed. If you're on a city street, it might be a different story and. And CCTV town meeting TV is here and they will be televising this which is really great so much appreciate that Scott. Can I just get everybody who's under 30 in this room to stand up for a minute. Everyone who's under 30 30 and under there is your future of journalism. In in our program we've been lucky in the in the couple of years we've been at it we've had maybe 100 120 students who've done some local reporting, five of them are in Vermont working in journalism, which is very exciting. And speaking of students, I just want to give a special shout out to Emily Stigliani, who worked with us on building the first scholarship funded UVM connect summer students scholarship. Emily as you all may know has been the executive editor of the pre press and it's going on to be senior editor of the Sacramento Emily. And, and again I'm going to turn this over to Fran in a second and do the more of the logistics but I do want to introduce one other really important person bill falls. No or somebody can you find a microphone for bill got one. Bill is the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and has been a don't turn it on yet has been a huge champion of all the stuff that we try and do to engage students and navigate UVM to help support all of this so bill if you want to just say. I take my, I take my orders from Richard. So he actually runs the college but thank you so much for being here it's wonderful to see you all. I also want to thank Richard for all of his hard work in organizing this important conference. I also need to thank Richard and Sophia and Corey for their amazing work with the community news service. Yeah. And really acknowledge that it's, it's, you know, of course the brainchild of Richard and Corey. It really comes from a desire for the college to double down on the importance of a liberal arts education, but acknowledge that we've, we've not done a great job historically here at UVM and certainly in the College of Arts and Sciences of doing two things. One is, you know, giving our students real experiences that link their core competencies transferable skills the things that we've been really good at, you know, for a couple of centuries in teaching our students with liberal arts education, linking those two real experiences that they can take as springboards to careers and Richard and his team have done an amazing job of building an internship program in the College of Arts and Sciences that I dare say is now the envy of the university. And it's in that context that Richard conceived of the community news service and I'm always willing to support a brilliant idea. I'm always willing to hitch my wagon to Richard. And the community news service does three critical things. From my perspective as dean of the college, it really supports student success. It's gives students and thank you to to all of you that have hosted these students. It really gives students amazing experience where they can bring those liberal arts skills to bear in the journalism sphere. It also supports faculty success. It also supports Richard success and and I know Richard is pushing hard to to incorporate scholarship and research springboarding from the community news service but of course the third thing it does which is near and dear to my heart is a 23 year veteran of this brilliant university. It fulfills the land grant mission. Right. I mean this is our land grant institution here in the state and while we might think land grant is largely associated with UVM extension very very important land grant mission. I believe the College of Arts and Sciences also has a critical role in fulfilling our land grant mission and the fact that we're placing our students in the community and providing opportunities to do local journalism as Richard said which we are suffering from a lack of is so many ways. I think really fulfills that land grant mission. So, again, you know, thanks to Richard thanks to everybody who helped organize this thank you, all of you for being here. And for supporting Richard and supporting the community news service and and the work that we're trying to do. I am really looking forward to the outcome of this conference and in such Richard asked me to announce the fact that the university through a variety of sources of the College of Arts and Sciences the generosity of the Provost, the Center for Research and Vermont has committed $100,000 to to advance this effort in the community news service over the next three years. I wish I could commit more when more is available I will commit more. That's a promise. And, and I really think that the work that you'll do here today will really help steer the use of those funds to the greatest effect. So, again, again, thank you, thank you for supporting our students for supporting our scholarship and and helping us fulfill our land grant mission. Thank you, Bill, who really is a get to know bill if you can just a total pleasure to work with and be involved with and how he has helped support, allow us to do some kind of crazy things here and grow in these programs. I want to thank people just to thank briefly Kate and Bill shoe bar Cree lentilack, the College of Arts and Sciences have all chipped in a little bit to help with the lunch, which will be amazing. And, and the other parts of this event that we get to do. So, now brand is going to help explain the day a little bit. Sorry. So, so a huge thanks to the University of Mont Richard we called him up and said, Well, you know, I think it's time we all got together again. And this was maybe six weeks ago or something. Yeah, okay, let's do it. So pretty amazing. And if you've got your list of the attendees. When you walked in there are probably more over there. This is really a who's who's of journalism in Vermont. And we're missing a few people, but people wanted people were knocking on the door to be in this room today and it's fabulous to see you so thank you all for coming thank you to Richard thank you to UVM and the community new service for making this happen. So we're together today to be together. That's a big one to learn about sustainability issues of journalism in the state of Vermont to share our wisdom to brainstorm some solutions. We have incredible wisdom in this room. And this is a very short period of time we're not going to solve everything, but we're going to, we're going to take a step towards that and commit to some actions to move forward. And I think help focus where that $100,000 might go. So as, as we kind of all know, you know, 1800 local newspapers across the country have folded since what, 2004. We've not suffered the news desert that has happened in many parts of the country. We are really lucky because of the hardworking and nimble and innovative people that are sitting in this room today. We're doing pretty well. But we've got, we're still in trouble. This is, you know, journalism is in trouble and we have to make sure that it is strong and sustainable here. And we can make this scene much better. So soon you're going to hear from a variety of journalists about a myriad of issues that are affecting us about what's working what needs change and where folks need help. We're also fortunate to have philanthropists in the room and some some veteran journalists who who are sitting here because they want to make sure that all of this work moves forward. And what we're going to do after we hear and really get a sense of what's going on in different areas of journalism from these, these folks and we're only giving them three minutes apiece which is just really crazy but it'll ground us and after each presentation there'll be a little bit of time for clarification and discussion and a few questions. We're going to move through each topic pretty quickly. And then there's going to be a working lunch. So notice that there are numbers on the tables and just there is going to be a list we'll put it back up again about what each table will focus on. And we'll get a we'll get a little bit of a temperature about what that might look like it'll be a little bit of chaos trying to figure out where you might sit, but also know if, if the place you really wanted to sit and that problem is all filled up. Your wisdom, your presence will be perfect at whatever table you end up at. So I'll just say that I'll get I'll get into that more as as we move ahead about how we're going to do that logistically. So it might be chaotic but I know we're going to come out with some really very very good thoughts and solutions so I am going to move this on and get going with our speakers. And Richard is going to introduce those people and I'm going to kind of keep a sense of time as best I can. Thanks. So amazingly we're actually ahead of schedule. So the first in all of these were meant to be a couple of minutes of people talking just kicking off the conversation and anybody chimes in any way you'd like. So we're going to start with Meg little Riley and Rebecca Alice. Meg is the deputy director of the center. She has been instrumental in growing these programs. She grew up in Vermont like me that did a stint in Washington DC in the White House and other places. And she'll talk a little bit about research she's doing around. The fundamentals of why local news matters so much and then Rebecca Alice, who is the Vermont State Director for Congressman Welch, talk a little bit about what's happening in the federal funding scheme for local news. Thank you. This is so exciting. This is kind of a fusion of all the things that I'm very passionate about. It's very exciting to be here and I'll pull this together. So just a few mercifully brief remarks about why all of this matters and I mean like the big lofty why we don't really need to explain to the people in this room the role that a thriving free press plays at the local level. But I do think that we all take for granted the public's understanding of these things. We can forget to articulate what this matters to democracy and to the success of our communities and the people who live here. Vermont tends to be pretty good at this stuff, but we're not immune to the economic forces in the in the rest of the country and I think it'll take an intentional campaign. At the local level just as it will at the national level to make our case so I'm just going to like let me just toot your horns for a moment so we can keep that all in mind today. Local news supports civic ties and community engagement. There is just oodles of social science research on this sense of place identity and awareness of what brings us all together. Many people live in Vermont because they chose to be here. They think it's a special place. These are things that local news can reinforce. Local news consumption is of course correlated with higher voter turnout, particularly at the local level. I'm talking about elections small small races local elections state town select board. It all goes up when we have good newspapers in our town. Good newspapers doing reporting on like the shoe leather stuff of committees and you know it's the medicine that we need whether or not everybody wants it all the time. It's a bulwark against political polarization. This one like feels especially urgent in this moment I think when local newspapers disappear and there's strong evidence in social science right now to suggest this. People turn to national and political heuristics basically to make determinations about their choices in local elections and also their their sense of who their political opponents are and local national excuse me local news really can inoculate communities against those forces and once they go it is much harder to reintegrate those ideas and those principles back into a community. Local news improves economic outcomes for towns and taxpayers oversight transparency, of course we know it this is like it's the the math is very strong on this, our legislators work better for us when we're all keeping a close eye on them. Local news supports robust and competitive elections. When voters are engaged they knew the candidates are they also have a higher standard for debate and dissent they want to see interesting ideas debated in the public sphere. This is so incredibly important. So, part of what I hope we do today is just kind of keep all these things the back of our minds and recommit to making a collective case to consumers of news to people who live here to our lawmakers that these are things that need to be invested in. I don't think that we any of us should be shy about making these these arguments were sort of in a privileged position here at UVM in that like, we don't need to. Our only motivation in being here is to support all of you to give students opportunities to see how the sausage gets made to feel inspired, maybe to stick around in Vermont. And regardless of what any of our journalism students do here, they will all go on to be more engaged citizens. They'll be smarter, savvier news consumers, they'll have higher standards for the information they're exposed to. This is all like that to us is as important because those that's how we also support a strong ecosystem of news. So no pressure but the fate of democracy is on your shoulders. Hi, my name is Rebecca Ellis. I'm the state director for Congressman Welch. And thank you for inviting me to join you today and Congressman Welch is extremely concerned about the economic pressure on local media right now. And he strongly supports getting more financial assistance for local journalism. I don't need to explain to you Meg just did about the fact that a strong democracy really depends on robust and healthy media. Democratic institutions rely on an informed electorate. And without an informed electorate or worse a misinformed electorate, our democracy is in peril and Congressman Welch actually frequently makes that point when he's talking to folks. Over the past two years, the cares act through the paycheck provider program extended a lifeline to many Vermont media groups. But clearly that's not enough and isn't going to address some of the structural changes in local media. Congressman Welch has co sponsored the local journalism sustainability act, and I've been asked by Richard to use my three minutes to try to explain what this bill does. And I do want to just say at the outset that this is one attempt to address the problems that local media is facing right now but I'm really looking forward to today's conversation and, and other ideas that people might have. So the local journalism sustainability act is a bipartisan bill in the house both Democrats and Republicans have supported it. There is a companion bill in the Senate identical companion bill, but it's only been supported in the Senate by Democrats and Senator Leahy as a co sponsor in the Senate. The bill is a tax bill, it would create three new tax credits, one would be a subscription tax credit for consumers buyers of newspapers. The second tax credit would be a compensation tax credit for local media that hires news journalists. And the third would be an advertising tax credit for small businesses that advertise in local media, including both as well radio and TV. So I'll just briefly explain each of these tax credits. The first credit, which would be for consumers is a five year credit up to $250 annually, it would cover 80% of subscription costs in the first year of the tax credit and 50% in the following years. So to receive a $250 tax credit, a subscriber would have to spend at least $312 the first year and $500 each of the following four years. Sorry, there's a lot of numbers here, but I thought I'd run through it just to give you a sense of what it means and an actual dollars. The second credit, which would be for local media that hire local journalists as again it's a five year tax credits is the five year bill. It would provide up to $25,000 a year per journalist in the first year and up to $15,000 per journalist in the second in the subsequent four years. And the credit would cover up to 50% of compensation in the first year and 30% of compensation in the subsequent four years. And the final credit would be for small businesses that advertise in local media. Again, it's a five year credit, it's up to $5,000 in the first year, $2,500 in subsequent four years. So the credit covers 80% of advertising costs in the first year, 50% in subsequent four years. So a small business that wants to receive the maximum credit would have to spend at least $6,250 in the first year and $5,000 in subsequent four years. I did also think that the definition of a local newspaper was interesting in the bill. It defines local newspapers as print or digital media that serves the needs of a regional or local community provides original content from primary sources and with fewer than 750 employees. So I'm guessing that all of the media here in the room would qualify. So that's my three minutes. Congressman Welch will be fighting for this and other legislation to support local media and local journalists. Thanks. So we've heard from about kind of the national landscape of what's going on. We have a few minutes if people want clarifications from either Rebecca or Meg. Or something else that they want to state at this point. We'll move through these presentations fairly quickly, but we also want to give you all a chance to have comment on on any of these speakers and what we're talking about this is kind of introductory stuff. So maybe there isn't at this time but I think they will be soon. Here we go. Yes. Thank you. Please just say your name. I'm Scott Finn. I'm with BPR in Vermont PBS and this is for Rebecca. I'm curious if you could give us a sense with the the buys of the build back better bill. What is actually happening with the journalism local journalism sustainability act and what do you think are the chances it could go through. Thanks. Well, the good news is that the bill is both in the house in the Senate. Also good news that it's bipartisan in the house, but as many of you have probably noticed Congress isn't working completely well these days. So I would it's probably not a good chance that the bill will pass this session. That said, it's really important that these bills get introduced and that the ideas get socialized so that they can be incorporated at some point into some legislation, you know, either this year or in a future session. And aren't some states doing this on their own doing tax credits like this. Yeah, I'm not sure about that but just to mention, I'm sure folks in this room know that there was a lot of money in the ARPA bill for the state and local Coronavirus Relief Fund. So the state does have some funds at this moment that it could be putting towards these types of credits if it wanted. Thank you. Rebecca also don't sit down. I think the tax credits. I think the tax credits are a great idea. But I wonder what Congressman Welch is doing about section 230 of the FCC rules, which I think is really the seat of the problem for local newspapers. Section 230 is the is for social media companies there have no liability for the content that is published on their platforms. Great. I don't have this actually great specific answer for you right now. I know that Congressman Welch has been very concerned about the impact of social media and the discourse on social media on democracy generally and has some initiatives that he's planning to introduce to create a little more regulation of what happens on social media. And I think that addresses your question but I can get back to you with some more specifics. Others don't be shy and by the way you can also just if there's something you want to say sort of in this thematic area shouted out my and just call on people. Where's Tim from Vermont Business Magazine. I'm sure you have something to say. One of my thoughts coming in here is about competition and here we are in a collaborative environment, but as we know in the last generation, the competition between new news organizations has largely disappeared and it's not it's not a question. It's more just a thought of what that's done also to the the general news and environment. I'm not sure if you have any any data on that or or there's been any discussion about that. And it's sort of more globally, either Rebecca or Mike. So, in places where news competition goes down, there has been quite a bit of social science research on this, and the quality of the coverage also tends to go down. The, this is something that has been you, it tends to, it works with apples to apples comparisons newspapers and newspapers but it also works with newspapers and public radio stations. The, and I'm going to, I'm going to editorialize slightly on this I think that the understanding there is that the public becomes less sophisticated consumers of news essentially the demand for it tends to weaken a little bit, even if one can be one, even if the surviving can be more economically healthy because they, at least in the near term maybe get some of the advertising dollars but that doesn't mean the quality of the product tense improves in any material way so it I, I'm going to I'm going to look I'm going to try to find a concrete some some more recent studies on this because I think it's a really interesting question because it speaks to the point that a rising tide really will lift everyone in this room and a sense of competition among news organizations, it really ultimately even if in the near term may feel like pain ultimately it really can be incredibly helpful to everybody. Anyone else have a clarifying question, a comment, we can move on we've got a lot of ground to cover, but maybe we'll, we'll move on and we'll keep, we'll keep these everything churning churning away here. So Richard, are you ready to move on to the next set of speakers. Okay, so now the folks actually out there doing this work at the local level we have somebody drove all the way up from Brown Burl, Randy, here somewhere from the Commons, Randy can tell us about that. Lisa Loomis from the Valley is not able to be here but Mike Donahue, who many of you know will give a word or two about that Lisa pass on to him about some of her observations from the Valley and Cassandra are you here. Yes, Cassandra from the bridge and Tim are you here. Okay Tim may walk in the top. Okay, there he is. And Richard we need you to put your mic a little bit closer to your mouth and that's true for everybody else. It's the mask then. Anyway, Tim, thank you Collebro from the Randolph Herald and by the way I been out and around gathered a few papers I don't know if anyone brought some but if you want to see some of the work that's going on in these communities that's there on the table. So the order we have I think, Randy, and we'll just, we'll just, we'll just go in this order okay Randy, Tim Cassandra, and then Mike to talk about the Valley so Randy, take it away. Good morning everybody and welcome readings from the banana belt. So the commons was formed in 2004 as of around the kitchen table and started publishing in 2006 and became a weekly in 2010 where I entered into the story. It was founded on the idea that there shouldn't be a toll gate in front of the news that news is a public service, and it is something that everyone should have access to regardless of means. So we started out with the idea that we would be a free newspaper. And we'd also be a nonprofit newspaper we were one of the among the first in the country to adopt the model of a nonprofit newspaper, mainly because we wore out the IRS and trying to to solicit them for the, for the status, and they didn't know what to do so they gave it to us. In any event, at the nonprofit status ensures us that there will be no hedge fund buying the commons. There's nobody that can buy the commons because nobody owns the commons. We have a, we have a board of directors, but there is no nothing to be bought or sold. So really can be a community resource that will live past Jeff Potter, who can't be here today and stuck me with this job of talking to everyone. Nice to do that. But it's also the idea that we can keep it going and introducing the public radio model to journalism. And it was a tough sell in the beginning because people thought, why don't you sell, why don't you sell the paper, you know, why, why are you giving the paper for free. And then we circle back to the initial argument that we, it would be more trouble than it's worth the charge for it. So, a free newspaper comes as doesn't come comes at a cost somebody's got pay for it so philanthropy pays for some of it. Individual donors pay for some of it, we get we've managed to convince several hundred people to pay for their free newspaper, which is a pretty good feat. And since the pandemic, we had, like many of you out here we accepted the lifeline of PPP and the state grant money and that kept us in business. But the pandemic also had another interesting effect for us, and maybe for some of the other folks around here who rely on philanthropy. People suddenly realize how important a newspaper a local newspaper was. And they dug a little deeper in their in their wallets and started giving us money and supporting us at Brattleboro is a unique place we're far enough away that nobody wants to cover us we're too far from Burlington we're too far from Boston too far from Albany too far from Springfield, Massachusetts. So there's it's been a there used to be a pre robust media ecosystem with a community radio station community website to commercial radio stations and a daily newspaper. But the daily newspaper the circulation has dropped precipitously. I don't want to blame because I left 1010 years ago because I worked there. But the both the radio stations don't do newscasts anymore, they used to the. It's become a model that the nonprofit model has become the model that will keep a newspaper going we think it's we put the non and nonprofit many years. I'm happy to say we're a little closer now to pain or to paying for our pat paying off previous debts and getting financial footing but the cost has been. Jeff and I are the only full time people in the newsroom, and we rely on community contributions contributions from freelancers we have a couple of freelancers we have. We've taken full advantage of the offer of Vermont diggers to share their content with local newspapers. And it's been there's been a stone soup aspect of the newspaper. But for the most part, we're surviving with a model that we don't have to explain any more because people get it a newspaper that can't be bought. Okay, hello everyone I'm Tim calibre from the Harold down in Randolph, the White River Valley Harold. I started there as an intern when I was in high school as a photographer and I never really escaped from that. And I am still there today. This is sort of the, the opposite of the Commons and the Harold is a is a for profit paper that was started in 1874. And so far, still kicking. One of the, I'm very interested today in hearing how everyone feels about the kind of the people aspect of of local journalism. One of the things that we do at the Harold and that we've had some success with is working with with interns, you know, forever including myself. And I think that ultimately that's going to be a key point in keeping, keeping us staffed but also in keeping people interested in reading the news, when there are about a billion other things that they could be doing with their time, including watching what we've never had in history. So, you know, we've got some stiff competition. So we're going to get people while they're young and clue them into how vitally important this all is. And Mike, don't you jump up and talk. Oh, you need a mic maybe you got one speaker should know that you might see me coming around and doing this TV thing after three minutes and that's time to to wrap up. Thank you. So I'm Mike Donahue. Lisa Luma sends her regrets. She's come down sick so she asked me to read some of the comments that she had prepared about the Valley reporter which is down in the ways field war and area, which, which has been an operation for over 50 years. Number one, we record the history of the people, politics and events of our community. We scrupulously monitor question and challenge our elected and appointed officials, keeping them open honest and transparent with our community, but also important providing important context for their actions. For example, the town of Warren has been working on rewriting its land use regulations for over a year. These regulations are not the sexiest thing to report on, but it's critically important that people understand how this rewrite will impact their ability to use their own land, and hence their property value. A reporting on the changes brought a lot of people to the table to talk to the Planning Commission and select board about the proposed changes and resulted in a set of changes that reflect full public participation. The first public hearing on these new changes takes place on Monday and we will cover that as well. Third, we celebrate the people in our community who do great things and report on the community, the losses, the obituaries, the deer that hunters, the deer that hunters take. Four, we cover high school sports and review high school plays. And lastly, through our letters to the editor and social media, we create a way for our community members to interact with each other and public officials. All of this work is critical because it connects us and informs us, which in turn creates citizens who have the important knowledge they need to participate in our democracy. Thank you. And by the way, if folks don't know, Mr. Donahue has been a reporter here in Vermont for maybe four decades or so, 50, and shine the light, right, Mike, you know, leader in those efforts. All right, and then Cassandra to talk a little bit about the bridge. Oh, you need a mic. I'm going to stand over here so I don't have my back to folks. So I think the bridge might be a hybrid of some of what we've heard described. We are a small community newspaper in Montpelier used to be called the Montpelier Bridge. We were founded in 1993 by a group of local citizens who wanted a newspaper devoted to Montpelier. We had some interesting iterations for a long time we had it was purchased and run by Nat Frothingham. So he was the publisher and editor and then a few years ago, he retired and the bridge is now a state nonprofit run by a board of directors. We are in the process of applying to be a 501c3 nonprofit. So we don't have the long history of some of the older papers that go back to the 1800s. And we've been, I don't know for profit is really a fair term, but not a nonprofit. And now we're looking toward the nonprofit model because I think if I'm going to be completely frank and no surprises here. I'm not sure how the paper would exist without donations and some kind of support. We do have a sister organization called the friends of the bridge that raises money for the paper, we would not be able to operate without that. And I wrote down a few challenges and opportunities that was my request so I gave you a little background. I think our challenges are probably shared surviving on diminishing advertising revenue coming up with new creative ways to fund the paper. And staffing right now, similar to the commons we have myself and one other person who are actually in the office on any kind of a regular basis, neither one of us are completely full time. And we have a 15 hour a week contributing editor. And then we have a huge amount of support at no cost from our board of directors. And there's some question about, you know, that's another challenge is boundaries, where are the boundaries and maybe that's okay that there aren't any but the board of directors who write stories for the newspaper. They're out there delivering papers they're out there. We have a designer on our board of directors so he does a lot of design for us. So one of the things if I could get my wish I would love to have a staff assignment reporter we just don't, we don't have an assignment reporter. We don't have a chance writers but you know we don't have anyone I can say school board meeting Wednesday cover it and they and they can't say no I don't want to, you know, which is pretty much how it is now. The other thing is, we're also like all of you we're a newspaper we still print, and actually our board is committed to delivering mailing the paper to every box in our postal code. That's something the board really wants to do. And that happens twice a month for a teeny newspaper that's a pretty big part of our budget. And when I hear about the newspaper that I was raised on I'm looking over I think someone else who might have been there. Hardwick Gazette recently went totally digital. And this newspaper is printing and buying postage so it's there's models all over the place, but we're also digital. And so one of the challenges how do we on this tiny staff, get our print issue out but we also have to be posting pretty regularly between issues. So opportunities. The 501 C3 may provide some grant opportunities. I'm hoping we can find interns that's an opportunity and also we're I'd love to hear from other people how you build out your digital advertising. And realize this is an editorial focused conference but we are just in the beginning stages of starting to build out digital advertising as well. Okay. All right questions or comments and there also are some other I don't know Joe Gressner did you. Are you here. Yes, do you want to say anything about the Barton Chronicle. It was founded by Chris and Ellen Brathwaite and Ed Cowan. Chris and Ellen were back to the landers and they found out the land didn't want them back. And they started a paper instead, which was just as crazy, but it turned out to be successful. A reflection of the Orleans County community, which means when it is prosperous where prosperous when it isn't were not, and given the situation with dairy coven and everything else. Things have been difficult for everyone in our area. We are fortunate enough that Chris made it possible for the people who work at the paper to buy the paper so we don't have an outside owner, we're able to produce something that we're proud of. We don't have to make money for anyone else if we can pay our salaries and at the end of the day, not have, you know, hold in our pocket, we're doing okay. I've been facing challenges that I think everyone who prints has been facing a major one is the outrageous behavior of the post office, which was founded to distribute newspapers, but has been working for the last 15 or 20 years to put them out of the way. And if Congressman Welch can do something besides just giving them more money but also slap them upside the head. That would be very welcome. And I think that's about all I have to say, except that we do have competition they're two dailies in our area so I think that's a good thing. People haven't seen the Barton Chronicle it's just a fabulous paper and we have one of our graduates there is your assistant. I think. So remember anybody can chime in anything but I'm just going to call out because there are some local news other local news providers Tommy, Tommy Gardner who represents multiple local papers. I recognize just just quickly there are this isn't just about content it's also very much as the woman from the bridge was talking about sustainability and and balancing digital and print and these are some of the things that will be discussing this afternoon. Hey everybody, I'm Tommy Gardner I'm the news editor for the Vermont Community newspaper group, which also means when I'm depending on when what what I'm writing about who I'm talking to or I'm asking questions from I'm either Tommy from the story Porter hi it's Tommy from the news and citizen or hi it's Tommy from the other paper or the Shelburne news or the citizen of Charlotte and Heinsberg, depending on, you know, what story I'm writing for. And then in who I'm talking to. I was the other reporter at the is that that you're talking about, as well as a, I believe and gutter cutter teeth or there as well and I guess that we, I was doing a kind of enumerating the stories that I had to write and Aaron had to write and Corey had to write and Avalon had to write for town meeting day and I added it all up and I had 13 pieces of copy running from two police plotters sports roundups for two high schools five different time meeting wrap ups, a correction sorry about that. And so this is the kind of thing that we have to do on a week to week basis in our papers and. And then we do it, I think, on a kind of a small staff which kind of I'll shut up and pass a question on if I can to Steve because you mentioned. The, sorry, the, the internship model and stuff like that I was wondering if you have any. Advice or, or, you know, ideas on how to bring interns into a paper that if they don't have oversight, because all of us have to do so many different things why not so I mean interns are great, but they want to be paid, and they also need a little bit of supervision. Thanks. So, again, we're just putting all these ideas on the table there'll be a longer period of time lunch to talk about some of this stuff but right next to you is Jay. Jay Evans. Shea. Do you want to just say a quick word about charlotte. Sorry, shea tonight. You didn't say chia, which is amazing. So thank you. Yeah, I mean, I'm in charlotte and we are a news rain forest. There are several papers covering charlotte. And what you said about the competition between the papers, I think it's great I think we're all a bunch of people who wanted, you know, get it out there before everybody else. I think I have. So there's the citizen which is charlatan Heinsberg and then there's the charlotte news and then there's me at the charlotte bridge. I think I don't want to brag but I might have a little bit of an advantage because I'm all online. I don't have. I miss having like a print paper because I've been both I reported and edited about the charlotte news and the citizen before. And I have the advantage of being able to just shoot it out there in the middle of the night if I need to on email. Yeah, yeah. That's right. I just, I'm also well by myself for the most part of the very generous copy editor and proof reader who is sometimes not available at 10pm to go over what I've come up with, which is fun but also a little terrifying because left to I think it's really cool to have other people in the same town for reporting on the same things. And there's no lack of drama, even in charlotte which has fewer than 4000 people. So, that's my thought on the situation. No lack of drama, because there's local news. Bridget, do you want to say a word since you're right there at that table. Yeah. Hi there. My name is Bridget Higdon. I'm the managing editor at the St. Albans messenger, the Colchester son, the Milton independent and the Essex reporter. In St. Albans, we're covering all of Franklin County at the moment. It's got a twice weekly print edition as well as the daily website Colchester Essex and Milton are all digital at the moment. But I've got a team of there's six of us on staff at the moment. So, for news reporters for all four of those publications, a sports reporter, and myself as managing editor. I'm a UVM grad I went to a studied English here. And I worked at the student newspaper all four years. So I'm sort of proud to say that I'm someone who didn't grow up in Vermont but grew up in New Jersey, had a great experience here stayed and I'm now giving back to the community and in this way so thanks very much for having me. So, we're going to move along but I think that Jeannie Johnson from the Cabot Chronicles here maybe just and no okay and let's see bunch of folks from those Shelburne news other paper. Citizen, let's see, and other local news providers are probably here that I'm missing. Anybody have a quick question or comment on this. Oh, yes, of course, Essex. Also, anybody else have a quick question or comment before we move on. So, Bill Schubert did have a question about, and maybe we'll get to this later because we're starting to be off time and I'm the big time person. We've got about resistance to subscription costs for smaller papers. So I'm going to hold that and I want to come back to it, but we'll go on with our models and our speakers right now so those of you from small paper just think about that jot down a word or two about the resistance that you might be getting around subscription costs did I phrase that properly bill. Okay. So we are hearing about different models. Clearly that's one way to survive. And Paula Routley from the seven days and Angela Lynn are going to talk a little bit about things they're thinking about whatever order they want to go. And just one quick thing. All right, like, all right, I just can't help but say this, my first reporting job in Vermont was at the Addison independent. And I'll in, I lasted a year and I'll never forget I wrote a negative unpolite story about the car dealers which I never should have written, which the editor at the time was sort on his way out and paid no attention to. And Angela may have forgotten this but they came in and asked them asked him to fire me. I didn't. And they pulled their advertising for a year, which was not a great thing but anyway, that was where I learned to be a reporter Paula. I don't know why I'm nervous but I've written something. It's just, this is why I write that I can't speak publicly. Thank you for this opportunity to update you all on the topic of business models for sustainability, which is likely the primary reason we've got some publishers in the room today. Like them one of my jobs is seven days is to make sure that we bring in enough money to pay for the product we create and give away for free to finance the news gathering photography and design printing distribution we've had to come up with some innovative revenue streams. A year ago, or a year or so before the pandemic, we set up a voluntary subscriber program to solicit donations just in case. A few super readers as we call them signed up but we never really felt comfortable asking for money. That changed when the pandemic hit that just like what Randy said, I started writing a from the publisher column once a week to let people know what the paper was up against and why it was important. And then the donations started pouring in almost overnight our relationship with our readers went from a measurement. How many people picked up the paper and went to the website to real personal connections. More than 3000 people gave money, gave us money to help us get to get through it and many of those are now recurring monthly donors still generating about $2,000 a week. I'm not just a standard operation but it has been incredibly helpful and huge morale boost. Interacting with the super readers I soon discovered that some of them wanted to give us larger sums. If only they could get a tax deduction for it. If we couldn't make that happen they'd find a nonprofit news entity that could that launched a two year search a way to find to find a way to make it possible for for profit media outlets like seven days. And more crucially small community newspapers like the Harvard Gazette and Harold the Randolph to accept philanthropy readers and the IRS are coming to realize that what matters in journalism is responsible reporting not legal structure. That is to say for profit does not necessarily mean anyone's making money and nonprofit doesn't rule out the possibility that an organization is rolling in dough. The first stop was the New England newspaper and press association which stepped in quickly created a foundation that could act as a fiscal sponsor for its members. A number of Vermont newspapers set up fundraising pages on the foundation website and it was going great until we realized the entity couldn't accept donor revised funds, which a lot of people like to use, and the whole thing shut down. I will lamb it week in Oregon suggested I try the tides foundation, which acts as a fiscal sponsor for them tide said no they were moving in a different direction. Closer to home the Vermont Community Foundation was supportive, but didn't have the bandwidth to take this on during the pandemic. Through France daughter I made inquiries at the Vermont journalism trust which funds for Vermont digger but the board was wary of working with for profit newsrooms. I was at the Burlington Center for Media and Democracy and vpr to, and of course I called bill shoe bar because he got a call bill shoe bar. All great conversations but none has led to the holy grail a way to leverage philanthropic support for local news of all varieties. My friend and mentor Angela Lynn proposed the most elegant solution tax deductibility for subscriptions and donations to any and all local media outlets. Especially that would take an act of Congress. At seven days we found a short term solution the California based journalism funding partners run by by former newspaper people has helped us outline three initiatives that qualify as charitable. We've already had some fundraising success, but seven days is GFP smallest partner and the nonprofit doesn't have the capacity to work with other Vermont outlets. We need an organization that does. It's a great goal that brought a small group of us together at the end of January for our first and only meeting. Kate and bill shoe bar and Angela Lynn. Brands daughter Stephen Karen and Michael and Michael would Lewis and Jason von Drescher from from porch forum. Fran and Kate immediately set out to organize or organize this event with Richard. Thanks to a generous donor I have hired a lawyer and an account accountant to turn friends of Vermont journalism into a reality. Brian Murphy and Wally tapia are here and they're both nonprofit experts. Now we just need an executive director. That won't be me but I'm happy to share what I've learned and process including different foundation and partnership models that are popping up around the country. I hope you'll join us in this effort to help Vermont struggling but vital media newspaper survive. Thank you so much, Paula. And we'll turn it over to Angela. You have a mic. Okay, well as long as you have a mic, we're good. Is that it? No, that's working. I just pick up where Paul left off on the act of Congress. This idea about tax deductible subscriptions or maybe even memberships isn't that far off. If you look at what we do the community service that we provide, I think that's it's not too hard to get there. And even in Canada, we just noticed that the global mail has a subscription notice that they send out and there's a tactic deductible line line right on it. You know, so you check here and it's in it computes the amount of your tax deductible expense. Well, when you think of this at $50 a year, that's not much. But if you do this on a membership and you have a tiered membership level and you're going 50, let's keep it at $50 a week for for all those people that can't afford more. But let's also have $100 rate. Let's have a $200 rate. Let's have a $500 rate. Let's have $1,000 rate. And this is the way that you get that message out that it needs to be funded. And if that's tax deductible to the donor, that starts to make a difference. You know, the independent, we have 8,000 paid subscribers and suddenly we're getting 250 a year instead of 50 on average, which is what we do now. That's about $500,000. That's enough to make difference. That's enough to replace advertising. So that's what we're talking about. That's these are the types of ideas that we're talking about. And let me just address a couple of things. You know, we're being nice out here. We're working at dancing around the core issue here and the core issue is advertising sales are going to be down, particularly in rural Vermont, rural America. And this is because of a couple of things, right? We have fewer kids in schools. We have our demographics, it's changed in in Middlebury when I was there. When my kids were in school 25 years ago, the school was 660 kids in Mary Hogan Middlebury. It's 400 today. The town is the same size or populations the same, the demographics have changed that much. Consequently, we have fewer retail stores selling, you know, selling goods to families and that sort of thing. We have lots of art. We have gifts. We have real estate, but we don't have that retail store that used to support newspapers. That's not going to change. You know, you add in social media and how that's diversified the advertising market. You add in Amazon and how that's taken away a lot of retail and it's not coming back. So we have to replace that funding. We used to be 80% advertising, 20% subscription roughly somewhere in that ballpark. And we need a three-legged model. We need subscriptions. We need to get more from our readers. We need to get advertising still and that still is a big chunk of our payroll or of our revenue. And we need some donor funds, some bigger funds, some grant funds. When we look out on the landscape about who's giving money to whom in this marketplace, this media marketplace, there's a lot of money being given. There's a lot. And the pandemic helped us realize that people would also give to that community newspaper. Part of our problem is we need to tell a better story about what we do out there and we need to ask. And part of the challenge there is it takes staff to ask. It takes staff to put together a campaign to go out there and do this. It's another full-time salesperson to do that. And we all ought to be looking at this in those sorts of terms. But we can't get there until we have, you can't really get to money until you have a fund that can make it tax-deductible. We ran into the same problem a couple of years ago when Paula came to me about this problem. I was dealing with the same problem. I had a donor that wanted to give me $10,000. Right in the, you know, come for it here, but it's a tax advisory fund and they wanted that deduction. So that's what we tried to do when I was president of NEMPA in Boston was set this up. It took two years of legal work and we still didn't get it done. It's fairly complicated. It didn't seem like it should be, but it's fairly complicated. And I can tell you this. Paula and I have two of the bigger weekly publications in the state. We don't have time to do it. We can't spend all of our time out there doing this. You take a paper that has three or four people on their staff, they can't do that. They can't do it. There's not enough time in the day to do this. So this is a reason that an organization such as we're talking about makes a real big difference. And let me just, you know, if I could have jumped up and stood up and applauded when the dean at UVM gave $100,000 to this effort, that is huge. That is huge. That really puts some legs under this and makes it possible because what we need to do is set up a template for this so that we can help every paper in the state so that you can apply to this and we can get you some money when we need to before you go out of business. And this is, I'm going to wrap this up in one bit. It is, we are close. However, there are lots of newspapers out there that can't make it. So we need to be able to get this money to them beforehand. And the responsibility of each of the publishers, editors and publishers in the room, keep it open. If you need help, ask for it. Don't shut down. Don't create a news desert. It's much easier to keep something going than it is to have to start something new again. Thank you. Thank you so much, Angelo. Incredibly important message. The Western Iowa Journalism Foundation is a model that's out there. I encourage you to go to that website. Look at it. There's some problems with it. We'll talk about those later. But just so you know that there are models, there's lots of models out there that's being done like this. Thank you. Thank you so much, Angelo. We're really laying the groundwork here for work we're going to be doing later. And I'd like to move on to digital content, if we could, Richard. Any, yes, right back here. Here, I'm on my way. Just to sort of state the blatantly obvious, it's become clear to me, maybe everybody else has already come to this point, but having bounced back and forth between community journalism and nonprofit theater. What the problem it seems like to me is that when I worked in theater, you, we could take donations, but we couldn't sell memberships because you get tickets. If you get something in return, then that's not considered a donation. And if you're a for-profit, you can sell something, but you can't take a donation. So I think that sort of legally is the problem that we need to find a solution to. Fantastic. And it's from the Charlotte News. I'm sorry, your name just so we... I'm sorry. Scooter McMillan. Scooter, thank you so much. Okay. I'm going to add one relevant point to this because we were talking about, I was fact-checking my answer to Tim on competition, and I think this is an important thing to point out because so many people have alluded to it. The argument that more competition is always better for news organizations is only true, according to the social science, when it doesn't hold when everyone is a for-profit entity in a free market. In fact, that actually tends to drive down coverage of public policy and public affairs and drive up entertainment coverage, the sugary stuff. But when some element of a news environment has the kind of safety of being supported by foundations, philanthropy, donors, tax deductions, state-sponsored model, like think BBC, something like that, there is a little bit more. It's sort of, it inoculates them from some of those market forces and it kind of protects some of that harder coverage. So I think it's just a reminder that some sort of hybrid model woven into the state of Vermont is actually the ideal. It is not in fact, kind of, we sort of think of it as a kind of like patchwork solution, but in fact it actually drives more substantive coverage for readers and consumers. So anyways, I'd like, I'd love to hand this to somebody else who has any questions. All right, should we move on to our next speaker? Digital content. Okay, so we have, do we have Ness? Oh, Sarah Ashworth at VPR. Lisa and Sarah. Sarah. Hi everyone. I'm Sarah Ashworth. I'm at VPR and Vermont PBS now. I'm just happy to be in this room and talking about with a group of people who are committed to helping local journalism thrive and talking through what it's going to take to do that here in the state and do it together. I know it's digitizing content. It's also reader engagement I read on the agenda. So I also wanted to talk a little bit about reader engagement because I've been thinking about that a lot and more, you know, I started out as a reporter and thinking about my colleagues as other reporters, editors, producers, many of us in this room as who my colleagues were in journalism. And I've been trying to think and talk with our newsroom more about how our colleagues are community members and people in the community and we're partners with people in the community in making content together. And as part of now, a merged team with video and radio and digital as well that we're trying to focus on impactful and inclusive work and thinking about, as I said, community members as key partners in that and thinking what does our community need from us now? How can we best provide it for them? And we don't know the answer right now, but we're going to do the work to figure out what that looks like going forward. And I hope that that's going to create programs and content and things that that have a big impact and feel like they matter in people's lives here in the state. As I said, I head up our content and news team at this newly merged organization. And as we're shifting our relationship from making content for people sort of delivering it one way to people and thinking how do we work with people to make something new something we couldn't ever do on our own as a team of journalists sitting in a room together thinking through it. And also thinking a lot about how more people can see and hear themselves in our journalism, and also how to make our work really inclusive and shared on audio, video and digital and what does that look like and how do we decide where it goes at any time. And we need the public's help to be able to figure to answer those questions and so we're doing some of that work now we have a podcast that's been on the on the air and out digitally for a while called Brave Little State it's centered on answering audience questions. We have our reporters. They just are writing mission statements now and sharing why they do the work they do and the questions that they would like some help answering and inviting people to fill out an easy online form or leave a voicemail with questions and ideas for coverage and we're calling it engaged in building. And we're also as an organization, doing an audience segmentation study right now, and it's not about understanding who vpr and Vermont PBS is or who we have been, but figuring out who is in the community. And then back to that original question of thinking with what needs do they have and what are ways that we as a media organization can start to step in and work with people to address those needs. So in terms of digital I come from a broadcast background public radio background, but I am really also thinking about how do we make journalism for people who are never going to own a radio never want to own a radio. Don't even know what that would look like or where you would get one. Same with the television as well now to people of no interest in owning a television, but they are interested in what's happening in their community so what is our journalism look like now because of that. And because of feeding all of those platforms thinking about digital. You know it's questions about resources and sustainability, as well. And I know questions that we all share around that and thinking, you know that there's potential for us to work together as organizations to figure those questions out and I think about. There are lots of competitors I think Tom mentioned, you know, or Tim mentioned on that our competitors are everywhere I think about that on our smartphone every app is a competitor to our local journalism. And you know our competitors aren't each other necessarily in this room so I'm eager also to talk about how we might all work together to deliver better local journalism on digital platforms, more and more so, and just, you know wherever people want it and need it. Thank you. Thank you, Sarah. I'm very happy now unless does anybody have any questions specifically about Sarah's comment. All right, I'm excited now to introduce you to Lisa scagliati if you're ready for us from the Waterbury roundabout one of our successful partners in this mission you have my good. I want to my back to everybody good morning everyone. Boy this has been great to hear about all these different models and great to try to figure out where what I do fits in and I feel like I've got a little bit of pieces from a lot of the models that we've heard from. I'm here with a new kid on the block it's called waterbury roundabout org. It's a website that started as a class project here at UVM soon after the pandemic hit in early 2020. I previously had been an editor and a reporter with the Vermont newspaper group here based in so I was an editor with the two other weekly papers and then started working with UVM to help create this internship program. I'm going to feed local newspapers with stories that were done by students but I was the editor to sort of help, you know, kind of shape those. The pandemic hit in March of 2020, and one of the six newspapers closed, and that was the Waterbury record, and I happen to live in Waterbury. So it was really sad and the community was sad we understood the reasons for it. And it was a really bad time to lose a newspaper. We were working with Richard at UVM and we had these students and none of them bailed out of the internship program that semester which was fantastic, even though they were all working remotely. And we decided to turn some of our attention to Waterbury. So one of the students was really good at the whole website thing and she created the website that you see today if you go to waterbury roundabout org, and we started writing stories. And I guess, I don't know, I feel like the moral of the story is, I'm a bit of an example of maybe what not to do because I really didn't think about the business part of this. I'm a newspaper reporter and editor, it's sort of in my background all along and that's what I love and what I do. And we just started covering stories. And I didn't really think about the fact that we're starting a business. But by the summer of 2020 we registered with the Secretary of State in order to open a bank account. And so we're now registered as a state nonprofit business. And we got a board that campaign that Paula talked about with NEMPA. We jumped on that, the folks at NEMPA were like, yep, you're online, you can do this and we raised about $7,000 in the fall of 2020, which was really helpful. I was super stingy with that money, which makes me feel like maybe I am sort of on my way to being a publisher. I've been really careful doling that out. And so by the fall of 2020, the folks at the Times Argus came to me and they said, boy, we're starting to do this free weekly little paper that we're going to be mailing around Central Vermont and we see that you're covering local news and we're doing this by zip codes. We could actually put Waterbury News into this weekly thing that we're sending around. And so that was one of the biggest questions I was getting in the community. People love the fact that we started covering local news. They were using the website, they were on the website, but I was constantly getting stopped at the grocery store by people saying, when are you going to bring back a paper? My Pat answer became, if the paper was easy to continue to do, there would still be the Waterbury record, right? So I don't have the answer to that question. So the Times Argus came to me and they said, you know, we will pay you for your content if we could put it in this little paper. So we're not just sending warmed over Times Argus content everywhere. So now we have, it's just eight pages. It's called the Waterbury Reader and it comes out free every week in the mailbox to the two zip codes that serve our town. There's the coloring contest for St. Patrick's Day back there. And so we started that in the fall of 2020. So we've been doing that over a year now. And it's been a lot because I'm continuing to work with the internship program. We've had one or two students that are helping us every semester and that changes every few months. So it's great to have the interns contributing and to give them a chance to write stories at land in a real paper and on a real website, talking to real people and that just be class assignment kind of things. But that does take time to help supervise as well. I have a partner, Gordon Miller, who's a local photographer who lives in Waterbury and shoots for local papers, including the Stowe paper still he's able to give me a few hours a week. His work is all over our website makes it look really good and he's also a great local journalist so he's he is like my other sounding board where we go to brainstorm questions to ask select board candidates. But as far as impact goes and what before I go away here right now we push out our stories with a newsletter once a week that we send out on email to over 1700 people every Saturday. We have about 1800 followers on Facebook where we also publish our stories put those out there a lot of our readers are there our readers are not on Twitter I found that out. And we also have the weekly paper that comes out as well. We saw the impact of what we do really play out in the last couple weeks with town meeting day. And sometimes I've been asking myself why am I doing this because I really have not cracked the financial nut of this yet to be able to get help. Other than a handful of freelancers thank you Mike Donahue who's often has bylights on around about. We started seeing letters to the editor posts on front put porch forum posts on people's Facebook pages saying to support this candidate to vote for this item that's on the ballot and go to the water very round about and see this article about it. Go and see more about this person by I read about this. And so we're starting to see this conversation where people were using the website and telling people go check this out because that's how I found out about this. I was able to do candidate profiles I sent out a survey to that the lively candidate list for our select board and publish their answers verbatim and it got over a thousand hits on our website within a week and a half. They. These responses came out and there were four candidates for two seats. One candidate was the chair of our planning commission the other three people had never been in public service at all. There were some interesting options on that ballot. We published we let their words speak for themselves in the survey. Within a few days of the survey being out there was a campaign happening in our town to draft somebody else to run. And there was a candidate who kind of thought about running and didn't sign up in time and wasn't on the ballot they drafted him and within a week before the race. He got into the race. I sent him the survey he answered the questions we added them onto the website. A whole new flurry of hits all over that survey. And then letters to the editor started coming in posts on front porch forums started pouring in town meeting they came the right in candidate came in second place and he won one of the two seats. People really got engaged and got and got very involved in this and so it was really fascinating to see how this how this happened and so every story needs a good quote so I'm going to leave you with one of my favorite comments that we saw after the election. So one of the folks that helped coordinate this draft this last minute candidate had a comment on his Facebook from a friend who thank him for organizing this and forgetting this candidate on the ballot because now he's going to be one of our new select word members. She says I'm very thankful. I read the candidate interviews from the roundabout and I was like, oh shit, these options except Alyssa who did an excellent interview do not look good for our community. I voted for Alyssa and I wrote in Roger thanks to the great information from the community in the local news kudos to all of you. Love your work Lisa thank you so much. And Richard we should move on. Okay. Well let's move on but hopefully we get to talk more about these things and Lisa has been a ball of fire in the Waterbury roundabout and she didn't say a click through rates but they're like 60 70 80% or people are clicking on your emails every week. And to have vpr and Sarah here and Scott I mean MP from on public media. So much there that we can keep pondering how to bring it all together. So our next quick little flurry of activity is hugely important about content or whatever the folks in this section want to get into. And of course we all know the amazing work that and Galway has done in bringing BT digger to life. And then we'll also hear from Michael would Lewis if he's here or Jason Michael to talk a bit about the role that front porch forum which has come up a few times already Michael could play here. And lastly, we have Corey, who you may have seen wandering around, who is our editor the person we hire to manage our students to help provide the content for folks that need it at the quality that you need it so. And kick us off wherever you are there. Thank you. Thank you Richard. Thanks everybody. I'm in Galway I started v to digger in 2009. It feels like a century ago at this point. I've got the gray hairs prove it although I've colored my hair so you can't see it. And to fill gaps in the media landscape at a time when things started to fall apart and things haven't gotten better, I'm afraid, and that's why we're all here today in this room. And from the beginning since 2000. So, as soon as we had a reporter, we were able to start sharing content with other news organizations and so we started doing that 2013 with the star report group and with others and the idea was that we would essentially be the State House Bureau for local newspapers, and we gave our content to folks for a very low fee. And it was, I think, 30 to $40 a week, depending on if you're a weekly or a daily and you could take whatever you wanted off of our website. And that was how we started to find a way to collaborate with news organizations around the state. I do think that collaboration in a competitive environment is hard but it's also really essential now for all of this. We also have had experiments with other news organizations around the state we shared reporters with a Bennington banner and with a Browder reformer at one point. We worked on projects with public radio. We offered to sell our State House content to the Burlington Free Press and others that we weren't taken up on that offer, by the way. We also carry content from the cynic and we've been a proud supporter and publisher of the Community News Service work by students and we're also experimenting with fiscal agency because we see the need here and we've heard it loud and clear from Angela and Paula and actually we did extend fiscal agency to the Waterbury Roundabout last year as an experiment. The board approved that as a pilot project and we take a small fee for administrative costs but the idea is that Lisa has her own bank account. We send her money once a month when her donate page is hooked up to our bank account basically. And this is actually something that I mentioned to Fran Stoddard in a meeting we had, gosh, a while ago, in which I said, you know, if there are others that want to become nonprofits. There is a possibility that we could consider providing and we'd be up to the board ultimately but fiscal agency for others. The trouble is, as Paula mentioned, we can't under IRS rules, provide a pass through for nonprofits, that would be really dicey for our 501c3. But I do think that there is an opportunity for us potentially if others in my team and on the board agree it is something that we are considering seriously and our first experiment is with Lisa. So what else was I going to say. Yeah, I mean I think that this is a good conversation. I'm really glad you're having it because local news is critically important statewide news organizations like digger really are surfacing local news of statewide import. We cannot replace the hyper locals and we have no intention of trying to do that, because it's that's that's the real community work that's essential, and how we figure out together how to how to keep the these organizations sustainable is just critically important to the future, not only of journalism, but of our state. And so thank you for inviting me to come and speak briefly. And Michael would Lewis of front porch forum. We're all quite familiar. Thanks Fran. Good morning everybody. It's kind of fun having the power of making everyone do a conference chair yoga here so look over there look over there. Keep us moving. Well, I'm glad to see everybody today. I wish I could see your faces to see if you're smiling or frowning. I'm sure maybe I will stand over there so I'm not on camera but you know from porch forum is not, you know, doesn't belong here in my old Sesame Street view you know one of these things doesn't belong here which one. We're not journalists. We don't hire and employ journalists from porch forum is not in the direct news business. I want to state that very clearly. That said, over the, oh, about 20 years, we've been doing this service in Vermont. We find ourselves as part of the news ecosystem. So, Fran, you said my name Michael would Lewis my wife, Valerie and I co founded front porch forum in our Burlington neighborhood, just down the hill here in 2000. We now serve every community in Vermont with a local online forum that's moderated by our staff over monitors. Some days you may not think it's moderated depending on which community you live in. But we are a mission driven family owned for profit Vermont business were a public benefit corporation that puts our social mission on the same plane as our financial goals. We employ 24 people across the state who moderate the content day in and day out who sell advertising to local businesses. We are in that same line of work. And we're in there every day town meeting is a big deal for us and presents all sorts of challenges. I, I tend not to over over time, the way I think of all this I know I'm supposed to be getting on into content here is not journalism versus social media, or print versus digital, or you know, us versus them. The us versus them that I haven't heard touched on at all here is Vermont businesses, Vermont nonprofits, Vermont efforts versus global big tech. You know, we all depend on Facebook. You know, Facebook is a lot like cigarettes, and we're a lot like people in the 60s are like, Oh, this isn't bad for me. There's no downside here. Yeah, Facebook is destroying our communities in many ways, whether you're talking about January 6 or whether you're talking about local economies. And we're addicted. We're addicted to this cigarette. So sometimes people say from which form that's like Vermont's Facebook. No, you know, that's not what we do. We're driven by a very different set of values and principles. And we don't get it right every day. But we are open for feedback. We are working hard to always be improving our model. So when I think of content, I'm thrilled that so many journalists use our free service to connect with their communities. We see every day reporters using front porch forum where we're thrilled. That's that's great. We're glad to make that contribution. F. P. F. has often a source in local news stories. We also have seen anecdotally on how many data to back this up that from porch forum. It is increasing the audience for local news, people who weren't paying attention to local news, joined from porch forum for the free couch or the lost dog. And before you know it, they're paying attention to the school board, school budget debate, and they get drawn in. And they say, I actually want to read some journalism about this. And they go to go to the local news source. We are eager to do more. Front porch forum has tremendous reach for every 1000 households in the state. We have 750 members who are looking at front porch forum day in and day out and participating. Half our members contribute content every year. So we don't have any solutions here, but we we are open. We are part of the ecosystem and we'd love to talk. Corey will close out this this section. Thank you. Hey everyone, thanks for coming. Of course from community news service. Yes, so for those of you don't know me when I'm Corey Dawson, I run the community service here at UVM. So we have interns anywhere from 20 to 40 somewhat interns every semester who are working in newsrooms on the state. So there are several, several folks here who do have CNS interns with them. Raise their hands if you have a CNS intern or use CNS work. So we'd love to get more to your newsrooms. And actually we have one intern here at UVM. It's break. So Noah LaFosso is a CNS intern now. We'll take any job offers for Noah on the table over here. So thank you. So, you know, all our content is free. All our stories are free for newsrooms. The interns work for newsrooms for free. And this is a very beneficial mutually beneficial relationship. It's a win-win students get credit for this work. Their work is shared. They get to understand what's going on in these communities and readers get to understand what's going on in these communities. And I also want to highlight that it's not just UVM that's doing work like this. There are universities and colleges around the state that have similar programs. And if we can't get you an intern, I'm sure there are other colleges that can. News 7 at Linden College has an excellent program called News 7. And they cover their, the communities around that, that college, Castleton University provides interns to the Rutland Herald, and they have their own great newspaper. So the point is, is that there are many interns who want to do this work. And I've been frankly shocked that there is so many, there are so many interns who will go and cover a select board meeting. And we want to get them into your newsrooms. So I'm really going to use this time to highlight that and to make connections with people who we don't have interns at your newsrooms. I'm, I am teaching them the skills that I have learned as reporters in newsrooms, you know, Burlington Free Press, BT Digger, they hired me as a young reporter and I am trying to teach them the skills that made me successful in those newsrooms and helped readers understand those issues. So I hope that these interns can be a great farm team for, for your newsrooms and can really support you all in this work. It's, it's important to understand as well the limitations of this work. You know, these interns are, are great. They're very, they're very skilled, but they are also here to help you all do the work that you need to do. In many cases they're here to do the basic stories, the profiles, you know, the meeting coverage so that you can perhaps do the work, the more in-depth work, the more investigative pieces that you might need to do and hopefully give you a little bit of breathing room. So this is, this is what we are trying to do. This is how we're trying to help. So please, I'm very happy to hear ideas and help you all get interns into your newsrooms. So thank you. Okay, we have one more session. There is coffee over there, but the, they're going to move that out, bring in lunch in a little bit and then there will be more coffee in the afternoon, I believe. So thank you all for sitting here for an hour and a half or so. And our next session is going to just throw out some ideas of other models that are happening. And of course, at the beginning of many of these conversations is Lauren Glendavidian, town meeting TV. Lauren will talk about some of the work that they do and around the state. And from New Hampshire, Hampshire, Melanie Plenda, there's something called the Granite State Collaborative where there's 20 or so media organizations that are working together share content that Melanie will tell us about. Going even sort of bigger scale, Bill Densmore here will Densmore. We'll finish this off talking about some other models that he is involved with. So without further ado, Lauren. Sorry. I didn't want to just get up for one second. Just like up once I like like a two second yoga break, like stretch your arms and have a breath, five deep breaths, five deep breaths into your masks. Thank you so much. There we go. That feels so much better. How. Today was the first day I had to think about what I was going to wear for two years. I'm wearing, I'm wearing exactly the same thing I would normally be wearing but I had to think about it a little bit more. And I'm the executive director of CCTV Center for media and democracy, which started out in 1984 is chitin in community television. And at that time, the only outlets that non professional media makers and citizen activists had to speak their truth about what they thought was happening in their communities was a letter to the editor, or possibly a radio editorial. So it was our intent to liberate the means of production and distribution for media making for the people and that was the birth of public access television in Vermont. And at that time, there were people all over the country, trying to do the same things, knocking on the door of cable companies and saying, we know that you're using the public rights of way, and in exchange for that you need to provide a public benefit. And those public benefits need to be channels and a percentage of your revenue so that we can tell our stories. So flash forward from 1984, when they were 50 cable companies in the state of Vermont now they're six, where Vermont had countless radio news operations just here in Burlington I think there were at least four radio news operations, and the news were locally controlled, and the Burlington Free Press was actually in Burlington. And now there are 24 community media centers all across the state of Vermont. And the reason that we're here I think was very well teed up by Michael is that we are part of a media ecosystem of which journalism has a central necessary place as does community media, which is the modern term for public educational and government access because of course we don't think of ourselves anymore as simply cable TV public interest. We actually serve on multiple platforms and I would just like to point out a couple of important things that you might not be aware of. The only live election results that were done in Chittenden County were done at town meeting television. That's what Megan or work is here runs. The only connection live connection that people had to their local governments during the pandemic was to the public meetings that were covered all across the state. There are at least 100 public town meetings covered last week. Over the past two years, the community media centers, including Jess Wilson media factory have been providing live gavel to gavel coverage of public meetings that is the backbone of what the journalists here rely on to get the work done. We have 41,000 pieces of media media in our archives dating back to 1984. Jordan Mitchell, our archivist is here 41,000 pieces of video archives. A thousand of those happen to be Bernie Sanders. Politico helped us digitize all of them a couple years ago, or yeah, it was a couple years ago. And that archive is a necessary and vital record of what has happened in this community over four decades. What we're doing in Burlington and in Chittenden County is being replicated in the 24 community media centers all across the country. At the same time, our primary revenue source, we are all nonprofits, our primary revenue source has been cable television subscriptions. And that business has been disrupted, just like the news business has been disrupted. Now this is something that we've seen coming since 1990. It's not a big surprise, but of course, the number of cable subscriptions are declining rapidly. And the foundation of this revenue source is that these are commercial users of the public rights of way. Congress in 1984, when they passed the Cable Communications Act, basically wrote down that there should be a quid pro quo for the commercial use of the public rights of way. Now unfortunately, Congress has written laws that prohibit us from getting a similar quid pro quo from internet revenue. But they figured that out. And they've made it very difficult for us to transplant this policy directive onto a percentage of use for internet providers, even though the exact same cables that cable companies are providing video on, they're providing internet on. But there's not the same public policy basis. So it has always been part of our work to not just liberate the means of production so that people can tell their stories and can counter sometimes the narrow journalistic stories that are told and can amplify the stories that are told in local newspapers. It's not just that we are trying to open the doors of local government to promote transparency and local democracy. And it's not just that we're trying to preserve local history with our archives. And it's not just that we're trying to train the next generation with our media education work, which we proudly do. We have to be policy walks. We have to understand the foundation and the premise upon which the revenue is based for community media, just like with Congressman Welch, and the bill that you're thinking about, we have to be policy walks as publishers and journalists. So luckily, and I'll just wrap up the Vermont legislature identified our work as an essential service during the pandemic. We were just able to, in addition to COVID funds, negotiate $300,000 for the community media centers in the budget adjustment of 22. We're going for $600,000 for the budget adjustment 23. And these are short term bridge funding requests while we prepare to rewrite the policy in the state of Vermont. So the Vermont legislature can use what authority it has to reorganize how community media is funded. So I would leave that as kind of an inspiring alternative story, and to say that without partnerships, we, none of us are going to be able to do the work going forward. And we certainly look to continue that. Thank you. Thank you. If there are no questions at this time, I think we'll move on to our next speaker then I'm very excited to introduce you Melanie Plenda of the New Hampshire radio. Hi, I'm Melanie Plenda. I'm the director of the Granite State News Collaborative and I feel obligated though to say first as a neighbor but an outsider of Vermont. I have consumed a lot of the news represented here, and I am a diehard admirer, you're doing amazing work, and I know we're supposed to be competitors and all that but you're doing amazing work and the dedication and passion that brings you here to keep this public service that we all believe in alive is palpable. And I really commend all of you for being here and doing what you're doing. So I just wanted to say that very first and foremost. But the Granite State News Collaborative and I will use notes because no one told me that as a journalist I would ever have to do public speaking, and it is not my jam. So, so we are a collective of more than 20 local media outlets, also a university, our press association and community partners who are non journalists but do provide content to us we work with a lot of, we like to collaborate that is our thing and so we collaborate with pretty aggressively non partisan, and, and all that kind of good stuff. How this works is we, when we started, we were solely project based, but during the pandemic we realized that we could do a whole lot more together because we needed to because we needed to. So we're going to be able on our own to cover the pandemic and get people what they needed. So we needed to work together in order to do that. So we set up a system for communicating with each other. We set up a system for sharing stories with each other. And then the collaborative itself has a team of freelance investigative reporters that fill in the gaps so we kind of fill in those like time intensive resource intensive kind of projects and series and stories that the outlets just couldn't do during the pandemic. And we give those all to our partners, they can share them across any platform it's all free they don't pay in. Then the partners themselves. Also, again during the pandemic, they share their own content and I'm, I'm the one who pulls it all into, you know, our very sophisticated Google folder that we share with each other. And make sure that everybody has what they need they get their photos their cut lines or stories. They can run them with very few exceptions without restriction on any other platforms. And by doing that, in the last 18 months we've cross posted more than 3000 stories across the state of New Hampshire. This is in print in digital. You name it we we have them as our partners we have our energy PR station we have an HPBS station in the collaborative itself has contributed more than 600 of those stories to our partners, and it's many more often than not stories that couldn't have been done otherwise we just completed us eight month investigation into the impacts of exclusionary zoning in our state, and we've been able to show through data because we also have a shared data editor that is at the disposal of all of our partners. We were able to show through data how this is impacting affordable housing crime homelessness the refugees in our state. And we were only able to do that, because the collaborative exists because everyone's working together, because of the resources we can provide to our partners. A couple other things I'll mention is that, you know, our, our team of reporters, they produce their own stuff, but they also, we kind of look at them as like a little mini investigative SWAT team so they can let go out and work for short periods of time with our partners on projects. And the only caveat is, and we pay for that. And the only caveat is that they have to just share that content with everybody without restriction and, and they're like yeah great give me the reporter. So, so then they get to have these projects that again, they wouldn't have gotten to have by working together with our public radio or public television station, we produced 85 episodes of a public a digital public radio show that is also shared with the partners. We share both the video and a q amp a print version so that all of our partners can participate in that our print included. We also have launched with our educational partner Franklin Pierce, we launched two new podcasts that are also shared print and digital. So I know that this is working is, let me make sure that I have on my list. So one thing I know is that because of our network of our distribution network. Some of our partners have actually been able to leverage that into grant funding for our programs because they can tell people they can tell funders. Hey, if you help our outlet, do this thing or with this reporter. Not only are you helping us but we're sharing all that content with all of these partners across the state so those stories don't just live there anymore. Now they're going across the state more people are getting more news for fewer resources, our partners then build on that reporting, and I love that gets shared. So it, it's really has a multiplier effect which philanthropists really like and I get that. And it's good thing. The other thing is I've had had editors report to me that they're able to redeploy their own resources to more hyper local issues and topics that they might not have been able to cover because something that's happening that day that's a statewide is already being covered by one of the partners is going to be shared. So now they're getting more hyper local news which is what's bringing people to their sites and their papers, but they're also able to provide all this really rigorously reported vetted trusted statewide content. Hmm, let's see. Yeah, it's a there's been a reduction in the duplication of efforts for the very reason that I just said so against saving of resources conserving of resources. All of our partners like co production and that's okay we like to take partners where they're at and at the level at which they're willing to participate. But this year, the project that I mentioned the eight month project, we did have for the first time we had five partners work on that project together and it's a little bit of a little just go dance to make that happen but it did and so we were able to get that and I will kind of end with this anecdote. You talk about competition and collaboration and collaboration always looks good on paper, but everybody's got the thing in the back of their head like, how is this going to work. Who's going to have buy in it we're going to end up doing more they're going to end up doing less we're a special snowflake they're not it's all I mean everybody has those same thing. And in fact of my first day of work, my very first day. And I had to give a speech that day too, and it was not good. And one of our, there was an outlet there and I went up to the editor I was very earnest and was like hey you want to join the collaborative so fun it's great it's a good idea. And he did in the eyes like Melanie, we will never join the collaborative. And I was like, why. And he said, we do not work well with others. I'm not kidding. He now is one of our biggest supporters and our most active collaborative members so if that guy can join that guy can collaborate really anybody can. I'm happy to answer any questions if you have any other than to say that it works, and it's replicable. So if anyone does have questions I'm happy to help. Awesome. Thank you so much on our neighbors and more from our neighbors in New Hampshire, Bill Dunsmore is has an academic and supporter of all this. I love the fact that you are you have the last word here in this section of today's program. Thank you, friend. Well, I leaned over to her a minute ago and I said I'm going to try to make this three minutes. I, I am really eager to get to lunch and get to talking not so that I can listen rather talk but to tell you a little bit about it. And the most important thing to know is that I was driving up here last night from Williamstown, Massachusetts, where I live. And I said why don't I use the recorder I've got to record my comments and by the time I got to Bill and Kate's house. I figured it was 14 minutes long. So what I did is I loaded it up I typed it up last night and if you go to itaiga.org slash Vermont you can read it. And that's why I don't have to talk for more than three minutes it's ita.org slash Vermont. Ita is 501 C three nonprofit setup that stands for the information trust exchange governing association with a three part mission one is to try to help it help make it easier for people to manage their identity and privacy on the web. The second is to help news organizations to develop a stronger relationship with their users and the technology that we think is needed to enable those kinds of things will also create ideally a solution for a fast pass for news and information on the web so that you can have one account one ID one password maybe from any one of the polar polarity of your news organizations and have that give you access to bundle content from elsewhere sort of the cable model for news on the web. So in the I take a dot org slash Vermont discourse I talk about these theories of change in action. One is that privacy personalization and payments are really critical to sustaining journalism privacy because it goes hand in hand with identity and right now, Google and Facebook pretty much control the way identity works on the web and we need to change that. And our thought is that we change it by having a nonprofit that makes the rules that govern how identity and privacy work on the web. So without identity personalization isn't possible without personalization there's really no business model left for journalism that one. There's a set of actions that are possible around that one is the idea of the special purpose foundation which Angelo talked about earlier and which I'm super interested in and want to sit in on that and listen on to that conversation. The second is to deal with some way of creating a clearing house for the for the IP transfer the copyright protection of content. Another action is to figure out a way to do aggregated payments and if you read the the thing I posted it talks about how Eric Schmidt tossed talked about that 10 years ago when he was head of Google. Another action item is to keep thinking about ownership and how we do ownership. I think ownership really matters and I'd like to see more attention paid to the possibility that a cooperative form of ownership could work in the news business. But the fundamental premise of all of this which we've talked I've heard about all of us talking about this morning is that we need to collaborate collaborate collaborate. And one of the interesting ideas in collaboration which you can also read about in my posting is an entity called journalist net or trust dot txt. It's a technology that would that would that's explained that would allow you to post a note on your website that of the organizations that are trusted organizations you belong to. And those in turn those trusted organizations like NEMPA or Vermont Press Association can post a similar notice on your website on their website and by by then advertisers and consumers can look for those texts. Those text messages and see that you're a trusted organization that I don't explain it well it's explained better in the write up but let's all have lunch. Thank you so much Bill. Now don't move. I've got a this is going to be the most chaotic and part of the day. But it's going to work really well what we want to do now Fran Fran just one sec there's just a couple other people in this room I'd love to have them just jump up and say a word or two. Okay. Roger charity who many may know is the news director at channel three and one of the things. Great thank you. Hi thank you I know everybody's hungry so I won't be too long. In some ways listening this morning. I feel like a little bit of an outlier here we're a statewide organization. We founded pretty much the way we were originally were a for profit advertised based advertising based entity. We have changed and adapted over the years as the media landscape has changed and we've tried to have a reach in everywhere that we need to be to remain a viable and competitive. And it's been really interesting to hear the different models talked about today and how you're all working so hard to stay relevant and to survive and and I would say I would echo somebody else's comments earlier I think it's really. You're doing an amazing job Vermont has a robust. Local media. Infrastructure and serving communities amazingly as, as Ann said, as a statewide organization we. You know we depend a lot on the work that you're doing the close community contacts help us find stories and we are the state wide organization and we tell statewide stories we also tell a lot of local stories and that's the fabric of Vermont is is told by local stories so. I applaud the work that's being done and I think that the efforts to remain viable and keep those community sources my, my first job was at a local newspaper and that was a foundational. Opportunity for me to get where I am today. Lastly, just on the collaboration thing. I would say that we have this wonderful collaboration with seven days Apollo or out Lee. It's been, I think very beneficial for both of us. And it's something that I've wanted to explore more with local media around the state and so I'm going to throw that out there today that if there are outlets that are interested in working with WCA X and to get their stories out to a broader community we're really interested in that and I welcome a phone call or an email to talk about that so that's my little pitch. And that's it, thank you. Roger has been a pleasure to work with in so many ways Dan Smith here President of the Vermont Community Foundation, Dan. Thank you Richard everybody hear me okay. It's nice to be in the room with a bunch of people this is the first public event that I've done in a couple years I think so it's good to see you all. I'm just with President CEO of the Vermont Community Foundation. I, my first job out of high school was in the news department of WDV and radio Vermont and Waterbury and some tablets who's the current Secretary of Agriculture was my boss there he also bought me my first razor, which is a, you know, small point of history. But, you know, I have a couple of observations and I apologize I'm going to have to duck out I got two sick kids at home and we're doing a handoff at midday. And the thing that I would ask you first, except that gratitude for the service you provide on behalf of building strong communities I think you can't just disaggregate the work of your organizations and your businesses from the strength and vitality of your communities. So thank you. One point I've been thinking about this morning is that you can't separate out the experience of your enterprises from the economic and social experience of those communities, which is to say, you know, when Angelo talked about the revenue streams that need to be revitalized. We're talking about the purchasing power of local purchasers buying subscriptions. You have to think about the economic experience of those local purchases and right now rural communities, not just in Vermont, which is entirely rural by almost every definition, but across the communities are in decline. So, I hope you also think about how broadly we can revitalize the economic and social experience of rural communities because rebuilding those communities will actually drive to greater vitality for your enterprises, but advertising revenue is the other example right when small small businesses focused on place are going out of business and dealing with negative economic trends. And so you need philanthropy, not just to be thinking about how to solve this problem for these enterprises in the room, although that's the conversation we're having, you need a lot of people thinking about how to revitalize small towns across this country for a lot of good reasons. And that will be a driving factor in the vitality of your businesses. The first, the third is, as you think about the work this afternoon in the exploration. Don't limit your consideration to the idea of philanthropy and funding as a form of grants. Right. Foundation philanthropy is a pool of managed assets that are invested right across the investment world people are thinking about the impact of their investment. And that needs to go beyond just the traditional and I think relatively narrow focus on what's labeled ESG but actually considering the lens of place that's the thing that we've adopted at the Vermont Community Foundation which is thinking about what is the role of our invested assets to be active in place to drive healthy communities, not just invested over here to generate grant making over here that does a little bit of work to offset what may be incredibly challenging global and economic trends. Now it's not easy for institutional investors to do and I would expand your thinking beyond just foundation philanthropy and institutional investors. It's not easy for them to do because there are a lot of structures that define those decision making. But I think it's okay to put some pressure on institutional investors to think about how to put their assets to work in communities. One of the lessons of the pandemic is that distribution disaggregation can actually be more stable both from an investment standpoint from a food systems standpoint. A whole host of things concentration is riskier disaggregation and distribution may be stronger in the long term. So put some pressure on the folks who's either private foundations that are out there endowments that are managed, you know, around, you know, to think about what their investments might do to build strong communities to change some of the economic trajectories that have driven the experience of our communities, and by extension your businesses and your enterprises for the last 15 years. And I think that is a really robust conversation. I hope you explore. And, you know, I look forward to hearing the product of the conversations this afternoon and the ongoing dialogue with all of you. And thanks again for your commitment to communities. Dan, could you. Yeah, so Ben Hewitt just the well known Northeast Kingdom writer speaking of rural. Thank you Richard. I promise Richard I would take 30 seconds so I'm going to speak really quickly. I want to just address head on a subject that I think a topic that we've kind of been flirting with here I really appreciated Roger's comments that really brought it to mind. And I will preface this just by saying I'm listed on the attendee list as a journalist. Richard and Corey think I'm a journalist that's one of the reasons they brought me into the CNS. But the truth is I'm actually a storyteller, much more than a journalist and consider myself a storyteller much more than a journalist. And so I just want to put in a quick plug for storytelling as an essential service in our communities. And I think it gets directly to Meg's point about the, you know, the antidote to partisanship, I believe is local storytelling. It's not just local news local news is critical of course, but let's not forget about local storytelling. I was thinking reflecting a little bit ago on the thing that made me feel loneliest in the pandemic. Honestly, was the lack of ability to go to Willy's store in Greensboro, and just talk to people and tell stories. So I just wanted to put that out there. I want us not to forget about the incalculable value of storytelling. We're losing the places where we are able to gather not just the pandemic but to the erosion of the rural communities that Dan just mentioned. We're really, really rapidly losing the places where we can gather and keep those stories alive. And to me, that's one of the things that just makes, you know, living in my community and living where I do so valuable. And also, oh, I was also thinking this in context of your comments, Sarah, you know, how do we get people to see themselves reflected in our news. And I think one of the ways we do that is through storytelling. Thank you. That's all I want to say. Can you make sure that makes all D Vermont Association of Broadcasters Wendy. Hi, very, very quickly, because I know we're all starving. I just wanted to bring to everybody's attention that there is another. Well, first of all, the Vermont Association of Broadcasters. Our job is to unite and advocate for all of the radio and television broadcasters here operating in the state of Vermont, but I am not a journalist. A lot of my time is spent advocating for journalists and broadcasters. I wanted to just bring to your attention that there is another piece of legislation that is circulating through Congress right now it's called the journalism journalism competition and preservation act. Basically what this would do is enable media outlets to collectively negotiate for with big tech to use the content online. So I encourage you to look if you're curious about it you can go to nab.org National Association of Broadcasters.org but this does include all media outlets. So look at it it's called the journalism competition and preservation act. And some of our, as I just came back from a trip to Washington where I spoke about this to Congress in the Welch and to Senator Leahy, they felt that they were not actually help small news producers here in Vermont. So if you feel that it should have that it would help you, certainly please look at it and then just let your representatives know have a second one as well. Okay. Aaron. Hello. Hello. And tell us what you have been talking about your recruitment and what you come up with. Thank you. Yes, we've been talking about recruitment and, you know, just some challenges around that and different, you know, levels of the organization. I think one that we all agreed on right out the gate was pay reporters like to get paid for their work. A living wage is always nice. And that helps towards retention, you know, working deliberately with younger journalists, as far as training goes. You know, providing some sort of incentive as far as equity in an organization. You know, journalists, you know, newsrooms with more than five journalists sometimes have unions now. You know, people like that. The journalists like that anyway. You know, the recruitment challenges, there's a drop off in an applicants at a certain point, you know, there's this sort of focus on, you know, as journalists gain experiences they want to move onto larger markets, you know, and bigger newsrooms and stuff like that. I think we talked a little bit about, you know, trying to provide clearer paths towards growth within an organization. You know, in general, I think across the board that was something that sounded good. You know, investing in staff. It's a strong newsroom culture. You know, at this table we had both myself and Avalon we both work for the Vermont community newspaper group were a pretty small, close knit kind of community of people you know at you can't have a newsroom as small as ours and have there be basically any attention at all, I think. Yeah, and Avalon talked about how she also enjoyed the kind of nurturing experiences she had at the beginning of her career. I think anybody who is still working as a journalist when they get into their late 20s, early 30s, you know, has had at least some positive experiences in a newsroom. And that has, you know, gone with, you know, editors fostering collaborative relationships within the newsroom. You know, taking people who want to learn and listening to their what they're interested in and helping them grow in their career. And, you know, making training available in the community, obviously Cory has done a lot of work towards that. You know, he's obviously bringing up the next generation of journalists and, you know, helping them gain experience. But yeah, you know, we talked about, you know, trying to keep reporters around and offering all these different incentives to them because preserving institutional knowledge is really important, especially, you know, if you are bringing on younger journalists at the same time, like in our newsroom, we have Tommy who, you know, has a lot of institutional knowledge about our area. And that's really helpful when, you know, we're looking into different things like that. And, you know, what else do we talk about, guys? Well, you're, we're trying to keep this to two minutes. I know it's crazy. But it sounds like hey, hey, mentorship is very important. Training is very important. And I think what Cory is doing of training just community members, not necessarily, you know, UVM students. Also, anything else major missing. One of our big challenges is how do we get to the point where we can make our sales pitch to the candidates we want to talk to because a lot of times we don't get to that point, you know, we're in a competitive market. You know, the top top candidates have multiple options and trying to draw a top talent from outside this area, especially can be a real big challenge. Great. So that whole real recruitment piece, not as easy as one would think. Thank you so much. So we're going to try to go through these and then, you know, hopefully we'll have a little bit of time for open discussion, but we've we've got a lot of great groups table number two. Can you hear I can give them the other that one. Yes, so we were the collaboration table and we're all really good friends right now we're all going to go out for beers and we started as enemies. But we, we all we all got, we were really doing well when the time ran out so I think if we'd had another minute or two would have been great. But I think we spent a lot of the other time actually listening to our friend from New Hampshire, New Hampshire, and a lot of the things boiled down to with with collaboration starting small and starting out of the necessity. What really made the thing hum and New Hampshire was the pandemic and, and they had a kind of a unifying goal that where everybody's kind of rowing in the same direction so if we're all living through the same sort of set of shared circumstances that's a that's a common ground that everybody can kind of get on board with. We have a TV representative at the table to and so there was talk about, you know, with those of us in the print world. Oftentimes we sit through hours and hours of select board meetings or zoning board meetings and, and, you know, get as much drama out of the ink that we can put on that but there's no visual aspect there's no audio aspect and, you know, like their photographer can come in and take some great photos of the girls got cookies or the person putting the ballot into the ballot counter or like that for a town meeting story but to really, you know, to really capture the emotions and stuff like that there will be a good like kind of jumping off part for print and, and, and TV to collaborate on. We also talked a little bit about how wdv radio but not group, for instance, not in our case I go on the radio with them twice a week and talk over the headlines and vpr does similar things on Sundays. Saturdays or something I can't remember when, but so there's, there's a way of collaboration is sometimes not necessarily collaborating on a story but interviewing, like a, like a more of a visual or audio centric media, I could say interview a print reporter who's been sitting through a, you know, onerous meetings and stuff like that and kind of getting their, their take on things and, and that and that helps the, you know, the print outlet get to a bigger audience but it also allows the TV and the audience to get a little bit into the community, as Aaron mentioned, like those of us with institutional knowledge of our communities. So that a greater audience and, and Rob was talking about, you know, a particular instance where if you don't, if you're not from the community, you don't know who to talk to. You're going to talk to two people, they may be the exactly wrong two people to talk to. They may have opposite views, but they may be the wrong two people to talk to and wrap it up if you had any next steps or anything else I missed from this table. Okay. All in projects, yes, like kind of a delegation, you know, when when you why, if you're if you find yourself stretched them for resources within your single organization, you might find that you have a lot more resources if you spread it out amongst different organizations and if you kind of swallow your ego and, you know, just all become parts of the of the of the machine going in the same direction. You'll find once you see the fruits of your labor just once just the first time it gives you kind of a, like, yeah, I could do this, I could do this. Thank you. Thank you very much. Great. And table number four. Okay, can everyone hear me. I'm going to go over here so I don't have my back to everyone. Okay, so at table number four we were talking about content, and there's going to be a lot of overlap over here with you all I swear we were not copying off your paper, but thank you, that's helpful. Yeah, this doesn't count against my two minutes right. So we were talking about it again about content and one of the things we found some of the things we found that were working well was that as local reporters we know our local communities and we know what our local people want. Those can be things like seeing their kids name in the paper local sports local schools. One of the things that Bridget mentioned is that property transfers are actually really exciting in St. Albans, and apparently elsewhere as well I'm seeing a lot of nods. And then I think Phil had mentioned as well that the police blotter can be really, really popular in some of the local papers. In terms of needs pay came up several times. I don't think that's surprising. People want to be able to have a decent life so they need a decent salary. One of the things that we talked about that kind of blood over between the two categories was that Vermont has a lot of writers, and Bill was mentioning I think that we have more writers per capita than any other state was that what you said yeah. Um, so we were saying well what we need to do is bring in some of this talent, bring it on board these these are people who could be writing for us. Another way to bring in more writers and really engage with our readers is to have regular column columns, especially humor columns can be really popular. And that can be something that can keep our readers and even bring in subscribers as well. There are people who will read the paper just for that one column that they enjoy every week. We also talked about needing to, and this again goes back to what you all have in New Hampshire. I'm not going to try to do the accent. But the, the collaboration that you all have there to try to leverage the resources that are available to report especially data stories which can be really challenging and require a lot more in depth work and a specific skill set that not every single paper has someone who has that skill set on staff. So in terms of next steps. We, we were talking about editors maybe reaching out to some of those local writers trying to get in touch with some of that local talent and bring in more people. Again, leveraging resources maybe using database resources at larger publications to feed stories to more local papers who might not be able to access or spend time digging through large databases to find their local stories. Again, going in with local writers is finding new and different voices from your community to bring in to keep your community engaged. And then another resource to bring in would be from porch form there are someone in our at our table and I'm sorry I don't remember who said that there are I think it was scooter. So there are a lot of people who will speak up on farm porch forum but might not write a letter to the editor or otherwise contact the paper so interacting more with people on front porch form to bring in again more voices more stories more perspectives. And we got to priorities a bit late but we were saying one one priority of course for our local papers here is to get the content up on the website because of course, many of our smaller local papers are only publishing week a couple times a week every other week something like that. But you can also essentially be a daily. If you're getting your content up more frequently and I think five. Okay, content number two. So, I'm going to permit myself the, the sort of ego to speak as the greenest of greens and journalism to say what the crisis of journalism is, which is for me I think a crisis of journalism is an excess of information. There's so many roots for information to travel there's so many places where we get information, and we lose what's actually important in them sort of flood. And so a lot of what we were talking about at our content table was how do we mitigate the damage that this kind of flood does. And one thing that we sort of touched on about this flood is that public discussion, you know, through things like front porch forum and Facebook are, you know, supported by are supported by these many many mediums but what journalism is sort of trying to do and what journalism is consequently through this flood is sort of like having trouble doing is providing in depth engagement rather than just discussion. People can talk and talk and there needs to be some place where somebody can just sort of define and explore something. And so we sort of wondered like what mediums will will actually allow people to like have this perspective because people are, you know, print is dying. People are sort of going towards more social media engagement. And as these mediums expand the sort of attention diminishes the ability to sort of engage with these topics. So we talked about avenues of access that have worked for for bringing journalism to people that wouldn't usually be engaged with it. One such avenue would be podcasting podcasts have become more popular with sort of people like my generation millennials and stuff. And not a lot of people that I know listen to news podcasts, but podcasts are sort of this like audio mediums reach people more directly. People stream a lot and there's a there's a there's a priority on the accessibility of content now, where one wants to take something and have it at whatever time they want. They want to go back and, you know, look something over again. The podcast can sort of give somebody a sort of direct access to headlines or direct access to things that they wouldn't usually notice. One particular idea for podcasts that we had to move on to implementation kind of briefly because I think I'm going to run out of time before I have anything to say. One aspect of implementation that we talked about was having a statewide media podcast. So sort of like bringing in different bringing in different publications and people reporters from publications to talk about, you know, maybe stories that that publication did, possibly bringing in perspectives of the public, you know, turning turning these stories into very like long form engagements with issues, maybe even connecting said issues to sort of larger like larger perspectives. And because really what the medium of journalism needs right now and what other mediums are missing is that kind of long form engagement that really deep engagement with these things, you know, which. So that was one idea that we had for podcast implementation. And we'll need to wrap it up a little bit. Sorry about this. I'm like the person that everybody hates, but also know that any of your notes please send them to Richard, because we're going to compile all of these things. So if there's anything that's missing, also, we will capture it that way but go ahead and finish. Pardon me for for interrupting. Okay. Yeah, what else to say. Oh yeah, reader surveys. One thing that we talked about as far as implementation goes is providing surveys through email lists to readers of local publications so that we know what sort of things that they want to hear about and what sort of things are important to them. Bringing in public voices also was another thing that we sort of touched on like front voices from front porch forum maybe trying to like get in touch with people from front porch forum to ask them to expand upon things that they've talked about in those discussions. Because really there's this like, there's this fundamental disconnect in the medium of journalism that needs to be bridged one way or another and it's kind of difficult to find that way. I have nothing else to say really. I'm just going to wrap it up. Awesome. Thank you so much. Fantastic. And again, I know that this feels just we're just rushing through this but this is these are all just we're getting together for the first time in five or six years I think this is fantastic. Table number six. And I can move some of that I think you can put that yeah wherever you wherever you want it. Meg thank you. Our group was talking about sustainability balancing the digital and print media. First we talked about what's working well with each take this off sorry paper of course satisfies traditional readers. It attracts eyeballs on newsstands. We thought of, of course, seven days is the classic example you see it want to pick it up. It's graphical. The digital platform of course attracts a younger audience it's got dynamic content it's great for breaking news, and you can put up timely posts. For Montagor classic example there. Of course you can also have targeted ads on digital and with digital media there's no paper printing costs so a little better for the environment. It's needed. Of course you'd have to build a loyal base on either a platform with great quality reporting. All of us are competing for brain cells and a soundbite culture. So whatever platform you choose or if you're doing both, like I am, you have to somehow attract readers and keep them there. You need to strike a balance of coverage for different users and different readers. And we found on my newspaper as you probably with yours you draw them in with the picture of the dog and you hope they stay to read about the school board meeting or the select board meeting. Next steps of course everybody wants to break even or make a profit. We would of course love to get revenues for publishing public notices and our digital media that we're not there yet. And of course as we've talked about all day long having some tax breaks for our subscribers or donors would be terrific. Thank you. Thank you so much Irene. And themes keep emerging here. Table number seven talking about leveraging digital trends and technology. Thank you Corey. I'm speaking for the dinosaurs among us that the our readership at the commons is mostly print and our Internet presence is an afterthought. So in making a transition between print and digital, all the talk about collaboration today a big thing ought to be collaboration and technology and training and ability for some of us dinosaurs who are lagging in our digital efforts to try and get up to speed. So we have a readership that really demands a printed paper so we have to balance the printed paper that everyone wants with the future of having an Internet presence that people are going to the next generation or two of readers are going to have. And the collaboration of tech and training among us all might be helpful there to help some of us laggers catch up to other ones. And also teaming up with the collaboration and the technology going with the people who are already doing it right like our local community access television. We've done that in Brattleboro others may consider that too for helping expand reporting and also using front porch forum to help promote our stories in one way or another. Obstacles for us especially in the southern part of the state is our Internet sucks. We have many people in our coverage area that can't get adequate broadband. So all the whiz bang stuff you can do online is going to be useless if you can't access it. So a little bit of poking and prodding with the Scott administration and the ledge to give us more money for broadband it's going to be very important. Also using our interns population to help do some of these digital project projects since they are more digital natives well you know I'm still the generation that learned on typewriters you got to help us old timers get up to speed. If we want everybody wants to survive. And the collaboration with local schools to we wanted to try and get get, you know, the CNS project is great. We need something for southern Vermont anybody got ideas in my way. But tech collaboration. That's the one thing we came up with. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much. And now we are table number eight. Go for it. Okay, so we were sustainability funding looking at community supported journalism membership subscription and ad revenue. So it's it's funny everyone's so far as almost everyone's mentioned front porch form. We had two members of front porch form at our table with this discussion so we kind of cut we kind of cut out the middle man just went right to report form. So one of the things that we talked about what's working well is innovation and Lisa from the roundabout here to like thinking about ways in which being innovative about how you're both creating content sharing content engaging with your community through different spaces so the collaboration with the Times Argus has been really has done really well for you right. So, and then the partnership with vt digger in terms of finding a fiscal sponsor to kind of move that we talked a little bit about that that kind of innovation and also which also leaves that kind of collaboration, which I think also people have talked about which we also said was also something that was needed more and most is that kind of smart collaboration between each other. Right, sort of what grand estate was talking about as well. But I think it's working well to as you think about it is like, is the connection that you all have with your communities. I mean this is one thing like they know you and trust you already in many ways. So that is something that is actually working. And in this day and age when you when you're seeing community news sites go down repeatedly and over time and dramatically in some cases that that's something that can't be gotten back. I mean, I think that was, I can't remember was it was Angela. I mean, he said that right. It's like, it's much, it's much, you know, it's much harder to build something back after it's gone than to try to do what you can to sort of save and that innovation does come out of that like doing everything you can to survive. Kind of like what Seven Days has been doing over the past couple years as everybody else has been to like finding every little bit of place to kind of diversify your revenue. So that's the kind of stuff that is working. One of the things that need the most though is to try to figure out, especially for some smaller publishers or those who are moving from print to digital is to have to monetize some of that content on digital, whether it's through whether it's through email or through newsletters and ads there or ads on on sites entirely and having more input from like, what do you charge, how often, what are the technology platforms to be used. So I think there's more to be done in that space. And it could be another group meeting here with some of the people who aren't in this room which are on the business side, not just the reporters who probably aren't thinking about ad rates and subscription costs or membership costs. I thought like we're was trying to sort of within maybe this group can have some examples they could share, especially or that members like Lisa or others who are just getting going could find resources to find where some of that is to sort of come up with some cost rates or think about some low bar strategies to sort of take smaller bites at the apple rather than trying to swallow the whole apple at once. And then also trying to figure out if there's a way one idea came up here was like, is there somebody in the business school here who could partner with CNS to kind of maybe get some interns that work on that side. I mean, I know champagne college does some of this they'll do like these. They'll do like, like a business like a business development analysis of a nonprofit, or other organizations, they'll sort of do it as like a case study for a class. But maybe there's somebody in the business school that could help train interns to come in and help do ad sales or develop business strategies that can sort of take a load off a little bit. Because we all know that you're already editing stories until 1011 o'clock at night, like thinking about that stuff can be hard so maybe there's other ways that could be supported. And I will also say just sort of like from my work but also hearing the content part, the kind of in depth engagement that you're already doing like that kind of reader engagement those surveys or opportunities to be kind of developing those kind of habits to kind of keep people keep people coming back to you and engaging with you and trusting you. And then apparently, and then posting your stuff to front porch form apparently is awesome. Thank you guys very much. And on to the policy duo policy dynamic duo back here. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, we, we had to talk about me read it. Government funding sources policy changes tax credits town budget support and grants. We started off with what's working well. And my partner here, Wendy said said not much. But the reality is we heard some ideas today. New funding source alternatives are being considered the tax credits and such and those are good things. And hopefully they will work well. What's needed most liability for social media platforms. Consider the internet to be a public ownership like broadcast the airwaves are and regulate them as such. So that goes to what I spoke about earlier. This idea of lack of liability for social media companies is enabled by the section 230 of title 47 federal FCC rules. Next steps. Journalists and broadcast publishers need to lobby the US government to repeal section 230 or at least modify it. Believe it or not, social media companies are doing that they're lobbying to keep it $700 million my partner informed me has been spent one year. So it's no wonder why that survives implementation priorities. Education on the issues of course very, very important. Organize those lobbying efforts for journalistic endeavors. Probably very important and it's starting to happen. I've seen it actually on some YouTube videos, teach in schools media literacy. Recognize fake news when they see it and they understand the different flavors of it and can actually treat it like what it is gossip. Wendy, do you have anything else? Thank you, Ken. That was perfect. And, and finally today this this large group that moved together to to make something happen. It's a super group super group. So we wanted to all of what you all have been saying today comes back in part to how do we make sure that there is the resources to have great truly like local journalism. And so one of the proposed solutions is creating a nonprofit that would support this local journalism. And there was a discussion about what a daunting task it would be. But at the end of the day one of the big questions was, can we even do this? Is this allowed? Because a lot of the local journalism being done right now is being done for by for profit entities, right? And can you have a nonprofit that gives money to a for profit? Luckily, we have two lawyers here who are real experts in this field. We have Wally and we also have Brian who are kind enough to give us their insights. And so mostly we discussed whether you can do it. And the answer is, yeah, if you basically follow the rules and there are rules to do this. One of the ideas, by the way, the idea that's being floated for a name is friends of Vermont journalism. So little breaking news there. You heard it here first. Oh, like this is off the record though, right? Okay. Awesome. The idea though is that the friends would be a place where people would donate to the friends have control of the money. But the donor could say, I want my money to be spent on this type of project in this type of community, even at this newspaper if they wanted to. So that is one of the ways that you might be able to get nonprofit money into for profit journalism. The money that's spent though would have to be for specific things that help the community. It can't just be for, I'm going to pick on Angela. It can't be for Angela's big party. Well, that might benefit the community. I need to think of something else. But it has to be for a civic purpose. But most of what we're talking about today, covering your local select board, that's a civic purpose. So it probably would qualify according to the folks who had the table for that sort of thing. And there are next steps to be taken in figuring out how to set it up, but also in figuring out how to sustain it. Because, you know, there are other nonprofit journalism organizations in the state like like UPR Vermont PBS also digger. It's one thing to set up something. It's another thing to sustain it. So that would take time and energy and resources. That being said, there was a lot of enthusiasm for exploring this idea and seeing if it could help sustain truly local journalism. Awesome. Thank you very much. And if there are things that people need to sign up for, I think you'll probably get that through Richard. Oh, Angela wants to say a last word. On this nonprofit, one of the things that we were going to try to put together is a accessibility of need. So that would be a conversation with newspapers across the state to identify what your needs are, what your annual needs might be, how dire are they. And when we do that, we'll put something together, send it out to everybody. Be honest, because if you're not, you won't get help. So please look for that. We'll try to get that done this spring. Thank you. Fantastic. Thank you all for the enormous amount of work that you've actually put into this. I hope you enjoyed the day enjoyed seeing your colleagues enjoyed wrestling with some of these ideas. I'm going to turn it over to Richard and I hope also you want to do this again next year. Actually, hands next year. Should we do this every year? Okay, cool. That looks like a yes. Thank you so much. We will be compiling this. That's going to be Richard's job. Thank you so much. It's been a thrill to be in an honor to be in the room with you. Go ahead, Richard. One other person we need to just take a minute and thank is our amazing facilitator today who just did all this on her free time and her spare time. As somebody who said to you, Fran, as they were going out, I know it's an interesting event if you're facilitating it. Thanks again to Kate and Bill Schubert and to create a little act and UVM for giving us all the space. And thanks to people who helped us organize this mag and Corey and all the others. Yes, we are going to write a report we're going to try and take all this and make some sense of it. And so please, I did put index cards on the tables if there's some. I do that kind of evaluation what went well for you today or what didn't. If there's anything you want to just write down or email me. And if you'll just everything you have, paper wise, you can drop in that cardboard box as you and we'll try and make some sense of it. We will thanks to CCTV. This will be taped and available that way. But we are also going to try and make some kind of report come out with some kind of next steps and welcome your, you know, continue thoughts as we do that. I think that's and please we do have you're welcome, you know, to stay around, enjoy the view chat with your new friends. And thank you all for taking the whole day to do all this with us.