 Good morning, everyone. I'm Tom McCollum, Executive Director of the Kellogg-Hubert Library. We're very happy to be working on this continuing program with Vermont Digger, News and Brews. And it's a very timely series, all sorts of things happening in the news. And so it's a slightly different part of this. So our two presenters or coordinators or discussion leaders this morning are Ann Balloy, Ann is the Executive Director and the Editor of Vermont Digger, and Theresa Murray-Claussen. And Theresa is Director of Underwriting. So I'll turn this over to Ann and Theresa. Thank you, Tom. Welcome. We were a small, mighty group. So what we thought, we're also running a monthly series in Burlington as well. This is an opportunity for us based upon feedback that we've had from our readers that because we are an online digital news organization, there's somewhat of a mystery about us. And people really wanted to know who we were, put a face to the name of Digger. And so we're going out into the community. We do an event series. We have a large event coming up at the end of March in Burlington. We're bringing Warren Strubble up. Warren is the U.S. diplomatic editor for Reuters. It is the newspaper reporter who is credited for uncovering the non-weapons of mass destruction, which perhaps was our first foray into big, fake news time back in the day. So we're bringing Warren up to the phone space at the end of March. So we do large-scale events like that and then very intimate focus group events like this. So we really appreciate you coming out. Fortunately, it's a beautiful Monday morning. This will be a series on Mondays. You'll continue to get emails about them so that you'll know the dates in case we have to tweak them in any way. But we plan writing them through 2017. The same is in Burlington. So they could be topical in nature. This one is geared towards who Digger is. Ann's going to go through a little bit of history for those of you who may not know when Digger was born or how Digger was born. This is the mother, as she may tell you how that all came about. Mother of Digger. Mother of Digger. And she's going to bring us right up to 2017 in what we have in store for 2017. You are? My name's Ann Galaway. Hi Ann, nice to meet you. And we were doing a lot in 2017. As Tom said, it's a very busy news year. Whether we want to be or not, we are very busy. And then there's an opportunity for questions. We're really interested in hearing from you. How is Digger doing? What would you like to see Digger cover in the future? What are we doing a really great job on? What can we do a little bit better job on? That type of feedback is really important to us. And you're all readers, so we value it highly. And I think without any further ado, we'll start our little slideshow is basically an agenda. Again, we're digital, so we're trying to use as little paper as possible. So Ann will use the slideshow to kind of walk us through the agenda and there'll be plenty of time. We're hoping for at least 20 or 25 minutes at the end for questions. How does that sound? Sound okay? Bye. All right. Sounds good. All right, so this first slideshow is very good. But we have to thank the library. So I have to talk to a tiny little story. So we have a benefactor. Digger is very fortunate to have a number of donors who in some of you are here who support our work. And she was, she is the one who planted the seed. We were thinking about having these coffees in our office and our new office space. We went to 26 State Street, much larger space for us. Now we're not sitting on top of the Associate Publisher. We now have two chairs, we can separate ourselves. And we met with this particular donor and she heard about the event series, thought it was a great idea, but really said, what if you could do it with the library? And we thought, that is an awesome idea. And so we came to Tom and Rachel, who of course said, rock on, let's do it. And so we're very fortunate that the library was able to open up its doors to us and help us host this particular series. So we're thrilled. If I could expand on that a little bit, I should say because I didn't specifically note Rachel Sandshaw, who you work primarily with, Rachel in the second set. I did. And she's our coordinator of programming and development. Yeah. Rachel and I actually go way back with events. Yeah, I'll way back to see folks. Yeah, the humanities council. Yeah. And Orca. So Chris is here from Orca, so Orca is actually filming this. So for people who aren't able to attend, they'll actually be able to watch this. And we're hoping that a lot of people read Orca. Nice, Chris. A lot of people watch Orca in central Vermont and we're hoping that that might help build the audience. And please feel free when you leave here to go home, talk about this with your friends, family, coworkers, anyone who you believe might actually get something out of this. Because I think you are gonna leave here today with some pretty valuable information and encourage people to come. It's only an hour. And again, we're hoping that the Orca audience will see fit to join us in person if that's all possible. So, who we are. Okay. This is the eighth year of Digger. And when I started in 2009, this was just a crazy idea. I had been laid off. I was the Sunday editor of the Rutland Herald and the Times Archus. And that year was the beginning of the Great Recession. And a lot of people around the state were laid off, not just in the media, but in other kinds of jobs as well. And I moved, in a way, I was shocked because I'd never been laid off before. And I'm a very hard worker and I was devoted to the newspaper. And it was heartbreaking for me because I love the paper so much. And, but I knew it right away. I knew there were practical reasons why they had to lay people off. I understood that. The economic model for journalism is broken. And it started to break in a big way that year. And over the past eight to 10 years, we've seen a decline of 40% of all newsroom employees have been eliminated, essentially. And, you know, I don't want to get too far ahead, but I think that's a big reason why we are where we are now politically. But it started back when I got laid off, you know, and lots of other people were laid off in the industry too. And at the time, there was a lot of uncertainty about what might work and what might not work. And that uncertainty has not changed, except that in the interim, groups like Digger have formed across the country. We're one of the most successful news outlets, non-profit groups in the country. And that's because we, from the beginning, saw ourselves as a destination website. We saw ourselves as a watchdog organization and we keep an eye on the state government and also on business. And we're daily. When I first started Digger, though, I had this idea that we would just report on investigative stories. And I quickly realized that while that is the, that's certainly the spirit of Digger. The spirit of Digger is all about investigation. But we do it in an iterative way. And what I mean by that is we're kind of like the old fashioned newspaper that really reached its climax in the 70s with some of the big national stories that came out, including, of course, the Nixon administration and Watergate. But prior to that, there was this tradition of muckraking in journalism that had kind of fallen apart in the 90s and in the aughts. And that's largely because I believe the newspaper industry, in addition to suffering from changes brought by the internet, the newspaper industry also experienced mission drift. There was a sense that it was about profits. It was about making sure that the people who own the newspapers, whether it was shareholders or individuals, were making profits. And back in the day, in the 80s and 90s, newspapers were one of the most profitable businesses in the country. You could get guaranteed returns, practically, of 18% back then. I don't know of any other industry that really produced returns at that level. But that all fell apart, in large part, I think, because people started to realize that there was not as much emphasis on the kind of government accountability reporting that people needed. And there were more feature stories, less attention paid to nuts and bolts reporting in communities, and at the same time, advertising started to fall away because more and more readers were going to the internet. And the big problem here is that you have a couple of online giants, like Facebook and Google, who are basically eating up about 90% of the advertising market. So you only have about 10% of the market available for the media now. And this switch happened very, very quickly. And so at the same time, readers started migrating the internet and felt that newspapers weren't doing an adequate job of covering communities. At the same time, the advertising model completely fell apart. So these three factors have really led to a continued decline in media across the country. And we've seen this locally. It used to be that the Burlington Free Press had at least 50 people in their newsroom, and now they have many, many fewer than that. In fact, I'm told, I don't know this personally, but I'm told that we have more reporters now a digger than the Free Press has. And I'm talking about news reporters. I'm not talking about editors and feature writers and sports writers and that kind of thing. I wish, I mean, I have to say that I don't take any pleasure in that fact. It disturbs me that, I mean, I'm glad that we're filling a void, but we're still not big enough. There's still so many things we're not reporting on. I can't tell you how many tips I get on a daily basis, calls that we get, emails, tips through our anonymous tip line, that we still don't have the resources to cover, even though we're now the biggest news organization from a straight-up news reporting standpoint in the state. Anyway, to get back to why I started digger, the reason I started digger was because I felt that there wasn't enough reporting. And I believed that there was an audience. I believed that readers wanted this kind of news. And so we started a kind of blog-like news website in September of 2009. After I had done quite a bit of research, I looked at other news organizations around the country like menpost.com, Voice of San Diego, Texas Tribune. These are other online, nonprofit-only news sites. ProPublica had started for about that time. And I decided that something like that might work in her mind. And I didn't have any money. I didn't have any staff. I did have a group of advisors, including Con Hogan and a couple of other people, Cheryl Hanna, who were interested in the project and who were willing to meet with me and vet the idea. And I had a business plan. I submitted it to the Vermont Community Foundation. They gave us a $6,000 grant. And we were able to get a logo up. We were able to pay a few freelance reporters, and we were off. And within a couple of months, I realized that this original idea I had, which was just producing two to three investigative reports a week, was never going to cut the mustard, because we would never attract enough readers that way. And so I decided in December of 2009 that I should go to where government accountability was happening, which was at the State House. And so I started going to the State House every day. And I started writing a daily report on whatever it was I covered. And pretty much all I covered was house appropriations. And the first time I went in there, it was for budget adjustment and not really knowing much about what went on in that building. Because I've been an editor on the desk for a long time. I hadn't been a reporter for a while. I'd never done any reporting in the State House. So this was a big adventure for me. And the first time I went in there, I'd happened to have an accident that morning. I live in Hartwick. And we have 25 acres. And so we had this sort of mini farm thing going. And I had some chickens. And it had been raining, kind of like weather like this. And I went out to feed the chickens. And I slipped and fell in the mud. And I walked my head on a rock as I was going to feed the chickens. And it wasn't a big deal, except that I mashed my glasses. And I had this big, like, gash on my head. And of course, I'm pretty hard-headed, so it didn't matter. And I was determined to go into house appropriations. And I had a camera with me. I was taking video. I had a little household camera, video camera. And I went in there with a video camera and looking like an absolute wreck. And the house appropriations chair and everybody in the room wanted to know who the heck I was. The camera was about this big, in case that she looked into that. No one had ever filmed the house appropriations before. So I got this great video of Otto Trouts. I don't know if you guys know who he is. And he had brought in a stuffed animal to talk about, to give a little speech and song and dance about the budget adjustment. And that year, they'd gone through this big rescission process, because it was 2009. They had to lay off some state workers and so on. That ain't right. I made my mark that first day, just by being such a wreck. But I thought it was really important to cover house appropriations, because I wanted to understand what our values are as a state. And I figured the best way to figure that out is to look at how we spend our money. And what I didn't realize at the time was that this was a great opportunity to get a mini master's degree in state government. Because everybody who is anybody in state government has to hold his held account to the appropriations committees. They have to come in and report. Why do we need these positions? What are we doing? Are we meeting our goals? Are we using our money wisely? And so it was a wonderful way to be introduced to the legislature and to be introduced to the money side of it, which I think is really important. So at any rate, we started this coverage in January of 2010. And by May of 2010, we had a following of about 14,000 readers a month. And we still did nagging reporters. I was the chief auto washer and reporter and editor and everything. But we had gotten the attention of a group of people who had started a nonprofit call for Montgermas and Trust. And this group included Doug Clifton, who is the executive editor of the Miami Herald and the Cleveland Plain dealer at one point. And he and Sam Chauncey, who was based in Shelburne and Bill Shubard, who is a retired businessman here in Vermont, they met with me and said, we would really like to merge with VT Digger. Because we like what you're doing. We understand that you're really focused on government accountability. And we understand your vision. We get that you want to create a newsroom and that you want to fill voids in the media landscape. And I said, awesome, let's do it. And that was a wonderful moment in the evolution of VT Digger because I had no connections in the business community or with anyone who knew anything about fundraising. And my vision at that time isn't so different from what we've achieved now, which was to have at least 12 reporters on staff, to have professional editors on the desk, to sell underwriting, to offer memberships, to basically reach as many people in Vermont as we possibly could through the media. And over the course of the past seven years, as we have made more and more investments in reporting and we've expanded our website to include beat reporting on education, criminal justice, the environment, business, health care, politics. As we keep adding more topics to our daily coverage, more and more people have found us. And now we have community reporting as well. We have four reporters who are based in counties around the state. We have Morgan True and Chittenden County. And we have a freelance named Emily Greenberg who is there as well. And then last year we created a summer Vermont bureau. We received a $75,000 grant from Ethics and Excellence in Journalism, which is based in Oklahoma City. And they supported this project for a one-year launch. And we were able to hire a reporter in Rutland County, Bennington County, and Wyndham County. And what's unusual about this project is that in two cases, in Wyndham and in Bennington counties, we're sharing the cost of those reporters with local newspapers. So the Bradworth Reformer and the Bennington Banner and Manchester Journal share the cost of those two reporters. So the reason we did that was because the reason we even pursued the Southern Vermont project in the first place was because the Rutland Herald and those two local papers, the Banner and the Palmer, had laid off reporters in Southern Vermont. So we were down to just a couple of less than a handful of reporters in those counties. And we wanted to make sure that the local newspapers had adequate coverage. We also wanted to make sure that people in Northern Vermont understood what was happening in Southern Vermont, because we think there's too much of a gap. And so that's why we pursued that project. And it's been very successful. We've been able to boost reporting, especially on major topics that affect everyone in the state, like PFOA, Pollution Situation in Bennington County, Vermont Yankee Decommissioning. Those things have an impact statewide. In addition to stories about the local economies there, changes in education, they've had a huge demographic shift in Southern Vermont. It's been populated in a way that I think people don't realize up here. Southern Vermont has many fewer people now. And it did 10 or 15 years ago. And part of that has to do, I believe, with the decline in the media down there. People don't know what's going on. And as a consequence, there's a kind of falling away of community in those places, because there's less information about those communities. I heard your second speech, so that was slide five. Oh, OK. So we'll touch back on Southern Vermont. But when you mentioned Digger first starting at like 14,000, so this slide kind of brings us to where we are today, so that people can get an idea of Digger's growth over a very short period of time. Yes. Since 2009, we went from this being me as a volunteer for two years to now we have 17 people on staff. We have 200,000 unique readers a month. We have a million page views per month. And that means the page views are the stories that people actually click on. And then we have statewide reach now in a way that we didn't before. I think I also didn't explain that while we are focused on daily reporting, we publish six days a week, and then we have a weekly wrap up on Sundays. In addition to that, we have not lost our focus on investigative reporting. And so we have, for example, covered very extensively the situation at Maple Leaf Treatment Center. I don't know if you've been following that story, but more than true, we got tips. We rely on tips from readers. And someone's tipped us off back in December that there were some major problems at that treatment center, which is the second. It's one of the largest treatment inpatient treatment centers in the state. It's hugely important in coping with the opioid crisis. And we broke those stories. And it turns out that there are state investigations going on there, and to medicaid fraud, and to inappropriate behavior by people who ran the place at the Office of Professional Regulations looking into those allegations. Investigative reporting is controversial. People don't like it on news. But the fact is it's important for people to know what the truth is, so that we can fix our problems without knowing the extent of the issue. We can't make any effort to improve the situation. So that's why I'm so focused on that. You may be very familiar with our EB-5 coverage. I started investigating what was happening there. Good to see you, Steve. What was happening there in the summer of 2014 almost two years before the SEC allegations broke. And that's been a very rewarding and difficult project, because I live in the Northeast Indian. I live in Hardwick. And people gave me a lot of grief for the coverage, because they felt that I was hurting the local economy. We also have investigated a situation at Brattle River Treat, where there was an inadequate oversight of nursing staff, and there was a situation in which a young man died because of a drug overdose. He grabbed some drugs off of the nurse's cart because they weren't doing an adequate job of keeping track of pharmaceuticals there. We've done a variety of investigative pieces over time. But in addition to that, of course, we write about what's happening in state government. And our one big window into that is the state house. The reason why we started coverage in the state house is not only because people are drafting legislation there, but it's also because this is our one really, our one big chance to figure out what's happening in state government. Most of the time, the only way we really can see what's happening on the inside is through public records requests and through interviews with official sources. And those things are important. It's the legislature's oversight role that I think is often underestimated. And it's finally important because it helps the public understand what government is doing. And government is working on our behalf. And we need to know how our money's being spent. We need to know how resources are being spent. And whether or not things are working or not. Where am I on the slides? So we're getting rid of this. Oh, OK. This is just a snapshot of our demographic. So I think one of the points that we really wanted to hammer home today was the diggers growth has been extraordinary in a very short time. And we continue to grow very quickly. Both you can see, not only from readership, but also from our social media presence. And it's a very symbiotic relationship between what we're doing and your support and the readers. We couldn't exist without each other, which is why you are all so incredibly important to what we do, especially being able to offer the news for free. No paywalls or fees associated with digger. And we think that's just incredibly important. And we couldn't do it without the reader support that we get. So as those readers continue to grow, digger will continue to thrive and to fulfill its mission. So again, we're really grateful. Were those numbers just for Chittin and County or for the whole state? That's the entire, that's all of our readership. That's representative of our entire readership. And I think the number that we're most thrilled with up there is 36% or under the age of 44. We're actually beginning to attract a younger audience. Typically, youngsters don't like to read serious news very much, but we are attracting every day a younger and younger reader. So we're really happy about that particular statistic. But we're a pretty well-educated audience, a pretty well-heeled audience. These types of events, we hope, will help us to reach a broader audience. We would very much like to have everybody reading us in the entire state for a month. That would be awesome. So you're all now deputized. This is a nice deputization, so this isn't coming from a scary place. And in addition to the 200,000 unique readers we have coming to our website, we have a news distribution service, kind of like the Associated Press. And so local news outlets like The Valley News, The Waterbury Record, The Stone Reporter, The St. Albans Messenger, The Addison Independent, all these newspapers pick up our stories and publish them in the print product. So we're actually in newspapers around the state in addition to our website. And we reach another 150,000 people a month through that local readership. And we make a little bit of money on that. We charge a small fee to the newspapers. But our main interest is to make sure that people who are still reading newspapers have access to news about the state in addition to local news. And that's worked out very well. So these next few slides are and touched upon our expansion throughout the state of Vermont. And these next few slides, I guess you can just talk a little bit more. But they actually put a face, so this is Morgan True. Yeah, this is Morgan. In case you're ever wondering what that Morgan True looks like. Oh, yes. There it is. In the flash. It looks about 15. Yeah. I know. The ladies down at the betting divider really liked it. They really wanted to come down. There's some young women down there like, that's Morgan True! That's pretty funny. They're kind of celebrities. If you want to talk about Morgan's, what he's doing there. Sure. Interesting. Yeah, Morgan is focused on covering the city council. And he does some school district coverage. And then he also covers crime in Chittenden County and other issues. And he's been at this now for a year and a half. And he really enjoys it. He's met a lot of interesting people in Chittenden County. We also have a freelance reporter named Emily Greenberg, who lives in Charlotte. And she's starting to produce more coverage about some of the surrounding municipalities in Chittenden County. And she's also written some nice feature stories for us. So we're looking to broaden our coverage a bit more in Chittenden County. And so there's always too much to cover. And I don't even know how to, maybe from your vantage point, it may seem like we're covering a lot. But I think a lot about what we're not covering and how much more we need to do. But Morgan is doing a great job of keeping this narrow focus on city government and on crime, which are the two most important things in Chittenden County, I think, to pay attention to at this point. And here he is at V-CAN. He actually does a bi-monthly presentation on video. It's also a podcast that we run on VTDigger. So we're experimenting with some multimedia. And we're looking to do more of that in the near future. We would actually like to produce a daily video feature, like the New York Times does, on important issues with B-roll and narrative. And with information that people need, they can tease young people who may not be as anxious to read long stories, to tease people into reading longer stories online. That's one of our challenges is reaching people who don't like to read. So we're focusing more on that. And you may have noticed today, because Ann just launched it this weekend, but we do have a podcast series. Mark Johnson actually does a podcast series for us. They cover the legislature inside the Golden Bubble. And then we have Morgan's. And so there will be a section now on Digger, where you could actually go directly to the podcast section. And there'll be a variety of podcasts that you'll be able to select and listen to. Morgan's happens to be a hybrid of a visual and an audio. So you can listen to it in your car if you wanted to. But if you're on Digger's site, you could actually watch him talk. It's right at Morgan's Alley. And there are three guys, Southern Vermont. That's right. So on the left, we have Adam Fetterman, who was our reporter in Rutland County. He's just left. He is being replaced by Alan Keyes, who is a longtime editor at the Rutland Herald. The Herald last summer to join us. Adam was tapped by the Nation Institute. And he's going to be covering energy on a national scale. So we're very sad to leave Adam. But of course, we understand he had this great opportunity to take a fellowship with the Nation. So he won't be reporting with us anymore, which is really unfortunate. But Alan is a terrific reporter. He knows Rutland very well. He actually lives in Rutland. And then in the middle we have Mike Fair, who is our reporter in Wynnum County. And he now, I think, is the sort of national expert on Vermont Yankee. I think he knows more about Vermont Yankee than anybody in the country at this point. And he broke a great story last year. Someone came to our offices here in Montpelier and gave us some photos of kiddie pools with radiated water in the basement of the Vermont Yankee reactor. And we had these images. And Mike was able to go to the NRC and verify that, yes, they were, in fact, storing the radiated water in kiddie pools. And it was a great investigative series that we had last year. And Entergy owned up to it, of course. They wanted us to give them the photos. We said, no way. And they confirmed that this was happening. Some of the employees, through a source, also told us that water actually had gone down the drain at one point. They're at Vermont Yankee, but they didn't close up the drain. So there was concern that this radiated water was going to contaminate the larger environment. And any rate, Entergy eventually put the water into bladders, these large tubes. And then they shipped the water out of state for, I'm not sure what happened to the water after that. But at any rate, it was no longer being held in the basement of the reactor for Montpelier Yankee. So those are the kinds of stories that we end up pursuing because we have someone on the beat. If we hadn't been on the beat for a year, I'm not sure that the source would have felt comfortable giving us those images and that story. To the right is Jim Therrien. And he is a former editor of the Bennington Banner, who is now working as a full-time reporter there. And again, we share the cost of his reporting. And he's been focused on a variety. He's actually, because of his experience as an editor, he's familiar with a wide range of topics that are of statewide interest in Bennington County. And so he's written about everything from school district consolidation to crime, to PFOA, pollution. And we're very lucky to have him on staff. And so that's our southern Vermont bureau. This is Jasper Craven, who also looks like he's about 12. And he's actually 24, just so you know. We're not engaged in child labor. But Jasper is wonderful. He was our political reporter here in Vermont last year. And he covered the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. He read a number of investigative stories, too, about the presidential campaign. And now he's in DC. And he's covering congressional delegation, which is something that I've wanted to pursue ever since I started Digger. Because most of the information that we get about the congressional delegation happens to come from what they want to tell us, from press releases or interviews about things that they want to tell us. And Jasper is down there keeping an eye on what they're actually doing and saying and or not doing. And in addition, he's taking a hard look at what Trump's policies mean for Vermont. And you may have noticed that last week he had a very big piece about the Heritage Foundation's blueprint for Trump's budget and how that would impact our budget here in Vermont. And that's a very important story. I think because we have so much copy on a daily basis and that story kind of disappeared too quickly to my mind, I'm going to be republishing it today so that you can find it. Because it took Jasper several weeks to complete that story. And it's very thorough. It really tells you what the impact is in the Department of Environmental Conservation, which would be decimated if cuts the EPA went through. It tells you what the impact would be on Medicaid and on Medicare and so on. So Jasper is, I threw him into the shark pool, the swamp. I asked him in December if he'd like to go down. And he very graciously said yes. And I hope that he'll be able to stay a while longer. We'll see. But in any way, he's there now. And if he does end up getting tapped by the New York Times or Politico or something, I have other folks on staff who are willing to pick up the beat. But I feel it's very important for us to really know what's happening down there and how it's going to impact us directly. And because we were able to do this, I took a risk. We didn't have the money to do it. Because we were able to do it, because that's the way we roll. We're very entrepreneurial. Because I took a risk to do this, now other news organizations around the country are looking at this also as a possibility. And we belong to a group called the Institute for Nonprofit News. There are about 100 news organizations that are part of this group. And they've put a call out. And they're looking to see if they can get funding to basically make sure that there are reporters from around the country in DC doing the same kind of reporting for states. And I personally think that if there was more reporting coming out of DC about what representatives in Congress are actually doing, it could be a game changer, both in terms of limiting the partisanship in DC and also helping constituents back home understand what's really happening on the ground, whether their representatives are acting in the public's interest rather than their own interest or in the interest of corporations. And I think it could be a game changer. It will take time, of course, for this to seed itself. Hopefully, more news organizations will do this around the country. But I tried to talk Democracy Fund into funding as a few years ago, because I feel very strongly that it could have a huge impact nationally. They're interested now, though. So the other real effect of this is, well, a small Vermont local ripple effect is this JASPER's article was immediately shared by the Speaker of the House, our Vermont Speaker of the House, and a number of senators and representatives on Facebook. It got a huge share, which I thought was really critical. And they were encouraging on Facebook their constituents to read the article. So they were sharing the article, particularly so that their people would know what's going on. So I thought that was really important. The other ripple effect, which was meant to be a fun ripple effect, but it's turning out to be a little bit meatier than that, is that we are hosting, in collaboration with the Vermont State Society, our first ever event in Washington, DC, which is next week, which is March 7th on Town Meeting Day. And so it's a collaborative event with the State Society in celebration of Town Meeting Day. So we're going down to Washington, DC. Ann's going down. JASPER is going to be there. And they're going to hold just something like this in this really nice hotel in Washington in this little room. There are about 25 people going. And it's going to be a town meeting style discussion about Digger's work in Vermont and also in DC. And that attracted, believe it or not, the first entities that signed up for that event was Democracy Fund, the Center for Public Integrity in the New York Times. So we were thrilled. Now, I have to tell, the New York Times Hamilton Boardman, his mother is from Brattleboro. And she's a huge reader. And she all looked at it and told him, yeah, it took off. So when we found out the New York Times was going, we were very thrilled. And then we found out that his mother told him that he had to go. We'll take him however we can get. We don't really care. So that was awesome for me. Mom's. If I had a conversation with Ann, we provided her the contact names of a couple people from Democracy Fund. And one of them, we had a fascinating conversation. And I then forwarded on the email on to Ann that they said there was no other nonprofit news organization in the United States that had a reporter in Washington, DC. We were the only ones. The local ones. Yeah, they just like they said it needs to happen. So here's the time now to go back to Democracy Fund and say, remember that idea we had a few years ago about funding reporters in Washington. So we're hoping that this, again, as Ann said, we may have created the impetus for stronger local reporting in Washington. And if we did, thanks to you, that's how it all happened. Could one of you address the issue of being a nonprofit? Yes. We became a nonprofit because when I founded BT Digger in 2009, there were no profits in media until the day that at one point they were making 18% a year. But by then, newspapers were really suffering and were cutting newsrooms because they simply didn't have the money. And that's continued to this day. And part of the reason why I thought a nonprofit was the appropriate business model was because I thought that people need, readers need to be able to buy into the news. They need to feel that news organizations are mission driven and that they're about the public interest. And that's why I thought that a nonprofit model could work. Of course, the most successful nonprofit model is national public radio and local public radio affiliates. We are very similar in our approach, except that we're online. And we have a slightly different take on our mission. Like I said, we have much more of a focus on investigative reporting and on government accountability. And while we're online, it's still really a print model. I mean, we're able to get into the kind of detail that one can only get in print. Radio is wonderful, but it's difficult to get into the sort of numbing detail that you need to get into to really understand what the Heritage Foundation budget is going to look like superimposed on for a while. It's like a newspaper. It's a newspaper online. That's really, I mean, I'm a print person. If I could still run out to the press at the time, Marcus, and grab that sheet, I would. I love that, but that's not possible now. But yes, it's the written word. That's our specialty. But the nonprofit model is also important because I wanted to be able to show readers how we spend our money and where our money comes from. So we have a commitment to transparency. We list our donors. We list our underwriters. And when I first started Digger, we didn't have any money for the first couple of years. In the third year, we had about $186,000, a budget of $106,000. And that enabled us to hire our first reporter and a couple of folks in the business office. And from there, we were able to immediately start working on the sort of three or four-legged stool that we have going for revenues. We were heavily reliant at the time on grant funding. At the time, about 75% of our funding came from foundations. Now, about 15% of our funding comes from foundations. So we flipped the model. In the beginning, I thought from the beginning, we should focus on, in addition to foundation grants, we should focus on membership and underwriting and resale of our content to other news organizations. And so we've built the business over time. And because of Teresa's great work, Paivon's great work, we're now at a point where we have a budget of $1.3 million. And 40% of our budget comes from readers, from donations. 40% of our budget comes from underwriting. 5% comes from a resale of our content to our media partners. And then the other 15% comes from foundations. And the other reason we needed to go to the nonprofit model is because advertising is very difficult to sell online. And as I said earlier, 90% of the advertising is held by Google, Facebook, Craigslist had a huge impact on newspapers around the country. Because newspapers relied on classified advertising a great deal. And because Craigslist is free, that eroded that market. We are still building underwriting. We think that advertising sales are still very important. But we would not be able to replace the funding we needed only through underwriting. We would only be able to do half the work that we're doing now. We would have half the number of reporters we have now if we were relying solely on advertising. That's why donations from readers are so important. And that has replaced the money that otherwise would come from advertising. So that's why we went with a nonprofit model. And people are always curious about it. And we do have an entrepreneurial approach. We're always looking for new ways to raise what we call sustainable funding. And what we mean by that is funding that is not from foundations. We'll always need some foundation support. We'll always need about 15%. But we've never had, as one former person in the business office put it, a football player. We've never had someone who gave us a million dollars. Or gave us half a million dollars to start what we're doing now. We've always had highly diversified funding. We have donations as small as $15. And we've received donations as big as $50,000. We have more than 2,000 people who gave to us last year. That's hugely important. Why? Because if we were relying on one person or one advertiser, all it takes is for that one person to leave and you're done. And our strength is actually in numbers. It's in this broad base of support from the public. And just so you know a little bit of what we're up against. So one of the revenue streams that we're attempting to diversify and that's sustainable would be classified. So we've had great interest from major institutions to begin a job section, an employment section, for middle to upper middle management positions. So UVM health care network, for example. Clara Martin would really love to see us offer that opportunity. Legal notifications. So this bill, there's a bill right now that's at the state house that you could talk to your representatives about. Because believe it or not, we're still fighting. I called us last week. I think I called us second class citizens. So the way the statute is currently written, online news organizations are not recognized as newspapers of record in the state of Vermont. And so any legal notices that a town might want to or that has to file or that the state has to file in relationship to rules or hearings or whatever, the state nor the towns can utilize VT Digger as a primary news source. So we're looking to get that statute changed. And you could certainly talk to your representatives about that and say, hey, I heard like that. There might be a bill out there. And this doesn't just mean Digger. This means any online news organization. And it wouldn't take the place of print. It would simply be another option that towns and the states would have as opposed to just the print newspaper. So these are kind of the obstacles that we face in trying to diversify our revenue stream. We're not even recognized by the Vermont Press Association right now as a newspaper of record in the state of Vermont. So that's a more personal dogfight that we're having. But these are some of the challenges that we face as this new beast attempting to survive in this turning out to be wacky world that we live in. So just to give you an idea. And a little teeny tiny call to action. If there's something you think, geez, what can I do for Digger aside from giving them $10,000? You could call your representative. You could email your representative and say, my understanding is there's a bill. Do you have the bill? The bill is being released tomorrow. Anthony Polina and Jeanette White are co-sponsoring the bill. Mary Hooper and Warren Kitzmiller are very aware of the bill. I haven't talked to Francis about it yet. But for sure it's on Polina's radar screen and Mary and Warren. So you could talk to them about it. Will it be a Senate bill? It's going to be introduced as a Senate bill with, we hope at some point, we think that there'll be tremendous bipartisan support for the bill, both on the Senate side and the House side. But it's going to be close because we're introducing it very close to crossover. So we're hoping that it's going to get pushed through. And then we'll see what happens to it. But there's a good chance of it passing. But it wouldn't hurt for the representatives to hear from their constituents about it. And it just so happens that a bunch of them are from here. So it's a match. What are some of the things you're planning to focus on in future sessions next month and the times? Here, you mean at the New Year's Day? Yes. These sessions here. Well, I think it would be helpful to talk about individual topics. And I'd be open to suggestions from you all. But I think there are a myriad of things we could talk about. I think we could talk about the event of fake news and what that means. We could talk about politics in Montpelier. We could talk about the state house. We could talk about we're going to be coming out with some data reports over the next several months. So we could also talk about a particular story if you wanted to and how we wrote that story or what the thinking was behind it. So there are a variety of things that we could talk about in the near future. And one of the things that I'm personally worried about with our newsroom, for example, is whistleblower protection. There is a bill right now that members of the press and the Broadcast Association are backing that it's a shield law that would essentially protect journalists from having to release their notes and other materials should they be subpoenaed in a court case regarding whistleblower leaks. And this came up last year with the McAllister case in seven days. And Vermont Public Radio were subpoenaed. It was kind of a weird situation because all of the things that McAllister had said were essentially on the record. So it was not, it actually muddies the waters a little bit, but the point is that news organizations like VTDiver and others rely on off-the-record tips from whistleblowers. And if the government is able to subpoena our records and force us to make a choice about whether to release that information or go to jail, the fact of the matter is that no matter what, we're potentially exposing the people who have risked their jobs, their livelihoods, perhaps even their safety to give us information. And I think that going forward, and this is going to sound a little bit paranoid, but I think given what we've heard from President Trump not so much, we're all faced with because of the way we use the internet and because of online snooping that's now done by the government, we're all a bit vulnerable now. There's no such protection now. There's no such protection in Vermont. So there are 30 states that have a shield law and Vermont is not one of them. And so I think there is support in the legislature for this. They've already accepted our testimony from last week, the folks in Senate government operations, they're more than willing to support the bill. And I think that that will pass and that will be very helpful. But in addition to the shield law, and I think that if there is some kind of controversy the next time we meet, I can tell you about it and you can call your representatives and tell them that you support this effort because I think it will pass in the Senate without a problem. I don't know if they'll have difficulty in the House or not. But in addition to that, I think that the onus is on us to take more steps to protect our sources and that means using secure encryption for email for cell phone use and for tips. And so our newsroom is moving in that direction because we wanna make sure that when we're investigating something and there's an FBI investigation happening in tandem, that we're not exposing our sources. And as we hear more and more about what's happening on the border, we wanna be sure to be able to make it possible for people to give us tips about what's really happening up there. And we don't want federal agents to be snooping in our email and with our cell phones. So we're going to be taking some additional steps. They will. I know they will. But they can't if it's encrypted. So we're taking those steps. So the law is one step and encryption is another. Yeah. Well, we hope that we'll... We have to do it. We have to do it. We can't. But there are a lot of things we can talk about. What do you want us to talk about next time? I mean, we didn't really give you a lot of time to talk, we kind of... I was kind of... Yeah, we didn't... Next time we could just have an open Q&A. Next time we'll be... And that would be fun too. Yes. I guess I have two comments. Yes. About what I read every day in the digger. Yes. One is that I find that the Sunday Rambo is a rerun. It's like... That's the point of it, yeah. Never redo it. Okay. Because I've already read all of it. I've already looked at it all week. And so it seems like kind of a waste. Does it come in your email, Michael? Do you get it in your... Does it come in your email? Do you get it in your email? Because we can unsubscribe you from the weekly wrap if you don't want to get it in your email. Don't bother. It's fine. It's easier to leave. It's true. It is redundant. That's for people who aren't as faithful as you are, Michael. Yeah, that's being read in the minority looking at it every day. But I kind of doubt it. Yeah, now it's true. And the other comment I have is about disgust. Yeah. Which, you know, I like disgust. Yes. But for national, you know, I have a disgust account, but it's not in my own name. And I would not want my own name blasted all over the country for all of these sites. They are on an enormous number of sites. Yes, let me... And I've commented on several. Yes. So let me just interrupt you there. Well, I have now opened a new account. We recognize this is a big problem. And so last week, we put together a system so that you can register your name on Digger only. You can comment only with your real name on Digger. The name that I usually use in this case, my usual, like Anna? Or Michael. You set up a separate login. It would be a separate. It'd be a separate login on Digger. Yeah, that's what I'm going to be able to do. Yeah, on Digger. I haven't put a passion to enough about it yet. Okay. To actually do that. I know it's annoying. And I wish that we didn't have to do this. And let me explain why we did this. I understand why you did it. Yeah, we did it for two reasons. I mean, they're good. I like them. Well, we didn't want to have to go to a third party commenting system, but the reality was two things. One, because all the comments were on our hosting service, it was dragging down our page loads. So the site was not running very quickly. And our hosting service said that it was a problem. And so we went to discuss for that reason. They also told us that if we didn't move to a third party system that we'd have to pay $10,000 more per year just for hosting the comments. And we're already paying an absolute fortune in hosting. And we just couldn't do it. So that was why we went to the third party hosting service. And I realized that it's annoying. People are using it. And especially now that we have a login just on BT Digger, people are using it because many people have the same problem you had. They didn't want to have their full names on the discus platform across news organizations. And I understand that. And we did come up with a solution, though. So hopefully we did come up with a solution and more people are commenting now. So it's already happening in there, but yeah. And we want to be respectful of your time because it is 11.10, but yeah. I have just two comments on your podcast. Yes. The person who reads it doesn't listen. Yes. Are your podcasts transcripted? Oh yeah, that's a good idea. I don't know. We'd have to probably have to get a transcription service to do that, but I don't know. Yeah, yeah. The other thing, the event you're having down in DC during town, meeting weeks, any more times it's going to be there, are other media outlets and invited, or do you know, tell them what's coming? Yes, I don't know. This is one of those events that they could just drop in. I mean the Washington Post could just drop in for all we know. The registration isn't required. Typical of us, it's a free and open to the public event. So the congressional delegation, for example, hasn't RSVP, but we know in fact that Senator Leahy's staff and Senator Wolch's staff are going to participate. So yeah, we could show. There are some other mothers out there that we can rely on to send their sons and daughters for major news outlets. So yeah, we could end up with a really interesting. I can probably send a couple of people your way. That would be awesome. Thank you. That would be awesome. That would be great. I think it's going to be a really fun event. Jasper, interesting. The two of them together is just a joy to watch. Young Cub reporter and the mother of Digger it's quite a combination. Jasper is dying in the Wilbur Motters. I don't know if you know anything about his family, that he is a Kingdom County production product. So Bessel Bryant is his mother and Jay Craven is his father. So Jasper helps her to do her own stuff. And actually we are thinking of, there's another podcast that I'm working on right now with Kingdom County production. We're looking for sponsorship, writers in recovery. So they have written a book. I don't know if you know anything. I don't know, Susan, if you know about this book, but Writers in Recovery was published last year through Kingdom County production. And it is Bessel's, it's a ripple effect of Bessel's work from Hungry Heart, which is the movie dedicated to opioid abuse and the crisis in Vermont. And what sprung from that was a book from writers who are actually in recovery. It's a book of poetry. It's absolutely stunning to read. And these are all Vermonters who are successfully recovered addicts. And we are gonna turn that into a podcast and put it on the site. And so that people will be able, by having it transcribed would be beautiful because it's a good idea. But it will be available, and it'll be in that section and you'll be able to go and it's a weekly series that we're hoping to start in the late spring and then run for 10 weeks. So again, it's another opportunity. We continue to cover the opioid addiction crisis. And we've done it through events. We've done it through our reporting. And this is just another very elegant way of bringing the issue to the forefront in a very different platform. So I'm kind of excited about it. But again, we are looking for sponsorship for that. So if you know of anybody who might be interested in underwriting that series, that would be awesome. Anything else? Thank you very much. Extremely informative. Yeah, that's great. Thank you. That's great. Impressive. Thanks. We'll be back next month and you'll get an e-mail. Well, the history at the beginning is all so interesting to hear about. There's some pieces I'm going to see through, but having a summary of the birth and the adolescence. We're trying to figure out how old we are actually. We're a teen here. We think we're, maybe you're still in your childhood. And it counts for all of the very friends. Thank you all for coming. Thank you. Thanks very much.