 I'm the Adult Programs Coordinator here at the Calacombered Library. It's lovely to have you here for first Wednesdays. I feel like we're kind of a little community of friends tonight. So thanks for being here. We extend our thanks to our partners at Vermont Humanities, as well as to the generous underwriters who make it possible for us to offer such rich and robust programming. The sponsor for our entire first Wednesday season is the Vermont Department of Libraries and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This program is funded in part by the Democracy and the Informed Citizen Initiative, administered by the Federation of State Humanities Councils and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The initiative seeks to deepen the public's knowledge and appreciation of the vital connections between democracy, the humanities, journalism, and an informed citizenry. We hope you will check in for the event and the QR code is at the table in the back. The Vermont Humanities uses this data for reporting on the success of this program to local, state, and national supporters. During the winter months, Vermont Humanities first Wednesdays will move to the online format, so we hope you go to vermonthumanities.org and find out for the really great programs that'll happen through the cold winter months when you won't have to drive and wear to see a really good program. And I'm going to switch over to you, Christopher, so you can talk a little bit about here. Just very briefly as you all came in, you took one of our freedom of immunity comics and I brought them here tonight because of the connection of democracy and journalism, as well as DADIC, the Democracy in the Informed Citizen Project, which also helped to fund the comic book. This is actually the final event of Democracy in the Informed Citizen, which was meant to end two years ago, but something happened. So thank you to the speakers for coming out tonight quite a ways after the actual end of the DADIC grant. The comic book is about democracy in Vermont. There's a companion book called This Is What Democracy Looks Like that's also available from the Center for Cartoon Studies. That's about the federal government system. And I encourage you to check that one out as well. If anybody wants multiple copies, if you're teaching or would like to bring them to a local group that you're a part of, you can certainly get them from Vermont Humanities or the Vermont Secretary of State's office, which was also the co-commissioner in this process. So thank you very much. And thanks for hosting First Wednesdays. It's really great to be back in person. It is. It's now my pleasure to introduce our speakers. Megan Little Riley is the Director of Communications at Convergence Center for Policy Resolution and helped found the Center for Community News at UVM where she is now the chair of the board. She's the author of the novels and the misfortunes of family, everything that follows, and we are unprepared. Her fourth book, How to Be Alive, was a finalist for the Black Lawrence Press 2022 Big Most Parks. And Tim, I forgot to ask how you pronounce your last name. I say Calibra. I don't care how people say Calibra. Anything's correct. Really? Tim Calibra was the editor and publisher of the White River Valley Herald, just the fifth in nearly 150-year history of the Randolph newspaper. The Spanish degree from the University of Vermont and started his career at the Herald as a high school photography intern, covering basketball games, events, and goings on at South Royalton High School before being sucked into a life of community journalism. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Go for it. We're kind of on a tour now. We sort of did this a few days ago, too, but I'm going to let Tim talk about the practitioner of journalism here. Okay. Let me just open by saying, so I come at this from really the like democracy and local journalism intersection place. This is so exciting, by the way. Vermont Humanities is really like a leader in the field on this, and it's exciting to work with them. One of the things, one of the way I came to this after a career in Washington politics, I worked in the Obama Administration as a communicator, and eventually kind of shifted over to a more non-partisan advocacy for a stronger state and community journalism in particular, where it worked with Richard Watts at the University of Vermont on the Community News Service, which is a really cool program that allows student journalists to partner with local news today, which is very exciting. We started this year the Center for Community News, which is helping other universities around the country build and initiate their own such programs. It's just one little solution in a whole, in like a very, very big tidal wave that is coming for local news, and so we're probably going to need a whole bunch of creative ideas around the country to stem that tide. And the reason it matters, and we know it matters so much, mostly because of the ways that we measure the harms done to local communities once local newsrooms leave. There's just abundant research in recent years that strong local journalism, it builds social cohesion, it enforces a sense of identity and culture. It's good for governance and government accountability, more transparency in local governance. There's, I have, I'm not going to bore you, but I do just to make sure I don't like make any numbers up off the top of my head. They're like a few really interesting, I think kind of a resting statistics on this that things like areas served by newspapers with sharp declines in newsroom staffing have significantly reduced political competition and all of their local races. They, in places where local news is still there, municipal borrowing costs tend to be less, sometimes by like a pretty significant number actually. Because of government monitoring is associated with higher government wages and it's, again, it's the enforcement of transparency and accountability by it's basically like just better decision making at a local level. Local news consumption is associated with higher voter turnout, obviously, and a sense of community and identity as I said already. So there's a lot of good reasons for this for us to try to make it to understand local news not merely as a consumer product but also a pillar of a functional democracy, which is kind of a shift in the way that we've thought about local news historically. And I don't want to just romanticize the presence of it because in a lot of places what we have now are ghost newspapers which is basically the thing where like a hedge fund or something buys up a bunch of newspapers and just sort of like keeps them alive as essentially grocery store flyers and like local sports headlines but without any like really rigorous reporting. And those are also no good in some ways they're sort of more insidious because they have a kind of facade of functionality. But what I'm talking about is like true, reliable rigorous news reporting that like matters to a community. So that's like my that's the the work that we're doing with Center for Community News. It's also something I'm interested in my other job, my day job, which is with a national think tank called the Convergence Center for Policy Resolution which is interested in decreasing toxic polarization and improving problem solving at the federal policy level which isn't about making people agree in fact in a diverse and pluralistic society wildly divergent views is like one of the great benefits of it. It's just about maintaining a sense of humanity for the people that we have to like share this country with and not inciting violence against one another as an example. And that's a whole other threat of this argument which is that local news is also it tends to inoculate communities against that kind of toxic polarization because when there are a number of studies that have been done that demonstrate that when local newspapers die I'm talking mostly about newspapers but obviously a lot of these also live online and they can be just as strong and important but when local news coverage goes away people's news consumption tends to shift. It doesn't usually go to the newspaper that's 50 miles down the road it goes to national news organizations which have a more kind of self-selecting sort of polarized viewpoint of most things and they also tend to have more like political horse race reporting you will know all this instinctively so that's why it matters but I would love to hear Tim talk a little bit about how you like do this with the students that you work with, the young people who you work with and what the future feels like yeah so this is kind of interesting because my perspective on this is not at all academic in any way whatsoever it's mostly how are we going to get, I run a weekly newspaper in Randolph and it's mostly how are we going to get next week's paper out starting from nothing at the beginning of every week and in fact this is the beginning of our week because we finished tomorrow's paper this afternoon so that's a minor miracle that happens at the Herald every single week it's just still amazes me to this day and I've been at this paper for like 20-something years now which is awesome we've had the great fortune to work with the community news service I don't know like 3 years did that sound familiar? 3 years? yeah I think it was about 3 years ago we had our pre-pandemic tour we've had like 7 or 8 interns and they are uniformly awesome people who are enthusiastic about getting involved in local news which is amazing to me because some people are Vermonters who grew up in small towns and are really into it because their families are into being involved in their communities and other people one of our first students moved here from New Jersey and she heard about the community news service and she was like that sounds just like an incredible thing to do and got in touch with us and she was a great reporter without any of that background it was absolutely amazing yeah so just a little bit about the Herald because that's my frame of reference for everything is we cover 16 towns kind of centered around Randolph in the southern part of Orange County the northern part of Windsor County it's a very small population it's one of the Orange County is one of the more rural places in the state Northeast Kingdom has its beat in some regards but there are not many people in our area there are not a lot of businesses in our area and we're a very old old fashioned newspaper that still functions entirely on the graces of advertising dollars which is a financial pressure that I don't know that anyone in the industry has pinpointed a solution to those types of things but that's a place that has sort of steadily been falling since about 2008 when the recession hit then that might be a good is that a good jumping off point to talk about something we're also hoping that there will be a lot of questions because it's a much more interesting to react to whatever you guys are thinking the only thing I'll respond to quickly is that that thing of introducing students from other parts of the country to reporting in Vermont is really special because like it is done differently here town meeting day every student that I've ever worked with who had something to do with town meeting day and reporting was really really delighted by the direct experience of democracy which no one else comes with we always do this doing it and more than that I think there's an ethos of participation that's really new to a lot of them as well and I asked a group of students earlier this year if they remembered going where they remember going with their parents to vote if they voted for anything a small or large election and about half the people in the room these are students who were all pretty engaged with the world so they kind of remember going to like a school auditorium or something like that and I suspect that when you ask for monitors more people who grew up here have a memory of like watching democracy happen it's a really informative experience so that's kind of a neat reminder of and it's not it's easy to take it for granted and it's it requires maintenance and sort of a kind of like active protection I think because all of the other forces in our society are working against maintaining I think including technology and global health crises it's a little bit like eating broccoli right? it's really good for you if you do it and broccoli is really good but candy is a lot better and those are kind of the tensions I think in news as well there's a lot of things that are really good for you to know about that are going on in your name but those aren't necessarily the most interesting things to most people which is also it's a little tedious as we can say there's a reason that select board meetings are pretty scarcely attended in most places indeed I'd love to just say questions if people want to talk, I'd love to hear what other people have to say about this yeah absolutely I'd love to just say that New Hampshire also has a very unique state house we have a really accessible state house here New Hampshire does too, there's 435 reps over there it's like a representative for 3,000 people over there and I came to Vermont a decade ago because my partner was working for the Digger and wanted to work in the state house she was covering the New Hampshire state house and at that point state house coverage was down 300% nationwide and so many things are going on in state houses that test laws, test lobbying create public policy and what I'd love if anybody's interested in talking about it is to hear about how we might make sure that state houses are getting covered because good policy spreads and bad policy spreads bad policy gets made, some people are like ooh that empowers me in an interesting way I want to do that in my state good policy for the common wealth and for the common health also gets made and that becomes public policy and reporting out to the citizenry about how it's going to affect them I think is a really important one the disappearance of the state house beat in local newsrooms first of all it's like probably the number one concern for places like the Center for Community News I think it's the most costly of all of the local beat disappearances with that too I would say courthouses you know just having people and there are cool things as an aside I should say that there are places doing interesting things with citizen journalism so they're like training citizens who don't identify as journalists didn't go to J's school but might be able to operate as just like court watchers and help sort of feed raw information to newsrooms and these are like creative ideas that are finding little sparks of interest around the country and I think that there's a lot of promise in places like that but state house coverage requires a more sophisticated level of knowledge about how of state specific laws and also like a relationship development and cultivation among the people who work inside the state house too I think is helpful so in context the difference of beats it's actually I heard an African journalist speaking about this about six months ago and it was like you could she could have been talking about any rural region in the United States the way she was talking about what's happening in other parts of Europe Africa with and it's this because it's the same economic pressures everywhere digital media is displacing some of this and and I think it went faster than people recognized what the social cost would be in a lot of places and that's not necessarily a bad thing either like just jumping on the digital media thing I mean Vermont has been an amazing thing for state house reporting in Vermont but I used to work weekends at the Times-Argus and the Rowland Herald as a photographer and there was a very vibrant Vermont Press Bureau at one point that would cover the state house you know pretty comprehensively and that was just you know if it was Pete Hirschfeld who's on Vermont Public now I hate saying Vermont Public still and he was just one of several reporters who would be at everything covering every step of the way and that's one of the thing that was one of the costs of the recession I think is that financial pressures really pushed reporters out of state houses I think it's interesting to bring up the courts in a similar way because the courts in a lot of ways are much more opaque than other parts of government there's some great dysfunction at state courthouses all over the place that is really difficult to access unless you have a person actually sitting there all the time we're in a weird state of limbo right now from the pandemic things were you know put on pause or close down entirely there was a push to go to remote hearings now we're seeing some judges in some places saying no we're not going to allow people to use these remote technologies anymore so that means I was talking with Mike Donahue who used to work at the Burlington Free Press and he's been the Vermont Press Association Director for ever and ever and ever he covers the courts pretty heavily even though he is retired and he was trying to cover this particular case he had you know the link to call in instead of driving from Burlington to Brattleboro for the half hour hearing and at the last second the judge says no we're not going to be able to use that anymore you're going to have to come down here and actually sit there and listen to it so weird things like that the minutiae of it make a big difference I guess is what I'm getting at court watch your backlash has upped up in a variety of places where people were really covering weird things going on by tele by telecourt watching and all of a sudden they're like oh we don't want you to know about that so we're taking away your tele access and we used to have a person just not a reporter the Herald's an interesting group in that I'm trying to think if we've ever had anyone who went to journalism school work at the Herald I don't think so we're a reporter now we may open I'm not I can't quite remember if that's true or not but we had just a person who lived in the community in Chelsea who would go to the courthouse and just do the simple work of getting a log of all of the arrangements and all of the sentencing so we could have a we could publish that or we could keep an eye on what was happening so we could be like oh this is an important thing that's going to be coming up when it comes to trial later on and just getting those records we don't have the hassle for her to do any longer so we lose that now so unless we know that there is a specific case that we want to look at then that's a piece of reporting that we miss and it's in the aggregate where you really recognize trends and inequities among disparate groups too so it is a huge loss you know it's it's kind of a bummer to talk about the economics of it all the engine driving a lot of these changes it's pretty widely understood that the start of some of the demise of print newspapers was things like Craigslist when you could start posting small things that you previously would have paid $50 to advertise in the back of a newspaper and and it's like easy to sort of just vilify the technology but it has also democratized a lot of things and given us beautiful things like B.T. Digger that's doing great reporting and that churn of technology isn't going to stop at any point so the question is how do you shore up newsrooms to stay nimble even as the ways we consume news shift over time and we hosted the Center for Communities hosted a conversation among like foundations the different journalistic enterprises Port for America places that are trying to think of new ways to do it and it seems as though the answer isn't one answer it is probably that we will never again rely exclusively on advertising especially if people are invested in the idea of understanding good reporting as being a pillar of democracy then there may be a way to think about it there are sort of other avenues and levers to push things like there are two pieces of legislation that aren't getting any traction in Washington but they are ideas to consider and some states are interested in entertaining these as well with like giving taxpayers opportunities to divert some of their taxes towards like a local newspaper if they are interested there are things like the more BBC model which we have a teeny tiny bit of with the with the public radio model but it's too small to really even sort of count it among that that leads you vulnerable to shifting political wins of course there are pluses and minuses to all these things memberships and paywalls and it seems as though the answer will be in diversifying how newsrooms sustain themselves but they weren't all built for this and a lot of small newspapers are just one person and that person doesn't usually go into it because they have a marketing degree so in Vermont we are trying to find ways to maybe pool resources and share best practices and get people talking to each other so that nobody feels like they are like on an island trying to keep their newspaper afloat or like hoping that a benevolent millionaire comes along which comes with its own problems but I'm curious if people have like opinions about the ethics and the promise of those different models for keeping these groups alive. I don't know if it's right in the mind of what you're looking for but my question is some economics and the profession itself so I'm not in the industry I'm an outsider so who reads the paper if you will. Thank you but I'm curious with the changes from my perspective how as a professional you kept I'll say independent integrity if your parent would be the hedge fund or the multimillionaire who buys the paper who has a bias but you want to be fair and honest and do that but knowing public opinion has the thought of this paper leans this way or that way so as a professional how do you deal with that as you get into the career when you're young and naive I'm sure I'm naive but I'm just interested in the profession as I look at it from my eyes I'm like yeah that's got to be pretty tough because you can be thought that in my perception it's anywhere you are you're either a good guy or you know not I think that you have to come to grips with the fact pretty early on that on any given story a bunch of people are really going to like what you have to say and a bunch of people are really going to hate what you have to say and those people might switch their opinion about you for the next story so it's a I don't think there's like an easy answer I mean I don't like it when people don't like me but it happens enough it makes for some incredibly funny angry letters that I get sometimes yeah so that's nice I guess have you seen have you seen a change like an increase in people telling you what they think of your coverage of the last couple years that's a good question maybe it's definitely not statistically significant I feel people are definitely more vociferous about how they feel about the coverage I mean I might make it the same number of people saying you know I didn't like this I do like this but they're much more emphatic about how they feel now much of history is written in the letters to the editors and the letters to the editor are great and I a lot of people write letters that I disagree with wholeheartedly fascinating part of our historical record in New Zealand first what's been interesting in electronic papers is they have not wanted or couldn't afford moderators so many electronic places have shut their comment section down and we're missing an opportunity for civil civic discourse because it wasn't civil and it wasn't civic so you need moderators to do that and that investment seems really important to role model the interaction in journalism and that's an interesting thing the tech community is also not immune to I mean moderation online is really hard there is a woman in Randolph who's a librarian so she's wonderful her name's Jessam and she is now the owner of this website called Metafilter which was a very kind of early pro-social media platform in the early 2000s and one of the things that Metafilter did very well was moderation they from the beginning hired a bunch of moderators to make sure that the discourse was kept pretty civil it's also set up in such a way that it operates a little more slowly than say the disaster that is Twitter but they've had really big trouble making any financial gains with that model Jessam took it over because she loved it and had a long history with it but it's not the big tech company that it probably could be people like yelling at each other online do you have a perspective that independence as a journalist and influence what would be from a parent company or special interest I think I'm going to come at this from the sort of other side of this which is that I think that there's a really important role for media literacy in addressing all of this one of the things that's kind of encouraging actually in young in student journalists people coming up I'm curious if you've observed this too is that when I started actually as a producer from on public radio in my early career so it was on the journalism side of it I was still part of an understanding of newsmaking as being a kind of voice from nowhere there's like one authoritarian and this was at a time there were a couple of network news shows at the end of the day and they were kind of the authorities and no one is approaching newsmaking that way anymore at least not in sort of academic sense there's an understanding that we all come in with our own biases and your job isn't to pretend to be like a sort of thoughtless robot it's just to be consistently to be conscious of your own biases and to check them and a lot of the students that I work with are also excited about advocacy journalism which wasn't even really a category 20 years ago in the same way that it is now and so I think those are interesting developments but I think they work best when they are also paired with media literacy because first of all it is clear that most people consuming news in the United States are not great at discerning the difference between trustworthy news reporting opinion and commentary and like true disinformation and so to help people understand like you know and it goes beyond just reporting it's also understanding like the provenance of a photo that you see on the internet or you know there are so many ways to manipulate one another and if you think of it as sort of a spectrum of misinformation which is like just like the erroneous headline that a wacky distant relative sends you and unknowingly is sharing misinformation all the way to like disinformation that has created the intent to lie to people and be with a political motivation and probably all of us have at some point fallen victim to the misinformation side at least though I doubt that we're home like doctoring videos to like shift you know to influence campaigns but with a stronger media literacy project in the United States everyone will be better at understanding what they're consuming you can consume good journalism that still has an advocacy angle you can consume journalism that really seeks to be objective things like newspapers that serve their local communities and then the ability to just like reject the things that just don't check out right? New Jersey I think just became the first state to maybe make media literacy a part of their official public school curriculum looks like I think that I think it passed today maybe anyway there was I was reading some coverage the other day about it and I think that today was the day that was going to happen so that's really promising and I think so in some ways the technology moved faster than most news consumers I don't even really like the word consumers but right like the way we actually receive this information none of us had like the armor to handle it yet so I think there's a way to do that and then the angry letter thing which can be really constructive and good as the editor can really demonstrate but it can also be a form of like vilifying journalism and sending threats and increasing toxic polarization I think that that's just part of like such a broader cultural ailment that I'm not sure the answer lies with journalism I think that's like a bigger question for democracy yeah can I follow that each of us segue something I've had online for quite a while you know back in the day and I agree with you that we just haven't come along as fast as digital media we haven't been prepared but back in the day we had the fairness doctrine and back in the day we had a federal communications commission that regulated corporate broadcast media and it seems to me that only a few rare people have been willing to even discuss the fact that our current administration has been unable to succeed getting their nominee to the FCC so we have a whole FCC and there's been no discussion of the internet as part of communications infrastructure that should be regulated at a federal level with some kind of a broader fairness doctrine that addresses the issues of censorship misinformation, disinformation corporate propaganda there are a couple of other things that I've had on my mind and I'm curious about how you think about those things very few people do I see talking about them and I don't believe that in a democracy corporations should be regulating themselves so where do we go with that? I think the discussion is happening I mean we're talking about it now so that's one thing but I mean even I read editorial in The Washington Post yesterday about the nominees for example not being able to make it through so I think it is happening I think that there's just so much noise with other crap in it that we it's really easy for most people to blow by the substantive discussion there's a great series that On The Me is doing right now at WNYC about how a right wing media a radio excuse me has sort of exploited the loopholes of FCC regulation and the fairness doctrine comes with its own complications too because it almost feels like such an enormous conversation I don't even really know how to get at it in this room but clearly these platforms that we do not regulate as utilities or public programs play a more central role than any one anticipated maybe somebody had anticipated but we weren't prepared for it and now we're in the situation there's no it absolutely has to be dealt with I totally agree with you we're talking mostly about I think the kinds of broadcast programming you're talking about it doesn't like fit neatly into newsroom reporting but I think that it is influencing the entire environment in which we're all consuming news and the ways that we think about journalism and the ways that we self sort and confirmation bias is like just kind of drawing us closer and closer to the things that we already believe to be true can I close the question to your real question? I'm scared to even touch that one because it's so enormous but it's really important you might know some figures on this I mean what is what are the trends in news consumption allegedly I mean what do people report that they so I just saw last week that most people get most of the headlines they see come from Facebook and which is like pretty problematic even if you have no problem with Facebook at all it's still tricky because it is also still well I mean it is my opinion that Facebook is kind of stealing content from news organizations that are paying for reporters to go out and do like hard boots on the ground work and so that's another aspect of the regulation that needs to be dealt with because it they're finding ways around the like the sustainability of news of good journalism so I've been reading about that this whole past week and I remember the four letters for the act that's getting pushed through Congress right now and there's a huge movement of most of the like the electronic frontier foundation and I want to say two dozen organizations the ACLU who are saying no this is a really awful bill and it seems like so on Facebook with my group of people some of whom are in the academic world and media studies and others are critical thinking and others are just people are saying well what is this about and I'm trying to lose the thought one of the points of view is exactly opposite to yours and I actually happen to share it in that Facebook because I myself select my resources is amplifying those particular news outlets so for example I wouldn't go to the UK Guardian half as much if I didn't have a particular person following a story like what's the name Todd Walleter who broke the Cambridge Analytica story was totally blamed on Facebook but actually it wasn't it was the employees of Cambridge Analytica and unless you really do down into the facts behind her story you wouldn't know that Eric Prince and a major Chinese financial firm were behind Cambridge Analytica and as soon as it gets too hot they dissolve as a corporation and they change their name so like winding around a lot of the issues you were talking about to say that I don't think we're really unless we're really looking and asking a lot of questions we're not getting a fair narrative even about what Facebook is about or most of us don't really understand what the Cambridge Analytica story was about because whether it's in broadcast traditional broadcast TV cable or whether it's in investigative news reports or daily news we just get like little snippets off the top and you have to be a very committed almost researcher that has bad undertones now in social media but to really keep asking questions and digging deeper where you really don't know what the story is about so just to say going back I really feel like I never use Twitter but I think people who do did a similar thing are sharing the more corporate news stories that don't have a K-Wall and use it to amplify and to do what the Fourth Estate was protected to do which is to give people more information freely so that we can be informed and you can't do that if there's a K-Wall and you can't do that if you have to subscribe most of us can't do that Good journals cost money to make that's the defense of it if you want war reporting you have to be able to buy war there's armor and so maybe we find collective ways to fund it and that's the answer but there has to be an answer because if you're not paying then you're the product and that's the problem with social media and I wonder if the demand is there to support the funding we know that's sensationalism so we have a story in the world and people are like look at that shiny thing over there sell your newspaper sell your article give you subscription unfortunately the economics than the day war reporting is a good example but even on a more simple level reporters want to be able to pay their rent and eat food it's not even it's exotic we don't even have to fund satellite trucks to do live broadcasts we have reporters notebooks and our phones to record interviews with so it's not like those expenses aren't huge it's just that particularly community news organizations serve such small numbers of people that most of the funding models that we see brought up don't account for that there's a big push for or there has been a big push for larger entities to request funding from their readers and that works great if you have a million and a half readers if you have a couple thousand readers then ooh one of the things about the fairness doctrine was it's equal time clause and people stop saying bullshit because they didn't want to use their time to be equal time to other people and that eliminated a lot of opportunity for that back and forth that is constructive that butt's heads but does come to some resolve when it's a requirement I think so I'm think Reagan really wrecked a bunch of stuff when he did away with the fairness doctrine and but it surges purposes really well even then the fairness doctrine wouldn't cover most of the entities that we're talking about even newspapers newspapers are as well as it gets in American reporting anyway and the fairness doctrine didn't apply to newspapers but I think it's also important to raise like algorithmic news feed like that is the thing going on right now and it's created all this factualization algorithmic show you what you want because you clicked on it and that amplifies ugly to ugly and good to good and maybe they never see good or ugly anywhere else it's very strange and siloed and quite disturbing and one of the really like tangible outcomes of that which is it's like a passive kind of confirmation bias I don't think most people on social media even recognize that the news that they think they're seeing freely is actually being like it's being delivered to them and it's drawing them down a path in the same direction is that there are fewer and fewer with more political polarization we see less and less split ticket voting in small places split ticket voting regardless of like what your politics are it does appear that at least at the state level things work pretty well when people are willing to defy the party they usually identify with for a smarter person or somebody represents their ideas or just more experienced or whatever and then you get a little bit of a mix Vermont has always been kind of an example of that it swings a little bit but it's been pretty good at split ticket voting for a long time after splitting ticket voting in other states and it's becoming rarer and rarer and that's like and it leads to gridlock right and to be fair that is in Vermont at least relatively recently within our life well not within our lifetimes but just before our lifetime phenomenon there's this great old guy in East Randolph named Marshall Armstrong who calls me and will talk to me for an hour and a half at a time every Friday or so and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of every politician that ever did anything in Vermont and he can name and he'll recite them all and they're all Republicans until 1960 something and then we start to see that interesting mix it's true it's all kind of new America's kind of new I really ironed it out yet figured it out I do a little disclosure and say that Vermont Humanities actually supports the community news project with grant funding specifically to support humanities arts and culture reporting but my question is really when you are working with 20 something new reporters what's exciting about being in this field it's a hard field to go into it's not very good hours are really long it can be a slog I worked at Digger for a little while I saw it what it was like for many of the young reporters but what is it about it now that's getting people wrapped up to want to be journalists that's a great question I think it's different for a lot of people this isn't necessarily a big issue but we also have a ton of high school interns which is how I got started and there's a certain set that is really passionate about some type of activism that gets them interested in community involvement and that's an entry for some people there are some people are just incredible government nerds and they just love going to select board meetings or reading through court documents they thrive on that minutia and when we find those we're just like wow these are our people that's fantastic we're glad you made it here one of their characteristics is just insatiable curiosity young journalists I work with have question after question after question they're all great just really role modeling this inquiry and then reporting on it and then role modeling that inquiry out into the community is really constructive positive activity one really exciting avenue two is the explosion of data journalism that students you've really when you explain to them what you can get with a FOIA request and then you're like alright it's going to take you a month to read through the most boring documents ever but you might like find the smoking gun in them that's like that's a pretty cool realization and I mean that's like Bob Woodward like big sexy stuff but not in the day to day work it's not and there's a local version of it too because like that's the court documents too so I think and I think it also like works with a lot of you know they're all digital natives and so I think they feel really comfortable trying to like track down the original sources they also you know you probably have experience here where you're just like no you're going to have to call people on the telephone see I was just going to say the other nice thing is that at the advantage is you don't have to talk to a person you get the document sent to you and you just read through them and think that you can write your story but no you have to you have to go you can't get around the phone they don't know that thank you so much for being here thanks everyone community for having this conversation thank you very much