It’s time to vote on the future of community news

Local newspapers in Vermont and nationwide are in big trouble.

The situation in Vermont was front page news in last week’s Seven Days and on everyone’s mind at the recent Vermont Journalism conference hosted by the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News.

Amazingly, The Charlotte News has bucked the trend. Our revenues and employment stats have grown over the past few years. We have our readers, and your donations, to thank for keeping us in business.

Now it’s time for you to cast your vote for the future of The Charlotte News with a donation to our Annual Fund campaign. Your gift in any amount will help keep the presses rolling and the website rockin’.

We’re hopeful about the future, not just because of the support we receive from our readers and advertisers, but also because of the work of the Center for Community News.

CCN provides internship opportunities for young journalists-in-training. Each year, our editor, Scooter MacMillan, works with several Center for Community News student journalists.

Bill Schubart, an advisor to The Charlotte News, recently wrote about one of them in his VT Digger column. “I spoke at length with a young journalist named Busy Anderson. Listening to her lifted my spirits. … She spoke with deep commitment to an ethos of fact-based journalism and truth-telling and made clear her personal commitment to do everything in her power to build her career in its support. She had the fire in the belly that assures both her success and, with luck, the survival of journalism as a fundament of democracy.”

We’re delighted to be able to publish Community News Service reporting from the Center for Community News’s student journalists in The Charlotte News and to provide them with an opportunity to gain real world experience.

If you share our commitment to community journalism and to the next generation of journalists and reporters, please support this work with a gift to our Annual Fund campaign.

Make your donation on our website, or put a check in the mail to PO Box 251, Charlotte VT 05445.

Thanks very much.

(John Quinney is a member of the board of directors of The Charlotte News and chair of the fundraising committee.)