Journalists must collaborate as media outlets — especially small newspapers — continue transitioning to a digital world, said industry leaders at a UVM-hosted conference last week.

Seventy-five reporters, editors, community organizers and funders from across the state met in Burlington March 10 for the Vermont Journalism Conference. On their minds: Can Vermont buck national trends and ensure local journalism endures?

The event, the first held in several years, was hosted by UVM’s Community News Service and the Vermont Journalism Exchange. Attendees stressed that for local news outlets to survive, organizations need to be tech-savvy and work to share resources and expertise among themselves.

“On our smartphone, every app is a competitor to our local journalism,” said Sarah Ashworth, senior vice president of content at Vermont Public Radio and Vermont PBS. “Our competitors aren't each other, necessarily.”

Conference-goers pointed out that small outfits need clarity on how to turn to the growing role of donations in supporting news organizations — as seen in the financial models of outlets like Seven Days, the Waterbury Roundabout and VTDigger.

The one-day conference came amid increasing anxieties about the decline of local journalism in Vermont. Between 2004 and 2020, according to a report from the University of North Carolina, seven newspapers in the state either shut down or merged operations. Over that same span the U.S. lost about a quarter of its newspapers, the report said.

Losing news outlets hurts communities, advocates believe.

*Meg Little Reilly talking about why local news matters.*

“Increased polarization and lack of trust happen when there is no local news source,” said Meg Little Reilly, deputy director of the Center for Research on Vermont, which oversees organizer Community News Service.

One suggestion was to build a statewide nonprofit called “Friends of Vermont Journalism” that would allow donors to make tax-deductible contributions to their local news media. According to Seven Days publisher Paula Routly, the organization is already in the works and the team around it is looking for an executive director.

“At Seven Days, we found a short-term solution,” Routly said. “The California-based Journalism Funding Partners, run by former newspaper people, has helped us outline three initiatives that qualify as charitable, and we've already had some fundraising success. But … the nonprofit doesn't have the capacity to work with other Vermont outlets. We need an organization that does.”

Some outlets around Vermont already use a hybrid business model of selling ads, receiving donations and winning grants. And increasingly news leaders are looking at the nonprofit sphere as a way forward.

Randy Holhut, an editor at The Commons newspaper in Windham County, explained that his organization began life in the mid-2000s with a nonprofit model in mind.

“The nonprofit status ensures us that there will be no hedge fund buying The Commons,” Holhut said. “There is nobody that can buy The Commons because nobody owns The Commons. We have a board of directors, but there is nothing to be bought or sold. So it really can be a community resource that will live past (editor and publisher) Jeff Potter.”

These days, small news outlets often lack the resources or people power needed to support time-consuming investigations — the kind of work that shows best the service local media can provide.

So journalists are turning toward collaboration more and more. By pooling funds and sharing work, news outlets can make up for individual outlets’ lacking resources.

Melanie Plenda, director of the Granite State News Collaborative in New Hampshire, told attendees how her group of 20 media outlets worked to tell stories during the Covid-19 pandemic and address the public’s urgent need for information.

“None of us were going to be able on our own to cover the pandemic and get people what they needed,” Plenda said. “So we needed to work together in order to do that. So we set up a system for communicating with each other. We set up a system for sharing stories with each other. And then the collaborative itself has a team of freelance investigative reporters that fill in the gaps.”

Over the last 18 months, the group has cross-published more than 3,000 stories in outlets across New Hampshire, with more than 600 of those pieces coming from the collaborative itself, Plenda said.

That type of philosophy is underway in Vermont through Community News Service, which pairs student journalists with small newspapers statewide to provide outlets free articles.

Front Porch Forum co-founder Michael Wood-Lewis also talked about ways his organization, which is not journalistic in nature, can help news groups.

“I'm thrilled that so many journalists use our free service to connect with their communities,” Wood-Lewis said. “We see every day reporters using Front Porch Forum … (It) is often a source in local news stories.”

He also emphasized the local social media platform’s reach in the state — which could turn folks toward news sources as they read and learn about issues in their communities.

Looking ahead, the Center for Research on Vermont is publishing a report on the conference to lay out ways to bolster the state’s news ecosystem. The center hopes to make recommendations in the coming weeks, help facilitate new partnerships among attendees and reconvene the group to continue working.