Over a decade ago, I moved to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, an area composed of three sparsely populated counties in the topmost rightside portion of this long skinny state. I lived alone. I went to work and drove home on lonesome dirt roads passing more woods and fields than houses. I wondered who my neighbors were. So, I subscribed to the local paper, The Barton Chronicle, and little by little, week after week, I boned up on the characters and issues of this interesting outpost. As time went on and I met actual people–those whose letters to the editor I’d read, and those who’d episodes had merited brief mentions in the court report. Then I started to become curious about the people behind the news. Not just the school boards and town selectmen, the politicians and athletes, the alleged burglars and billionaire developers, I was curious about the people who were doggedly going out, asking questions and issuing their findings in the paper itself. Once, after inviting a local reporter to come speak to my college freshman about writing, she reciprocated, inviting me to come visit the Chronicle’s office where I met a handful of good-natured, middle-aged people in a basement room people all staring at computer screens at their individual but unanimously chaotic desks.
The Chronicle is almost as old as I am. The original plates from the first issue are screwed to the wall in a far corner of the office known as the mailing room: March 28, 1974. “Whatever happened to Spring?” reads the caption under a photograph from the front page of the papers debut.
Started by Chris and Ellen Braithwaite, a husband and wife team, quasi-back- to- the-landers who relocated from California and Canada to ensconce themselves in the Kingdom at a farm called Entropy Acres, The Chronicle was born in large part out of the hopeful idea, (akin to build it and they will come) print it and they will read.
They did, and forty years later, Reader, they still do. I just picked up this week’s edition: Brownington needs a new road foreman; Lake Region’s well is going dry; Sidelined rail cars worry neighbors.
Back when I interviewed Chris Braithwaite on the occasion of the paper’s 35th birthday, he described the essential paradox of what makes a local newspaper necessary and at times exceedingly difficult to produce. “News stories aren’t necessarily easy stories,” he told me, “because they are about or involve friends…People aren’t just subjects. And that is perhaps one of the major differences between community journalism and ‘the Biggies.’”
A few years late I pressed Mr. Braithwaite again on the dividing line between reporter and reported, between informer and advocate. I emailed him in November 2009 to ask: How do you train in objectivity? You must have an opinion on some of the things you report because some of these things will affect you?
Braithwaite replied tersely (but gamely) the next day with, “Proposed experiment: Read the page 1 story about the proposed Lowell wind turbines (Wind friends, foes focus on Lowell Mt. by Chris Braithwaite November 4, 2009,) then decide whether the Chronicle favors or opposes wind power in general. Then read the editorial. Did you get it right?”
I got it wrong.
He continued, “The reporter’s job is to understand the interests involved and lay them out coherently, like a good sports writer advancing a world series game. You can’t do that well if you let your misguided affection for the Yankees color your assessment…so you learn not to.”
The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, he too lived and wrote from pastoral precincts not unlike the Northeast Kingdom. He too heard the news, and noted his neighbors fissuring over issues. In his case, it wasn’t the same sex marriages and the mountain top turbines, but passionate property squabbles. In his poem ‘Epic’ he writes, “I have lived in important places, times/When great events were decided, who owned/That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land/Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims…”
And I love, I treasure his conclusion: contemplating the significance of local matters in light of the larger world’s stories, he’s tempted to dismiss the provincial fuss,
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.