Check your mailboxes: Yes, that’s a newspaper

November 13, 2020 | By Lisa Scagliotti 

The first edition of the Waterbury Reader lands in mailboxes this week. Photo by Lisa Scagliotti.

It wasn’t long ago that Waterbury and Duxbury residents regularly had their local newspaper land in their mailboxes at the end of the week. 

When the Waterbury Record ended its run March 26, our mailboxes became a bit emptier each week and local residents lost an important connection and source of information just as the COVID-19 pandemic led to school and workplace shutdowns. 

Just a little over six months ago, WaterburyRoundabout.org began publishing local news online through the cooperation of local professional journalists and the student journalism internship program called Community News Service at the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling laboratory. Working as an editor and mentor with the student reporters there while living in Waterbury, it seemed a no-brainer to turn their attention to this community that lost the trusted source of news and information it had relied upon for more than a decade. 

A website was created and hosted by the UVM program and we went to work covering local news. By summer, we registered with the Secretary of State as a nonprofit business. 

But from day one the most frequent question we heard was: What about a paper? It seemed a daunting task given the fate of the Record.

There are some strong winds buffeting the local newspaper world these days. Yes, the pandemic and its economic body blow is real with many papers on their heels, shedding staff and hanging on hoping to hit bottom and begin to build back the business they’ve lost. 

But there’s also a camaraderie taking root among news organizations as we weather this storm together and realize we have more in common than not. Where many were once fierce competitors, you now see productive partnerships and collaborations. For example, Vermont recently saw VPR and Vermont PBS join forces. The Pulitzer Prize for public service this year went to Alaska’s largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, for a series of stories on criminal justice reported through a partnership with the nonprofit ProPublica news outlet committed to investigative reporting. 

So it wasn’t completely out of the blue that in crossing paths with other Vermont journalists we began brainstorming the answer to the question of Waterbury and its hope for a paper. 

We were fortunate to have that conversation with friends at the Times-Argus, which has had its own hurdles to clear this year thanks to COVID-related losses. But as it’s started to turn around, the Barre-Montpelier paper is looking to return to covering more of Central Vermont again including Waterbury. 

We are happy to say we’ll be doing that together.

This week we introduce a new hybrid print publication called the Waterbury Reader, a joint effort of the Times-Argus and the Waterbury Roundabout. By customizing a new weekly mailed print edition with Waterbury stories and advertising, we’ve created a new newspaper. 

We hope this will allow us to reach more people in the community who may not be looking for local news online or who just prefer to read it in a paper. We hope this gives local businesses a way to reach their customers again.

WaterburyRoundabout.org will power the coverage readers will see in print. We will continue to send This Week in Waterbury, out weekly Saturday email highlighting new stories. And we need and welcome the community’s support to keep all of this going.   

Of course there are no guarantees. But we think this is worth a shot. The past six months have been encouraging, rewarding and fun. 

So, check your mailboxes. And thank you for reading.