Happy birthday to … Waterbury Roundabout!
May 8, 2021 | By Lisa Scagliotti
Waterbury village and a little bit of Duxbury from above on a summer night, 2020. Photo by Gordon Miller.
It was one year ago today that WaterburyRoundabout.org went live and the phone rang with a call from Seven Days reporter and Waterbury Center resident Kevin McCallum asking what this was all about.
It’s an experiment, I replied. A class project that will take a stab at filling the void after our local paper folded a few weeks prior. There’s a pandemic going on. People are staying close to home. It’s a bad time to be without local news and information.
With the help of the UVM students I had been working with that semester as an editor and mentor and the support of the Reporting and Documentary Storytelling program they were in, we created a website and started to cover local news in Waterbury, Duxbury and the Harwood Union school district. Gordon Miller shared his photos and hasn’t missed a week since.
The response was quick and positive. Each week we saw more visits to the site. By June, we launched the Saturday “This Week in Waterbury” newsletter to highlight some of the most recent stories. Today, it’s landing in more than 1,500 inboxes.
In July we registered as a Vermont nonprofit corporation and by fall, we took part in a special fundraising effort through the New England Newspaper & Press Association started during the pandemic to help papers raise money with the benefit of a nonprofit foundation.
The actual Waterbury roundabout is an important connector for travelers in, to and around Waterbury. Photo by Gordon Miller.
Not only were community members in Waterbury welcoming, but friends in the Vermont news colleagues – and even some national media – were very encouraging. Conversations last fall led in November to the launch of the Waterbury Reader with the Times-Argus. Through that collaboration, local residents get a free weekly newspaper in the mail and much of the news is produced by Waterbury Roundabout.
Along the way, there have been bylines by numerous UVM student reporters and recent graduates. Community members with journalism experience have found time to contribute regularly. Readers send commentaries and letters; organizations forward their announcements; families share obituaries of their loved ones.
As we followed news of closings and postponements a year ago, we now are reporting about reopenings, recovery and returning to “normal” as COVID-19 peters out. The pandemic played a role in nearly every story over the past year and affected the lives of everyone producing Waterbury Roundabout’s news as well.
The stories nonetheless captured day-to-day life in our community: many instances of people of all ages looking out for each other; local government and businesses continuing to function in new ways; schools “pivoting” to keep our kids learning and our teachers safe; elections held in creative new ways choose our state and local leaders and even a president.
We reported on new ways for kids to see Santa and celebrate birthdays and graduations. We’ve dug in with those researching our community’s history to understand the connections to the past with the present. We’re watching, listening and documenting the difficult but important conversations among young and old on what it means to be equal.
There’s certainly no shortage of stories to tell. In fact there’s more news to cover in any week than we can get to. One year in, there still are many steps needed to grow our small staff to anchor what we do while students and young journalists can spend time with us as a stepping stone.
To that end, we’ve added a weekly sponsor spot to our newsletter and some online advertising is around the corner. We hope to soon have a fiscal sponsor that will enable us to receive donations that are tax deductible to the donors (as we did last fall) and also to seek grant funding.
In the meantime, we welcome contributions online via PayPal or by check to Waterbury Roundabout, P.O. Box 626, Waterbury VT 05676.
How else can readers support what we do? Visit WaterburyRoundabout.org and see what’s there. Sign up for the Saturday emailed newsletter and share it with your friends and neighbors. If you’re on Facebook, like/follow/share our page.
And keep sending your tips and ideas for stories. Send your letters and announcements.
And, thank you for reading.
Lisa Scagliotti is editor of Waterbury Roundabout.