“The Vermont Daily Chronicle continues to be a vital part of the Vermont scene. You and your partners & staff are going the extra mile and it shows. I hope your readership and financial support is growing substantially alongside the continued excellence of the journalistic content.”

Few Vermonters take the time to write op-eds to the Chronicle about what they like about Donald Trump. In the interests of equal time and respectful discussion, I do.

Most people realize that ‘free’ news, isn’t. Someone is selling your data behind your back. Or else a sugar daddy funder is pulling the strings on news coverage while shutting down comments. Or, more likely, both.

Sustaining Subscribers who lock in for 2026 before January 1 will pay the current rate of $108 and may write comments through all 12 months of 2026.

Voting Vermonters now know that if you allow the shouters and screamers to drown out someone else today, you will stand by, holding the cloaks of those who do it to them tomorrow. 

If VDC is the warts-and-all mirror in which state policy makers can see how they appear to many Vermonters, then our Sustaining Subscribers are the people who raise the mirror to their faces.

We at VDC tried hard in 2024 to make that hope for balanced, responsive state government a reality. We will continue the work in 2025.

Allow me to describe what a Vermont without VDC Sustaining Subscribers contributing $108/year, or $9/month, would look like…..

To their credit, Supermajority leaders felt the electoral earthquake tremors even before Election Day. To their debit, they failed to respond in time with the sandbag equivalent of spending cuts and tax relief.

When the press can be counted on to take the government’s side, the cronies, corrupters, and grifters inside the government breathe a sigh of relief.

I need to tell you what happened AFTER I told a group of people Saturday night how to Become Your Own Media.

Lately I am realizing that the “you” in “we need you more than ever” is a plural that refers to our whole team – me, my indispensable copy editor Tim Page, reporter Mike Bielawski, and social media director Paul Bean – as well as the score of other regular contributors.

“After all, we had gotten plenty of wind from the State House in Montpelier for years, what had that solved? In fact at a a meeting that I attended of a House/Senate energy committee that allowed audience comments, I suggested that any/all wind turbines erected in Vermont should be on the hills around Montpelier and face the State House, because that’s where all the wind comes from. I made a lot of friends that day, but none on the committee.”

Our daily views started jumping off the charts within just 24 hours of Paul’s first efforts to create more robust social media.

You made 2023 the best-read (1.09 million views!), most-visited, most-commented-on year Vermont Daily Chronicle year ever.

If you’ve been holding your pecuniary powder dry…..

I had hoped to publish a triumphant ‘WOOT WOOT! We Just Reached One Million Views’ post today.

Remembering a different kind of Vermont Thanksgiving

The bad news has to do with PayPal. The good news? Check it out.

Herodotus said nothing about floods. 

Crisis struck. With two whole beach days left, I finished my designated beach book.

We’re going fishin’. But you will still be able to read new news and commentary in the Chronicle next week.

Every weekday I go to my post office box in Montpelier, slip the big, industrial strength key into #1547, and hope to see a letter from a reader. 

The dictionary defines crowdsourcing as “the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.”

I never imagined a readership like this when in January, 2017 I started blogging about State House news for a small circle of family and friends.

We like to think we punch above our weight, hitting tough subjects with questions and perspectives other Vermont media won’t touch.

Subscribing readers react strongly to PayPal’s threat to seize funds from users who the online giant says practice ‘discrimination against protected groups.’

Unlike many of his critics, Mark Coester would never denigrate the Constitution as the oppressive tool of rich, white, male, musket-toting, slave-owners. 

Happy Fourth to all of the Nation Makers of today! The Vermont Daily Chronicle office will be closed Thursday, June 30 – Monday, July 4. Comment moderation will be slight and the editor won’t be returning emails. An edition will be published Friday, July 1, but not Monday, July 4.

In addition to publishing 10 news and commentaries Mon-Fri, on Wednesday your editor found the time to drive to the Waterbury studios of WDEV to guest-host Common Sense Radio. That was a lot of fun!