Four Questions For Alden Pellett, Editor of VermontDailyNews.com

There's a new player in Vermont's news game, and it just launched late last month: VermontDailyNews.com. Alden Pellett, a former photojournalist (staff and freelance), had been squatting on the domain name for years and finally decided to do something with it "in light of the way media's going" these past few years. The site's so far a one-man show, with a few paid stringers and one unpaid copy editor (more on that later), but VermontDailyNews has already scooped the bigger papers on a couple lead stories and has covered everything from rallies to police activity to tomato blight. We spoke with Alden about competing with the big guys. Who's behind VermontDailyNews.com? A cadre of bought-out, laid off journos? It's me, basically. I've had that URL for over 10 years now, and was just hanging on to it. In light of the way media's going we decided to launch. [Additional staff include] two paid freelancers and a copyeditor,actually my wife. The reason I don't have more people doing more is that I'm moving into office space and trying to pick up some advertising before I start spending my money on other things. How will you compete with the current, entrenched media in Vermont? They might be far too deeply entrenched. There were layoffs at the local Gannett paper. More than one series. I saw that happening. Some of my editorial clients had cut back. A few years ago the AP came out with a [new] contract and they wanted to own everything. It's sort of been a downhill slope ever since then, I think a lot of freelancers would say that. It sort of felt like now, I wanted something new to do, it was less busy, and I didn't want to give up all my copyright to other people. And I intend to keep it that way. If people are working for me freelance, give me one day [to use the material] and then you do what you want with it. That's refreshing. I hate to be in the position of telling people I don't have much of a budget, but the fact is I don't. When a large newspaper tells you that, you're like "oh, that's what you guys decided in a meeting." I'm sure Gannett people that got laid off were delighted to hear a month later that they did show a profit after all. It's tough to swallow that someone's making a 15% profit after you got laid off. What's been the most surprising thing so far? [The site]'s still in its infancy, so I haven't had anybody walk in the door and say, 'here's a great story that nobody's doing.' But I've gotten a few big stories that the local papers have then used. There'd been a story that the blight had hit vegetable crops [in one isolated area]. I found out that it was all over the state now, and gardeners were pulling up their tomato plants. I had that up there a day and a half before the Burlington Free Press had it.

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Four Questions For Alden Pellett, Editor of VermontDailyNews.com

Rachel Kaufman

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Rachel Kaufman