Debriefing with my co-worker Erika Nichols-Frazer after she covered the Moretown Select Board meeting this week, she reported that a town resident whose road had been hit hard by last week’s flood attended the meeting to ask the board about help. Select board member Robin Campbell volunteered to drive around on Tuesday, July 18, to assess the damage and let the road crew know where help is most needed. That is impressively responsive local government. It demonstrates shared problem solving and also demonstrates the importance of the connection between citizens and their government.
That connection doesn’t exist in a void. It requires people to know what their elected officials are doing. Enter local news and community journalism. That’s one way people stay connected to their local government and it is one way local officials are held accountable to their communities.
Valley Reporter staffers attended a June 29 Community News Service journalism summit at UVM that featured speakers discussing the connection between people’s sense of community and being connected to each other. With local news organizations and community newspapers losing ground to internet advertising and flagging readership, those impacted don’t consume any less news. They fill their local news deserts with national news which is often significantly more partisan than local news.
This leads to what one speaker called affective polarization where people’s world view changes from ‘we’re all in this together’ to ‘us versus them.’ Local news, we were told, is what helps create a sense of shared problem solving. When people are working collectively on things like which roads to pave, and budgets, and this week, on recovering from devastating flooding affective polarization yields back to connection.
What happened in Moretown this week and what is happening across Vermont demonstrates that. People are helping their neighbors regardless of national politics and political divisions. Local government is working, state government, nonprofits are working with for-profits. The glue that is holding us together during this time and the glue that connected us last week was our ability to be kept abreast in almost real time by local media, online and in print, on air and by social media. Kudos to Moretown, kudos to the news gathering organizations that worked so hard last week and kudos to the road crews working so hard this week.
