EXETER REUNION
TALK/DISCUSSION
v4-exeter-densmore-with-the-colors-04-22-FINAL
With the Colors:
The past and future of news, communities and democracy
(SLIDE -- WELCOME TO WILLIAMSTOWN)
We’ve all read and heard a lot about the decline of trustworthy news, the Internet platform dominating advertising and surveillance capitalism, Craig’s List and big big-box stories. But there’s something else at work, too and that’s changes in American communities. As an example, and to help us explore the processes of losing, finding and supporting community, Graf asked me to talk about the experience with my wife of owning a weekly newspaper in the town of Williamstown.
JOURNALISM AND AGENCY
How did we get to a little college town in New England?
I fell in love with journalism when my car was towed from an illegal spot on the UMass-Amherst campus. Picking up from my time at WPEA, I had been writing album reviews for Poor Richards, the literary weekly of the 19,000-circulation five-day Collegian student paper. The paper’s then-student managing editor, Bob Scheier, suggested I research the contracting towing operator. I learned and wrote not about my towing episode but the fact that the person overseeing the contract on campus was the wife of the towing-company owner. The Northampton daily picked up the story and alarm bells went off. The contract was voided. It was the first time I had ever felt a sense of agency over the world around me -- that I could do something that would make things better. I had found a career.
LISTENING TO THE COMMUNITY
Working for The AP, I covered school busing in Boston, a U.S. president and vice president in Illinois, the assasination of Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk in San Francisco, the first unmanned probe of Venus and the court fight over liability for the nation’s most-deadly single air disaster, the May 25, 1979 crash of American Airlines Flight 191 at Chicago O’Hare, killing 273 people. On all those stories, not once do I recall hearing directly from a reader after the reporting. There was no community connection at all. Early, as a reporter and then editor on the UMass-Amherst student daily, I was embedded in a campus community and got plenty of reaction from the stories I wrote.
LEAVING THE CITIES
While living in Park Slope in 1982 . . . by the way, a fairly elegant and spacious two bedroom in a three-story townhouse was $800 a month . . . my wife Betsy noticed a classified in Editor & Publisher Magazine that advertised an anonymous “New England college town weekly” for sale. We were in our late 20s. I had reported and edited for The Associated Press in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco -- and for Crain Communications in New York City. Each of us grew up in places -- Worcester, Mass., and Barrington, Ill. -- with lots of access to open space. We found the idea of bidding to buy a small-town newspaper irresistible.
(SLIDE -- DEMOGRAPHICS)
We negotiated with owners for controlling interest and moved from Brooklyn to Williamstown, Mass. in early 1993. It has a resident population of 7,754, including nearly 2,000 students at Williams College.
ALL NIGHTERS AND BLIZZARDS
It is fair to say that my wife and I became married to The Advocate. We re-tagged it “the newsweekly for the Berkshires and Southwestern Vermont.” The tasks of manual phototypesetting, wax paste up boards and a slow, conventional darkroom process made it a 24-by-7 commitment.
(SLIDE -- BILL AND BETSY)
It was like producing a new play every week, with a relentless and immutable deadline each Tuesday night to get anywhere from 24 to 72 tabloid-page paste ups to our printer, 41 miles south on U.S. Route 7 in Great Barrington, for a 7:30 a.m. press start, pre-dawn blizzards and hazardous driving notwithstanding. Sometimes it required an all-nighter.
(SIDE -- FRONT PAGES SHOWN)
On each Wednesday, 4,000 copies of our paper landed in more than 50 Williamstown stands, store counters and offices. Community feedback was immediate and face-to-face as I’d walk along Spring Street -- the main commercial street. I’d get phone calls with suggestions for followup and fresh investigation.
(SLIDE -- BRICK STOREFRONT)
It helped having a visible presence in an unrenovated brick storefront, up a long flight of stairs on Spring Street, near the post office, banks and shops and the campus edge.
(SLIDE -- ADVOCATE SIGN)
Townsfolk would readily mount those stairs to deliver news releases, photos of their children’s achievements, or to complain about -- or occasionally praise -- our latest stories.
TWO COMMUNITIES -- A SMALL TOWN AND AN ARTS CORRIDOR
(SLIDE -- MORE FRONT PAGES)
Before we took it over, the Advocate had struggled to gain paid readers. Our insight was to expand free circulation -- printing as many copies as readers would pick up, at more than 400 distribution stops. We circulated 18,000 copies north and south along a more than 100-mile stretch of U.S. Route 7.
(SLIDE -- MASS MOCA)
It was -- and is -- a region relatively teeming with arts institutions such as the then-nascent MassMoCA, Jacobs Pillow, Norman Rockwell Museum, Tanglewood, Hancock Shaker Village, the Clark Art Institute, theater festivals in Williamstown and Stockbridge, and Shakespeare & Co., which ran and still runs a in-school program for high school thespians.
(SLIDE: SHAKESPEARE AND CO)
Our strategy was to serve one geographic community -- Williamstown -- with hyperlocal news and a much larger, north-south corridor as an alt-weekly and investigative resource for an extended cultural community. At the same time, we also covered Williamstown’s government carefully, and made room to print all the notices from schools and civic groups about breakfast fundraisers, obits and personal milestones and awards -- even headlining short blurbs called “With the Colors” -- who was off to military basic training -- and other notes about chicken-dinner-variety fundraisers
The hybrid strategy worked. In three years, circulation and advertising revenues tripled.
ANONYMITY, VERIFIED GOSSIP, THIRD PLACES AND COMMUNITY SUPPORT
We learned at least four lessons about communities . . . and about our publishing responsibilities.
We are a species that wants to use our evolutionary gift of conversation. Democracy gets bad signals when fake news spreads faster than truth. The practice of moderating and verifying the community’s gossip is therefore vital.
(SLIDE TWO -- KIDS WORLD)
We published a special supplement full of photos when community volunteers constructed from scratch a giant wood playground behind the elementary school.
(SLIDE TWO -- KIDS WORLD)
The playground went from plans provided by a consultant to a completed complex called “Kids World” -- in a single, long weekend involving 100 or more community volunteers.
I considered it a conflict of interest to accept an invitation to become a director of the Williamstown Board of Trade. But we diligently covered and facilitated its marketing of what was dubbed “The Village Beautiful.” We provided free advertising for a merchant “Holiday Walk” with sleigh rides and food offered by participating merchants. Fostering this business community brought us support and advertising. Calvin Coolidge was right when he told editors in 1925, “the business of America is business.”
There is no Starbucks anywhere near our town. But a local entrepreneur and his wife started Tunnel City Coffee three decades ago and it is now the de facto Third Place for Williamstown residents to meet and mingle.
You may have heard the term “Third Place” before. It was coined in 1991 by a University of West Florida author and social scientist Ray Oldenburg in the first of two books, the second published in 2002. His theory is that healthy communities -- and people -- thrive when there are abundant places to gather and gossip - not just homes or work places, but Third Places such as coffee shops. As well as parks, union halls, churches, playgrounds, affinity groups and favorite bars and diners --
(SLIDE: LIBRARY COFFEE SHOP)
and even bookstores and libraries. The hollowing out of local employers and retailers, and the associated suppliers, have shrunken the Third Place opportunities, which Oldenburg saw as critical meeting places for all types of communities within the broader geographic community.
When I discovered Oldenburg’s work ago I called him and talked about the origins of journalism in British coffeehouses. Experts such as Harvard’s Robert Putnam, writing in his 2001 book, "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” also see a link between active news consumption and active civic involvement at the local level.
NURTURING THE FACE TO FACE
Betsy and I were so wrapped up in getting The Advocate out each week, we had to struggle to make time for much else. In the newsroom and the sales office -- and in our personal lives -- we nurtured face-to-face personal relationships. I learned that my barber, Roger St. Pierre, was the brother of Joe St. Pierre, who worked the U.S. post office customer counter down the street.
(SLIDE: JAMIE AND DALE)
Among our best friends in the 1980s were Jamie and Dale Ott, the husband-wife duo that ran Clarksburg Baking Company, a luscious bread, muffins, cookies, brownie and shop coffee shop across the street from our office. Jamie and Dale’s families were multi-generational natives -- plumbers, auto dealers and health-care workers. Deeply political and musical, too. There was lots of gossip to verify from Jamie, Dale and their bakery patrons.
(SLIDE: FRONT PAGES)
(SLIDE: GREYLOCK ECONOMY WORKING GROUP)
To fulfill the publisher role, we would help organize economic forums, Board of Trade dinners, and charity fund-raisers, and buy tickets to Williamstown Theatre Festival premiers. If we had children at that time we would have been embedded in school functions. We went out of our way to do our personal business with our local advertisers -- Amazon didn’t exist and even Wal-Mart wasn’t nearby at that time.
ENDURING RELATIONSHIPS -- AND DIVERSITY
People stick around Williamstown because they like it. So relationships endure over time across politics and socio-economic subgroups. This means we are all in the same little fishbowl together and when one of us dirties the water, everyone has to swim in it. The news sources . . . locally owned businesses, our auto mechanic, doctors, teachers, seamstress, baker, bookstore manager, plumber, Realtors, lawyers . . . all knew us as people -- not revenue targets. The last dollar is less important than the enduring relationship, because in a rural area, if you burn a bridge there may not be another easy way across the river. It seemed to us that enduring relationships could build a secure, vibrant and caring social fabric.
And diversity, too.
(SLIDE: PRECINCT SIGNS)
Tolerance of diversity extends to the New England Town Meeting form of government, which Williamstown observes through an elected, five-member Board of Selectmen. But the town charter requires they get budget, zoning and major policy approvals at an annual “Town Meeting” each May. At Town Meeting, every single town resident is entitled to attend and vote.
(SLIDE: STAN’S ESSAY)
Lawyer Stan Parese, in his 10th and final year as elected “moderator” of Williamstown Town Meeting, delivered in 2010 an inspired and eloquent ode to “experiencing freedom” by practicing respect and tolerance for different spoken opinions and “treasuring everyone’s right to speak.” He admonished citizens: “We don’t attack one another because we have differing points of view . . . [so] speak to the substance of the issues. Leave any feelings you have about other people out of it. As a rule of thumb, if you find yourself about to say someone’s name, you are probably on very thin ice.”
FACEBOOK AND FACE-TO-FACE
If only Facebook would enforce such simple decency. It is easier to do so if you live in a place where, over many years, your neighbor and friend . . . will vote in opposition to you on one issue . . . and join in your support of the next one . . . all in public and all forgiven. Because the personal relationship endures beyond the ephemeral issue -- because you see and talk to each other face-to-face, regularly.
During and since we sold The Advocate, the challenge to maintain civility and tolerance has become much harder, because so much of our interactions are now digital, not face-to-face, with fewer smiles, frowns, and spontaneous chatter. The complexion of community as a concept has had to evolve. Facebook groups, Front Porch Forum, NextDoor-dot-com and Twitter are less-dimensional substitutes, but useful in some contexts.
COMMUNITY ANCHORS IN DECLINE
(SLIDE: BOWLING ALONE)
Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” talks about the importance of providing social structure . . . and helping to build trust, co-operation, bonding, bridging and linking. Beside’s Oldenburg’s theory of Third Places, other sociologists such as the Harwood Institute for Community Innovation talk about community anchor institutions which help.
(SLIDE: SPRAGUE ELECTRIC)
When Betsy and I arrived in 1983 in Williamstown, there were at least three major “community anchors.” The largest was Sprague Electric Co., with 1,800 employees -- next door in North Adams, followed by Williams College, with another 1,900 faculty and staff, and the North Adams Regional Hospital, with about 530 workers. Beyond that . . . were at least a half dozen other factories employing many hundreds more making plastics, military hardware, textiles, photo papers, wire and cable.
Within 25 years, all of them but Williams College would be gone.
Sprague Electric’s owning family had lived in Williamstown but sold to a conglomerate in the early 1980s. Its executives (all men) and their wifes supported and populated numerous community boards and charities. So did executives and spouses of doctors at the hospital and from the other manufacturers.
It was a three-side community triangle -- first Sprague’s . . . then the college . . . and finally the hospital. Their faculty, staff, and executives stepped up and volunteered to lead civic organizations. Unaffiliated “townies” and merchants were relegated off a bit to the side. With three anchor institutions and several smaller ones, there was a thriving milleur of VFW parades, the Visiting Nurse Association, a garden club, League of Women Voters, volunteer town-government boards and commissions, the Community Chest, scouting, and after-school sports. These and other community nonprofits had plenty of volunteers.
Thirty years later, these things generally still exist, but are reduced in scope and people power and rely heavily on Williams staff and retired alumni.
RECALLING THE THREE-ANCHOR COMMUNITY
(SLIDE: KATHY MILNE)
Last week I caught up with Kathy Milne . . . who grew up in Williamstown but left for college and never came back. She is a public-high-school English and drama teacher in Norwalk Conn. Her parents are both dead. She and her only sibling held onto the family home in Williamstown. Now at age 65 she is getting ready to retire -- back to that house.
As a child and teen, Milne always felt like neither a townie nor a college clique member, fully. Williams College, she feels, as the dominant community anchor, has opened up more to the broader community. That community is comprised of an increasing number of retired Williams alums and other city-dwellers with post-COVID, Internet-enabled, work-from-home capability.
Milne is anxious about where she will fit in as an independent retiree. When she was growing up, there were three big informal communities from which she drew teen-age friends -- Sprague executive families, families of college faculty and staff, those from the ranks of hospital executives and doctors. She recalls: “It made for really a democratic kind of situation. But there were cliques.”
Kathy’s dad’s name was George K. “Hap” Milne. He was a child prodigy church vocalist who held various jobs, retiring as a security officer at Williams. Kathy’s mom, Zita was the office manager of the PR office of Williams College. After his Williams retirement, Kathy’s father Hap came to work with Betsy and me at The Advocate, taking charge of a team circulating up to 18,000 copies of paper each week. He worked with his black mutt dog Fred and wrote a column of homilies and light-hearted observations called “Fred and Me.” He once distributed round white lapel pins on his delivery route.
(SLIDE: HAP WHOA STICKER)
They referred to town and gown, with bold type declaring, “WHOA -- We Help One Another.”
“They were your paper boys -- and ambassadors,” Kathy said of her dad and dog Fred. [And delivering] really saved him, my dad. It gave him a whole new lease on life. And gave everyone a perspective. He delivered to Vermont, to down county, and kind of connected us with the rest of Berkshire County as well. So I don't know what's doing that now. It seems like it's so impersonal now. You had a connection with people and ultimately a further connection through words . . . we needed some alternate sources of communication here. But you [and Betsy] carried it further in that you really were [outsiders] embracing and investigating the town from an outside perspective . . . And then you gradually became part of it.”
The loss of our community anchors created an opportunity for the newspaper, and we stepped in, with the help of people like Kathy Milne’s dad, Jamie and Dale at the Clarksburg Baking Company and a cadre of gifted and generous writers.
Why we decided to sell
(Our now-very-adult children came along just before and a year after after we sold The Advocate. Just as Kathy Milne calls Williamstown home -- Christopher, 30, a writer and environmentalist in graduate school in Montana and Eliza, 28, a singer-songwriter and Brooklyn-base piano teacher -- still think of Williamstown as home -- from hours spent trolling the rushing brook alongside our house, to starring in elementary and high-school plays and after-school ski-racing and soccer.)
A RECESSION, A CHILD AND THE INTERNET
Betsy and I, and our other local shareholders, were stewards of The Advocate from 1983 to 1992. The decision to sell in 1992 was evolutionary. There were three triggers, and a fourth event which then validated our decision.
(SLIDE: ANARCHIST ARREST)
I decided it was time to make a change. We listed the paper with a broker, told our colleagues but asked them to keep the decision confidential, and quickly had interest. We sold it to an independent local publisher -- Ellen Bernstein -- who, like us, left suburban New York for The Berkshires lifestyle. We moved on, no longer the Citizen Kanes of a small town and region. After a six-month breather, I began commuting 90 minutes daily as executive editor of a small group of weeklies owned by an old friend two counties away. After nine years, Bernstein sold the paper to a savvy non-publisher entrepreneur, Ozzie Alvarez. He ran it for several more years before selling it to his competing -- then-chain-owned -- Berkshire Eagle. Before doing so, he started up iBerkshires, a local online digital news service that was one of the first of its genre in the United States. The Eagle published The Advocate until 2014, and then folded it.
THE OPERA HOUSE
(SLIDE: THE OPERA HOUSE)
It was after we had put the paper up for sale in 1992 that a story unfolded that helped divorce us from of our nine-year marriage to The Advocate and our Citizen Kane role as community stewards.
The historic Waterman and Moore Opera House --
(SLIDE -- OPERA HOUSE DANCE)
for most of 100 years a fixture of the town’s performance and entertainment history was then serving as a lumber-yard office. But in 1991, Williams College contracted to purchase it from Taconic Lumber Inc. In a collaboration with the Williamstown Savings Bank, the college wanted the lumber-yard property to build a large-footprint multistory studio art building. The bank wanted more parking.
(SLIDE -- OPERA HOUSE REQUIEM)
Despite community efforts to move and restore the Opera House, Williams razed it. We had editorialized to save it, observing that it could be the only large meeting and performance space not controlled by Williams College. At the time and since, reminded me of the scene in the 1974 film drama “Chinatown” where Jack Nicholson watches his colleague be gunned down by agents of a water and real-estate baron played by John Huston. “Forget it Jake -- it’s Chinatown,” Nicolson was told by one of Huston’s stooges.
Williamstown’s only remaining community anchor had made a decision, and that was it. The newspaper’s voice didn’t matter. But 30 years later, people still tell Betsy and me how much they miss the paper -- many of them “Williams people.” So, the paper did matter, and so can community-building news organizations.
FINDING COMMUNITY -- 2022
Fast forward briefly to 2022. The media/community building function now extends to social media to organize around issues.
(SLIDE: BILAL ANSARI)
Bilal Ansari is assistant vp of campus engagement at Williams and the school’s Muslim community chaplain. He’s running for selectman right now in part because last year the Williams Record student newspaper broke a shocking story about our police department. One police department officer had filed a civil-rights suit blowing the whistle highlighting an alleged pattern of racial insults and discrimination against people of color going back more than a decade. For that decade, one fellow officer had posted a photo of Hitler in plain view on his police station locker - a joke, he said.
(SLIDE: HITLER BLOG POST)
The story went national. Selectmen reacted.
(SLIDE: BILAL ANSARI)
They endorsed formation of a Diversity Inclusion and Racial Equity citizen panel. A separate Racial Justice Anti Racism Group formed. Because of COVID, virtual meetings and vigorous debate took place on Facebook Groups and by email -- going beyond and informing news coverage. In time, our police chief, the complaining officer and the town manager were all forced to resign. The town appears tremendously more thoughtful about racial equity now. Yet Ansari says he still prefers to avoid going walking or driving at night, even in our small town, because he’s a black man.
The next chapter -- day care encounter
I’ve told you about how a community thrives by F2F connections, how that can be helped by a newspaper and more recently by social media. I won’t dwell here on the macro changes of newspapers’ decline . . . accompanied digital media growth and innovation on the web . . . and aggregation of advertising among a handful of big tech platforms. I had moved on in 1993 as executive editor of a chain of weeklies owned by an old friend 70 miles from Williamstown. Now my insight after Brian Coan’s president-threatening Internet message was now proving correct. The Internet was growing fast and I was determined to be part of figuring how it would carry the news. In 1994, I registered the domain name “Newshare.com.” (Here’s our 1995 home page).
(SLIDE -- NEWSHARE HOME PAGE)
Dropping off our now 2-year-old son at pre-school one morning in 1994, I met and talked with another drop-off parent, the wife of a web technologist at UMass-Amherst. The two families had dinner. He and I continued to meet, envisioning a personalized content-sharing service among publishers funded by a microaccounting innovation. He and a third collaborator began coding it -- and I and others tried to interest newspaper publishers.
Uniformly in 1994, the publishers believed advertising was all they needed to capitalize on the web. They offered their digital stories for free, and refused to try and charge for content. They saw no reason to collaborate with competing publishers. The Newshare idea was premature, I learned. It would be for at least two decades.
(SLIDE -- Densmore Associates patent story)
After filing and (by 2008) obtaining a patent with David Oliver and Michael Callahan, I moved on to research and consult on how to help newspapers with reinvention. This led years later to a major grant to start The Media Giraffe Project in 2005 hosted by UMass-Amherst’s journalism program. Our goal was to “find and spotlight people making innovative use of digital media to foster participatory democracy and community.” We profiled hundreds of such “media giraffes” and ran a 300-person conference, “Democracy & Independence: Sharing News and Politics in a Connected World” in 2006.
(SLIDE -- REYNOLDS JOURNALISM INSTITUTE)
This led to an academic year residential fellowship and ongoing work to the present for the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. At our 2011 class reunion I reconnected with Graf.
(SLIDE -- YOURSTREAM)
About two years later, after leaving ABC News, Graf asked me to help him develop a next-generation personalized, news-aggregation service. . YourStream may yet help some small-town news organizations.
(SLIDE -- ITEGA.ORG)
Most recently, I helped set up the 501(c)3 nonprofit Information Trust Exchange Governing Association, to help address problems with web identity, privacy and news sustainability.
When Graf suggested thinking about losing and finding community, I was drawn to a bankers’ box underneath a bed at our house. In it, in 1992, we placed a few copies of the Advocate issues we were most proud of over those nine years. Two things particularly struck me as I looked through them last week.
(SLIDES -- FOUR TOTAL)
The handout available to you all includes other examples of topics we covered in the 1980s that remain current -- the cost of day care and rent, good health, environment and toxics, college sex and assault, watchdog reporting on town affairs . . . and the challenge of being a person of color even in an elite college town.
If you want to read a version of this talk, with lots of links, as well as an extended discussion the hollowing out of Berkshire County journalism, you can find that at:
https://billdensmore.wordpress.com/exeter
And there are some archive copies of the paper, too.
I’d like to offer the floor over to our classmate Chris Alberti because he, like Kathy Milne, grew up in Williamstown.
Chris what do you recall about the three anchors -- Sprague, Williams and the hospital? And what about the rest of us, what do we remember about the “community” of our childhood. What of it exists today? And how do you think the changes in news and social media are affecting it? Do you know the names of your neighbors today? Do you want to? For each of us, there are certain things only a community can provide. What are those, for you?
END OF TALK
OUTTAKES
The Times Opinion/Siena College poll found that 46 percent of respondents said they felt less free to talk about politics compared to a decade ago. Thirty percent said they felt the same. Only 21 percent of people reported feeling freer, even though in the past decade there was a vast expansion of voices in the public square through social media.
Chart is from:
New York Times Editorial board op ed:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opinion/cancel-culture-free-speech-poll.html
“America has a free speech problem”
Survey is from a NY Times Siena College Research Insitute poll taken in February
The New York Times/ Siena College Research Institute February 9-22 2022 1,507 United States Residents Age 18+ MOE +/- 3.1%
Also see:
The Future of Community in the United States
Alaina Harkness for the Knight Foundation, Dec., 2019
https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Future-of-communities_Full-2-2.pdf
“What is the most important trend that will transform how Americans think about community over the next decade?” . . . Drivers of Change: “The characteristics and composition of the people. Technologies that enable communication and connection. The landscape, including the natural and built environments. The institutions that provide structure, stability, and boundaries for our . . . interactions.”
PEW RESEARCH:
https://knightfoundation.org/reports/free-expression-in-america-post-2020/