Here we are, Upper Valley. It’s time to send off 2019.
There will no doubt be plenty of reporting to do in the year ahead, with stones to turn over and storylines to tie up. What does the future look like for old West Lebanon, Westboro Rail Yard and the River Park development? How will Hartford voters at Town Meeting respond to the debate over whether police should be prohibited from sharing a person’s immigration status with the feds? Will Dartmouth College move ahead with plans for a biomass heating plant, or will it pursue an alternative in the face of detractors who say it’s not green enough? Can we go a year without a box truck smacking a covered bridge? (My prediction: no.)
Here in the newsroom, we head into 2020 looking a little different than we did in 2019, and quite a bit different from the start of 2010. The newspaper is a different shape, and we communicate to you on the page using a different design. We overhauled our website, a behemoth compared to what we had 10 years ago. Our newsroom — still located here in West Lebanon, alongside our colleagues in the advertising and circulation departments — has shrunk by more than a third over the decade, but over the past year we’ve welcomed a few new faces, and we’ve restructured our day to work new kinds of shifts. We collectively developed a new mission statement — to connect, engage, inform and give voice to our Upper Valley neighbors — and identified our primary values, including accuracy, fairness, independence and quality. We’ve applied for grants and even won one (from Report for America, who, with community support, will help us bring year-long reporting and photography positions to the newsroom starting in June) and I met a couple hundred readers during forums at libraries, arts spaces and meeting halls.
Our deadlines are earlier than they were a year ago, and we have to think about stories in new ways, too: If we can’t get a story in the paper on a given night because of our deadlines or resources, how can we roll the ball forward the following day? How can we regionalize and contextualize issues? What do we do best? What can we do that nobody else in the Upper Valley can?
Samuel Morey Elementary fourth-grade teacher Leah Wolk-Derksen sends a text to the teacher who has taken over her class at the school in Fairlee, Vt., from her home in Norwich, Vt., on March 13, 2019. Wolk-Derksen is currently out on unpaid sick leave after dealing with multiple sinus infections, and upper respiratory infections since she began teaching at the school in September. (Valley News – Jennifer Hauck) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com.
The turn of the year is a good time to review our work and a great time to make lists, and to help answer those last two questions, I looked at two groupings of stories from the Valley News website: those with the most pageviews, and those that people spent the longest time reading.
Take a look at either, and you’ll start to see some themes. As happens nearly every year, the “pageviews” rankings are dominated by hard news, including tragedies and controversies (the exception this year being the No. 1 story). What a dark profession, you might say to yourself, that surrounds itself with such unpleasant material.
Well, yes and no. None of us finds joy in tragedy — another one of our primary values is compassion — but we do believe in the public’s right to know about events happening in their communities, and we take that responsibility seriously. These stories show one of the things we do best: reporting and vetting information fully, even in cases where we’re speedily updating our website.
That includes when Border Patrol opened a checkpoint on Interstate 89 in Lebanon (No. 2) and when a Claremont man allegedly fired hundreds of rounds from his apartment into the neighborhood (No. 5). Misinformation abounded online during those incidents, and we were able to use our teams of reporters, photographers and editors to give readers full, fair and accurate descriptions of what was happening, placed in context.
The following 2019 stories led our pageviews on the Valley News website, which averaged more than 1.5 million total views monthly.
1. “Hanover High graduate eliminated from ‘Jeopardy!’ one day after dramatic win,” Sept. 28 (30,035 pageviews)
2.“Border Patrol checkpoint on Interstate 89 in Lebanon snarls traffic, causes stir,” Sept. 5 (27,050)
3.“Ruger estate in Newport set to be auctioned,” Aug. 21 (24,229)
4.“Ruger estate sells for fraction of list price,” Oct. 18 (23,452)
5. “Police: Claremont suspect in custody following hours of negotiations,” Aug. 15 (21,689)
6.“Red River CEO killed in boating accident in Maryland,” July 5 (19,028)
7. “Toddler dies of exposure outside Newport apartment,” Jan. 14 (18,838)
8. “Dartmouth halts $200 million project after excavation goes awry,” June 27 (18,602)
9.“Patient charged with choking DHMC nurse,” Nov. 25 (14,957)
10.“Arrests made in robbery of Mascoma Bank in White River Junction,” Jan. 8 (14,052)
New Hampshire State Police Trooper Chris Martineau photographs Friday, August 16, 2019, outside the Claremont, N.H., apartment were Michael Burns allegedly fired numerous shots into his Centennial Street neighborhood during a standoff Thursday. (Valley News – James M. Patterson) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com.
The other list — engagement time — is dominated by long, thoughtful and often difficult to report stories. (And in 2019, the top 10 was dominated by Jim Kenyon, who had four columns and an “A Life” on the list, with Valley News sports reporter Tris Wykes filing another two.) Three and a half minutes might not seem like a long time, but try sitting on one webpage for longer than a minute; in the digital world of scrolling and clicking, 60 seconds is an eternity.
This list — and the dozens of other stories just below the top 10 mark — often reflects our own editorial judgment, with most stories published in print on A1 and a few on other section fronts. And it defines what we bring to the Upper Valley in a way that few others can: dedicating hours and hours of people power to tell important stories in our backyards. That includes time spent on phone calls, interviews, traveling to scenes, shooting pictures, editing text and photos, poring over layout and presentation, questioning our assumptions, debating our work, re-thinking and re-casting. They’re stories that broaden our understanding of our neighbors and expand our view of our world.
And in addition to sustaining communities, they’re the kinds of stories that often sustain newspapers. Stories that rack up giant pageview counts inform readers in the moment and keep us at the forefront of their minds. But stories with higher engagement time often convert fly-by readers into long-term subscribers, and the “Digital Pay-Meter Playbook” released by The Lenfest Institute and Harvard’s Shorenstein Center found that a single subscriber is often more valuable, in terms of dollars and cents, to a newspaper than a viral story. For example, a sample case study using typical financial figures showed a single subscriber over the lifetime of an average subscription was as valuable as 48,000 views. (So please subscribe!)
These 2019 stories topped the Valley News website in terms of the average time readers spent on the page. The program we use tracks how often a person clicks or scrolls on an article to make sure she is still reading (and hasn’t left the article open on her laptop while stepping out to walk the dog, for example).
1. “Jim Kenyon: Classroom mold grows into a big problem for teacher at Fairlee school,” March 23 (3.53 minutes)
2. “What Becky Lost, Part 3: A woman’s pleas to regain custody of children fall on deaf ears,” Jan. 5 (3.21)
3. “Jim Kenyon: 42 years later, a fatal Norwich hit-and-run remains a mystery,” July 13 (3.16)
4. “Jim Kenyon: Hartland man’s yard full of scrap turned into a heap of trouble with the state,” Aug. 10 (2.8)
5. “A Coach, a leader, a friend: George Crowe left a lasting impact on Dartmouth hockey,” Jan. 13 (2.73)
6.“Jim Kenyon: Digging into the demise of Hanover’s only Chinese restaurant,” April 13 (2.71)
7. “A Life: James Lee Jenks, 1952 – 2019; ‘You can’t drive a stretch of road in Lyme without pointing out something Jimmy did,’ ” May 19 (2.53)
8. “Upper Valley businesses stung by alleged payroll tax embezzlement scheme,” April 20 (2.46)
9.“Lebanon community center to honor longtime director Jim Vanier,” June 1 (2.46)
10. “Eulogy for a farmer: David Ainsworth had a way about him,” June 14 (2.33)
To all of our readers (and especially our subscribers), we thank you for reading. Here’s to continued dialogue and engagement, new ideas, community support and a factually accurate and well-reported 2020.
Valley News editor Maggie Cassidy can be reached at mcassidy@vnews.com.