Small New England newspapers make Editor & Publisher's annual, renamed list of 10 News Publishers That Do it Right

A theater in scenic downtown Keene, N.H., is the headquarters for Radically Rural, which uses several venues nearby.

A New Hampshire newspaper that started a "Radically Rural" symposium and a Vermont alternative weekly known for investigations and deeply reported features are on Editor & Publisher magazine's annual list of "10 News Publishers That Do It Right," formerly "10 Newspapers That Do It Right."

The Keene Sentinel was recognized for establishing, with the local Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship, Radically Rural, a two-day symposium that features expert speeches and panel discussions on several tracks, a networking event, local food and beverages, and live music. "More than 600 people from 26 states attended all parts of Radically Rural in 2019, a significant increase from the first year," Evelyn Mateos reports for E&P. The next one will be Sept. 23-24.

Sentinel President and Chief Operating Officer Terrence Williams told Mateos that sponsorships, ticket sales and ad revenue are split evenly with the Grimes center, which continues a networking event that gave birth to the symposium. The six program tracks last year were arts and culture, entrepreneurship, journalism, land and community, Main Street, and renewable energy.

"With the nearest airport located two hours away, Williams said if people want to attend the summit they have to be committed," Mateos writes, quoting him: “We can’t be one of those things where we only marginally produce something, it has to be contemporary, it has to be seen as—if not cutting edge—then at least on the leading edge of the issues that are affecting each of the tracks.”

Seven Days of Burlington, Vt., which has a large rural audience, made the list for building on a very personal piece of citizen journalism to take an in-depth look at Vermont's opioid epidemic, Mateos reports:

"In October 2018, Seven Days published an obituary for Madelyn Linsenmeir, a young, local mother who had died of causes related to opioid-use disorder. Shortly after it was published, her obit went viral with more than a thousand comments and about 4 million views online—most likely because the obit had been written by Linsenmeir’s own sister, Kate O’Neill," a former Seven Days proofreader. The paper offered her a new job: "spend a year writing about the epidemic that had killed her sister."

“Kate could write about this in a way that our journalists couldn’t,” Publisher Paula Routly said. “She was able to portray her sister with sensitivity and enough specificity and empathy. You could really understand the predicament. That seemed like a unique perspective that none of our reporters had really managed to tap into and that seemed like a very important part of understanding the problem.”

O’Neill’s series, “Hooked: Stories and Solutions from Vermont’s Opioid Crisis," started in January 2019. It examined "how Vermonters became addicted to opioids and how the epidemic drives sexual exploitation," Mateos reports. There were six stories (at about 12,000 words each), which garnered about 100,000 pageviews with an average time spent of six to seven minutes per page. . . . Seven Days created a companion website called All Our Hearts, which launched last September, to find more stories of those lost to opioids. Through the website, families can submit a form describing their loved one, and someone from the paper will follow up to do an interview." More than 50 have posted.

Others on the list of 10 were The Arizona Republic, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Financial Times, Nevada's Greenspun Media Group, Argentina's La Voz del Interior, the Salt Lake Tribune and WKMG-TV of Orlando.

The News-Gazette of Champaign, Ill., earned an honorable mention for inviting more than 300 high-school athletes to its office for its "Faces of the Fall" project. "Students—nominated by their schools and dressed in full uniform—received a News-Gazette business card designed and produced in-house that each participant scanned with their cellphone to connect with the paper on social media," E&P reports. "About 70 students were invited to record radio spots promoting programming on News-Gazette Media’s three stations. Another 150 students went in front of the newsroom’s green screen and created GIFs for social media channels. Professional portraits were also published online and ran in the print edition each day through the season. The entire experience was filmed, and the video made available at news-gazette.com."