Two rural newspaper executives among winners of Yankee Quill Awards from Academy of New England Journalists

Marianne Stanton, The Inquirer and Mirror

Two rural newspaper executives are among the six New England journalists who will receive the Yankee Quill Award next month from the Academy of New England Journalists for contributions to the betterment of journalism in the region. They are Marianne Stanton of the weekly Inquirer and Mirror on Nantucket Island, Mass., and Terrence "Terry" Willliams, president and chief executive officer of the Keene (N.H.) Sentinel.

Stanton has spent more than 40 years at her paper, growing up with it when it was owned by her parents before being sold in 1990. She started as a reporter, became editor, and then publisher. "Under her leadership, the paper has won numerous awards and gained a stellar reputation for its integrity and unwavering belief in the right of people to know what their public officials are doing," the academy says. The paper recently returned to local ownership, with Stanton continuing as editor and publisher.

Terrence Williams, The Keene Sentinel

Williams "is the definition of an accomplished newspaper leader, both as an editor and a publisher," the academy says. "He has been one of New England’s leading publishing executives throughout most of his distinguished 40-year career. His news products have won numerous awards for excellence in journalism and bold revenue solutions. He is an outstanding leader and strong communicator and is regarded as one of the most thoughtful and collaborative publishers in New England."

The other Yankee Quill winners are: Paul Bass, founder, publisher, and editor of the New Haven Independent, one of the country’s leading nonprofit digital news organizations; Tom Condon, former columnist, editorial writer and investigative reporter at the Hartford Courant; Melvin B. MIller, founder, publisher and editor of the Bay State Banner, a weekly for Greater Boston’s African American community; and the late William Monroe Trotter, an early and outspoken 20th-century civil-rights activist who founded the Boston Guardian newspaper.

The inductees were selected in 2021, but the induction ceremony was postponed due to the pandemic. The awards will be presented at a luncheon as part of the annual convention of the New England Newspaper and Press Association Friday, April 29, at the Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel.

A rural Mass. town deals with development: "Any time you make changes folks get skittish"

Change has come slowly to Marion, Mass., but more is coming, and the town is planning for it, reports Paul Kandarian for The Boston Globe. The town of 5,000 year-round residents is located near Buzzards Bay on Route 6, which "has seen some significant additions that have already begun changing the character of rural Marion," Kandarian writes.

(Map by Bing) Marion just got a drive-through Dunkin' Donuts, which "required a nearly 10-year battle," and more such developments are expected. Tom Magauran, vice chairman of the Planning Board, explains some of the decisions the town is facing. "We’re proposing a bylaw at spring Town Meeting that calls for all general structures on Route 6 to be two stories, to be consistent with the area.” The bylaw would provide tax incentives under a proposed Neighborhood Overlay District, he said, and would take a two-thirds majority to pass. "Any time you make changes, folks get skittish."

The other big, recent openings in Marion, all within a mile of one another, are a new police station and Little Neck Village, a senior housing development. Cumberland Farms, which owns two convenience stores at the corner of Route 6 and Front Street, wants to raze one of them and replace it with a store twice as large. That project is in litigation after the Planning Board rejected it. (Read more)

Foreclosures spread beyond Mass. urban areas

A recent study by the Massachusetts Housing Partnership has found that more home foreclosures are outside the state's urban areas than in them. Jennifer B. McKim writes for the Boston Globe, "The shift of foreclosures from cities to outlying areas indicates that the sluggish economy and a lingering high unemployment rate, not subprime loans and predatory lending, have become the main reasons people lose their homes."

In small towns, foreclosed homes are spread across the community which makes the problem less obvious. That means public policy makers must find regional solutions instead of focusing on particular streets, said Clark Ziegler, executive director of the Massachusetts Housing Partnership. "In a lot of these more suburban and rural places, it is difficult to know what policy interventions will make a difference, short of seeing employment go up,"  Ziegler told McKim.

Massachusetts communities are trying to adjust to the situation. Ashburnham, for instance, is auctioning about 100 properties that were taken for unpaid taxes, even though the town recently approved a tax amnesty program. The town ranked third on the recent Massachusetts Housing Partnership list of municipalities with high rates of problem properties. A year earlier, it was 107th on the list. The value of municipal real estate in Ashburnham dropped from $696 million to $606 million in the last year, forcing officials to raise the property tax rate by about 6 percent, to $17.15 per thousand dollars of valuation, writes McKim. (Read more)

Mass. loser Coakley won the rural and urban vote; Brown won on strength of conservative suburbs

Republican Scott Brown won the Massachusetts U.S. Senate special election Tuesday and dealt a serious blow to the Democratic health-care reform bill, but he didn't win on the strength of the rural vote. Democrat Martha Coakley, the state's attorney general, won the counties with both the most rural and urban populations, while Brown rode victories in the more suburban counties to victory, the Daily Yonder reports.

In the five counties with more than 20 percent of their population living in rural areas, (Nantucket, Hampshire, Berkshire, Franklin and Dukes), Coakley won 64 percent of the vote, and in the most rural county, Dukes, she won by more than 2 to 1, the Yonder reports. Brown did fare better in the five rural counties than Republican presidential candidate John McCain, getting 36 percent to McCain's 25 percent. (Read more)

Voter turnout was surprisingly high for the special election that many first predicted to be a "sleepy election day," David Abel and David Filipov of The Boston Globe report. More than 2.2 million of the 4.1 million eligible voters cast ballots in the three-way election. "A surge of angry voters looking to upset the status quo flocked to the polls yesterday" led to a strong Republican turnout the reporters write, but "Democrats, who, facing the loss of a seat their party had held for decades, also flocked to the polls." (Read more)

Mass. bill would streamline wind-energy permits

Nearly a third of the wind-energy projects in Massachusetts wind energy projects are on hold because of lawsuits or permit appeals. To help meet the state's energy goals, Gov. Deval Patrick's administration has introduced a bill to streamline the appeals process, David Abel of The Boston Globe reports. Patrick previously said Massachusetts should produce 2,000 megawatts of wind power, enough for 800,000 homes, by 2020, up from its current 9 megawatts.

“For us to see progress, there needs to be a lot more certainty in the permitting process,’’ Ian Bowles, secretary of the state’s Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, tells Abel. “That’s what we’ve heard clearly from the wind industry in order for them to do other significant wind projects in the state.’’

Opponents of the legislation say it give the state too much power and allows developers to steamroll legitimate opposition, based on noise pollution, loss of pristine views, and risks to birds and bats. The director of the Massachusetts chapter of the Sierra Club says he hopes the bill is amended to allow more local input, while some groups that initially opposed it have removed their objection due to more protections for local control in the latest version. (Read more)

Sharp drop in N.E. bat population could hurt crops

Thousands of bats are dying in caves of the Northeastern U.S., and while scientists aren't sure why, they do know that a lack of bats could hurt the area's agriculture, reports Beth Daley of The Boston Globe.

"A mysterious illness is sickening and killing thousands of hibernating bats in New York and Vermont, baffling scientists who fear that tens of thousands more may be dying in abandoned mines and dark caves throughout the Northeast," Daley writes. "Humans are not believed to be at risk from the disease, but the death of large numbers of bats could indirectly affect New Englanders: Bats devour crop pests, midges, and mosquitoes."

Scientists first spotted the disease in Albany, N.Y., in January 2007. By March, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation had found 11,000 bats had died from what scientists dubbed "white nose syndrome," called that "because of a flaky white fungus on the nose of many of the sick and dead bats," Daley writes. (Above, bats afflicted with the illness in a photo by DEC's Nancy Heaslip.) Recently the disease has been spotted in more places, including Vermont, and it has been affecting the Indiana bat, an endangered species. The affected area is growing: sick bats have been found as much as 135 miles apart.

Many labs are searching for answers to the mystery, and the best theory so far is that the disease has been spread by humans since the affected caves are popular with cavers. (Read more) Hat tip to Al Tompkins and his "Morning Meeting" for the link.

Local health board in Mass. backs off manure rules

Only six dairy farms remain in Essex County, Massachusetts, a jurisdiction of 500,000 north of Boston. But when the county Board of Health proposed to regulate cow manure, to protect groundwater that supplies the town of Rowley, near the coast (Encarta map), dairy farmers, horse owners and their allies raised quite a stink and prevailed, reports Lynne Hendricks for the Daily News of Newburyport.

"Though the board effectively shelved the proposed regulations from last week and approached this week's meeting in the spirit of compromise, some of those present found it hard not to call attention to the proposed regulations, which they say would severely harm their livelihoods if enacted," Hendricks wrote. Farmer Sam Herrick told the board, "What you're saying you're concerned with now has been our primary concern for 20 years. We've had a manure management plan for the past 10 years." (Read more)

Microbe and the investors who see its potential in ethanol production get noticed by Post

A month ago, The Rural Blog reported on SunEthanol, a biofuels technology company in Amherst, Mass., that is working with a bacterium that converts all sorts of plant matter, including cellulose, into ethanol. The company is using research by University of Massachusetts Amherst microbiologist Susan Leschine, who has made it the focus of her work for the past decade and is the chief scientist at SunEthanol.

This week, The Washington Post ran a story about SunEthanol and its chief investor, VeraSun Energy, which is one of the nation's biggest producers of ethanol. Like so many others, SunEthanol is working hard to try and make cellulosic ethanol a moneymaker, writes Steven Mufson. "At the moment, they have a way to go. Unlike ethanol made from corn, not a drop of cellulosic ethanol is being commercially produced. Half a dozen pilot projects are being built — with the help of $385 million in Energy Department grants — but no one claims to have a sure thing."

Mufson explains that the microbe discovered by Leschine is the key to SunEthanol's future, but to succeed, she and the rest of the startup company must find a way a to move the microbe from the lab to the factory. Just as importantly, they must keep raising money and get more ethanol makers interested in their microbe. (Read more)

Murdoch will probably sell Ottaway Newspapers, industry analysts say

Rupert Murdoch will probably sell the Ottaway Newspapers subsidiary of Dow Jones & Co. because community newspapers are not his line of business, say industry analysts, most recently the editor-at-large of Editor and Publisher. "My guess is, prepare for a sale. It's really not the kind of paper he operates in the United States, or even the kind he operates in Australia or the U.K," Mark Fitzgerald told Sarah Shemkus of the Cape Cod Times, Ottaway's third-largest daily paper, with a circulation of 44,000.

Ottaway publishes eight dailies and 15 weeklies. The dailies are the 80,000-circ. Times Herald-Record of Middletown, N.Y., and The Record of Stockton, Calif., 59,000, both with substantial rural readerships; The Standard-Times of New Bedford, Mass, 32,000; the Mail Tribune of Medford, Ore, 31,000; the Pocono Record of Stroudsburg, Pa., 19,500; the Portsmouth (N.H.) Herald, 12,300; The Ashland (Ore.) Daily Tidings, 5,010; and The Danville (Pa.) News, 2,623. Click here for a list of all Ottaway papers.

Ottaway was once a separate company. Its former chairman, James Ottaway Jr., controls about 7 percent of Dow Jones' stock and was an outspoken opponent of the sale to Murdoch's News Corp. Just as Dow Jones' Wall Street Journal reported forthrightly and comprehensively on the controversial sale, the Times added useful context to its coverage today, running a list of the 17 papers on and near Cape Cod and their owners.

Many industry observers have concluded "that News Corp. is likely to sell off the Ottaway newspapers quickly," Shemkus reports. "Possible suitors could include GateHouse Media, Colorado-based MediaNews Group Inc., and Alabama-based Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., according to Ken Doctor, who leads analysis of the news publishing industry for the California market research firm Outsell Inc." GateHouse, a fast-growing company, has four papers on Cape Cod, where Ottaway has three. CNHI's chief news executive, Bill Ketter, is based in Massachusetts, near most of the Ottaway papers.

One other "rural angle": A top industry analyst "said the dismantling of newspaper dynasties was reminiscent of the disappearance of small farms," report Joseph Menn and Thomas Mulligan of the Los Angeles Times, quoting John Morton: "It's like the farmer who leaves the farm to the family and divides it evenly. A couple of generations go by and all of a sudden you're sitting on an acre."