The Rotary Club of Martha’s Vineyard gathered in a small knot around the American flag at the Portuguese-American Club in Oak Bluffs yesterday and sang “God Bless America.”
After all the divisiveness and national hand-wringing that has come in the aftermath of the Nov. 5 vote that re-elected Donald Trump as president, this gathering was a simple and beautiful moment that seemed to capture everything about this Island we love.
First, the meeting was taking place in what those who live here know is the coolest club on Martha’s Vineyard: our beloved P.A. Club. It is an unassuming place, far from all the too-expensive restaurants and high-end hotels and fancy summer parties; it is just a place with a good pool table and great music, where real Islanders come together. The club is organized around celebrating the deep history of the Portuguese language and culture on our Island that dates back to the whaling ship days, and which has surged with the influx of Brazilian immigrants, who now make up 20 percent of the year-round population.
Those gathered here yesterday represented some of the very best of the down-home, hard-working, year-round residents of the Island. And when I asked them if they were subscribers to The MV Times, I was proud — but not surprised — to see nearly every hand go up. They were seated at round tables before standing respectfully to sing “God Bless America.” And they punctuated their weekly gathering, as they do every time, with the first principles of the Rotary Club International, which they call “The Four-Way Test:”
- Is it the truth?
- Is it fair to all concerned?
- Will it build goodwill and better friendships?
- Will it be beneficial to all concerned?
As they chanted these questions in unison, I realized this could well be the creed of a good news organization. Each of these four questions forge the nonpartisan ideal of what we at The MV Times try to live up to every day with our daily online coverage and every week through our print edition.
I was invited to share with the Rotarians my work as the publisher of The MV Times, and to offer some history about my work as the founder of the GroundTruth Project, a nonprofit news organization that is the home of Report for America and Report for the World. These two flagship service programs support the next generation of reporters in doing public service journalism in undercovered corners of America and the globe. It is a movement of sorts, and over the past decade we have placed more than 1,000 journalists in the field to do work that enlightens and informs on issues that matter. I’m proud of that global and local work, but these days I am right here on this Island, which my wife and I call home, and where we have extended family. It’s the place our four boys have always regarded as their home base.
What ties these efforts together — building GroundTruth and leading The MV Times — is not just a love for journalism, but a fierce commitment to defending journalism at a time of grave crisis.
Journalism is under attack from all sides. There are extraordinary economic challenges to the business models of traditional journalism in the digital age, at a time when people are dramatically shifting how they get their news. And there are profound challenges to and dramatically eroding trust in the work of journalism, in a time when it seems misinformation and disinformation abound. Amid all of this tumult, there are direct physical and verbal threats to journalists that seem to be escalating.
With the re-election of Donald Trump, advocates for journalism fear a climate of hostility and attacks on a free press, or any journalist who dares to challenge Trump and his followers.
They represent “fake news,” as Trump would cry.
Journalists are “the enemy of the people,” as he has uttered so many times.
In a campaign speech only a week before the election, Trump made glib remarks about the media being shot at, saying, “I don’t mind that so much. I don’t mind that.”
This Trump II presidency puts us on the precipice of a very dangerous moment for journalism. But as important as it is to heighten our awareness of this threat to free speech, it is equally important, perhaps more important, for news organizations to step back and evaluate how this happened. How did journalism lose the trust of its readers and viewers?
After all, the Constitution guarantees the right to a free press, but it does not guarantee that the work of journalists will be trusted. That’s up to us, and we have to win that trust every day. As a journalist with 40 years of experience locally and globally, I have watched the steady erosion of trust in journalism, and I don’t believe we journalists as a tribe have reflected on that sufficiently.
But we must, particularly since the evidence of decline is devastating. Every week since 2005, more than two local newspapers have shut down in America, according to a recent study by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
Amid this bleak, national landscape for local news, I joined as publisher of The MV Times in January at the request of Steve Bernier, the longtime owner of Cronig’s Market, who bought the paper late last year. We are lucky on our Island to have two healthy print news organizations as well as several magazines and two public radio stations that provide news and public affairs. Steve and I, and the whole team at The MV Times, share a commitment to the idea that our news organization provides a necessary public service, and that the Island would be less without robust, competing news organizations.
You will not hear me use the word newspaper very often. We see ourselves as a digital news organization that publishes stories that keep you up-to-date on what is happening on a daily basis. Yes, we offer a print edition weekly, and several other print publications, including Vineyard Visitor and Arts and Ideas, and we are proud of the tradition and journalistic craft that go into them. But “The Minute,” our newly redesigned and improved daily email newsletter, is perhaps our most robust delivery of news to our community, with its 20,000 subscribers. We invite you to subscribe to “The Minute” for free, and jump into coverage by our awardwinning reporters at The MV Times. And most of all, if you are a business owner, we invite you to advertise on “The Minute,” and reach the real Islanders who make up our audience.
As Steve and I are learning the hard way, it is challenging to make a local news organization sustainable these days. Still, we are giving it our best effort, and we will need you, our community, to support this effort by subscribing, if you haven’t already — and if you own a business, by advertising with us (learn more at mvtimes.com/advertise). You can also pledge your support through a donation, which can help us to keep providing the public service of journalism that enlightens and informs our increasingly diverse community.
At a time of deep division and increasing polarization in our country, your local newspaper can provide a binding agent of sorts; it is what holds a community together around a shared set of facts emanating from a trusted source. A local newspaper helps us come together to make good decisions. Our reporters serve as a watchdog over local government, and if we cover the stories fairly and independently, we can help guide important discussions about our future. Our writers can also reveal and celebrate the amazing depth, talent, and diversity of our Island.
As we watch local newspapers die across the country, we see what is left behind in their wake: a more polarized community, a place where corruption can take root, and where voter apathy inevitably sets in. The crisis in local news has everything to do with the crisis in our democracy.
This was the message I shared yesterday at the Rotary Club. And, as I also shared, we are going to call on you, our readers and our wider community, to consider supporting us in our work — not only through your annual subscription, or advertising if you own a business, but through donations to a “sustainer” campaign that we will be launching next week. Please keep an eye out for that, and consider making a donation and becoming a part of community-supported local news where every day we are working around those same framing principles as the Rotary Club:
- Is it the truth?
- Is it fair to all concerned?
- Will it build goodwill and better friendships?
- Will it be beneficial to all concerned?
And as we announced at the gathering, I will return in January (precise date to be announced) to the P.A. Club with my partner, Steve Bernier, where we would like to make ourselves available to our community supporters, and hear from all of you about how we can best serve you and win your trust.
Charles M. Sennott is the publisher of The MV Times and founder and editor-in-chief of the GroundTruth Project.
Please consider making a gift by writing a check to
MV Times — “Sustainer”
Send to: MV Times, 30 Beach Road, Vineyard Haven 02568.
Thank you!
