Publisher of the Martha’s Vineyard Times, Charles Sennott, spoke to the Island’s Rotary Club Wednesday at the PA Club in Oak Bluffs discussing the need for community support to help sustain the Island’s newspaper amid what he called a national crisis in local journalism and truth.
According to a Northwestern University study in 2023, two-and-a-half newspapers are closing a week on average in America and Sennott, founder of the GroundTruth Project and Report for America, is proactively searching for ways to continue supporting the next generation of public service journalism, what he considers to be the first line of defense against big media misinformation.
More locally, Sennott announced to the Rotary Club that next week, the Martha’s Vineyard Times will launch a new campaign to gather support from Islanders — through subscriptions, advertising and donations — with more details to be announced in next week’s print edition.
“Hopefully, through community support we can deepen our community coverage and hear from you about what are the issues we need to cover and how we can best cover them,” Sennott said.
Sennott is thankful for having two newspapers on Island and believes it’s part of the reason it continues to have a well informed community.
“Counties without local news sources, we call these ‘news deserts,’” Sennott told Rotary Club members on Wednesday. “When there is a desert, it’s not that nothing happens — those communities are susceptible to really toxic flows of misinformation and disinformation from the left, the right and all over the place,” he said. “They no longer have people in their community who they trust.”
