The fourth estate in the Adirondack-North Country
I attended part of a fascinating gathering yesterday in Blue Mountain Lake: journalists from across the North Country coming together to talk about the challenges of writing and reporting in small, far-flung towns.
The event was organized by the Adirondack Center for Writing and the Blue Mountain Center.
There were some amazing presenters (I’m flu-buggy, so I didn’t get to spend as much time with them as I would have liked) including veteran Will Doolittle (who writes now for the Glens Falls Post Star) and Michael Hill, who works out of Albany but covers a lot of North Country stuff.
Also on-hand was John Warren, who founded the Adirondack Almanack blog.
The journalism world is in freefall these days, but my sense for a while now — re-enforced by yesterday’s gathering — was that our region is experiencing something of a renaissance.
The Post Star just won a Pulitzer. The Adirondack Daily Enterprise has its strongest stable of reporters and editors that I’ve seen in my ten years here.
Regional papers in Watertown and Plattsburgh are devoting a lot of serious reporting time to the Adirondack region.
We also have two brilliant regional magazines — Adirondack Explorer and Adirondack Life — that offer very different reads.
What else? Mountain Lake PBS has one of the most aggressive local production schedules of any small public television station in the country.
We have great commercial radio news teams scattered around the region, along with NCPR and VPR (which does great Champlain Valley coverage).
I’m leaving a lot of folks out — from Denton Publications in Etown to the Malone Telegram — but you get the point.
For a region that boasts a total population well under half a million, that’s a lot of ink being spilled.
What do you think? When you pick up your newspaper in the morning (or tune in your TV or radio station) are you hearing the kind of news that you want? If not, what would you like to see or hear that’s different?
Comment below.
Tags: adirondacks
