Letter from the Publisher

One should not take the helm of a 165-year-old institution without a sense of history and humility, and so I arrived this week to take up my new post as publisher of the Vineyard Gazette with a healthy dose of both.

I am not a stranger to the Vineyard; nor, however, am I a native or even a long-term summer visitor. It was helpful to be a New Englander and an “island person” when the blue weekend skies turned gray on Monday and a blustery spring wind canceled the ferries for most of Tuesday. Others might have felt stranded. A refugee from the over-connected outside world, I felt a brief, irrational moment of bliss: “Nobody can find me here!”

It will take some time, I know, for me to get acquainted with my new home and for others to begin to get comfortable with me. I needed a map to locate Sengekontacket Pond, and still haven’t dared pronounce it aloud. I’ve had to develop a cheat sheet to remind myself of organization titles and agency acronyms. I am slowly putting faces with names and trying to mentally cross-reference these with the many facts and stories I have read and heard. I have yet to experience a full cycle in the life of this newspaper, which has its own particular weekly rhythms. I’m impatient to know more than I do, but try as I might, I can only absorb so much information in a handful of days.

So it was with great relief to discover that I had arrived on the Island just in time for something I understand: town meeting season.

Don’t get me wrong: I still have only a cursory knowledge of the specific warrant issues that six of our towns are grappling with starting next week. Libraries, wastewater, land acquisition. But I do know that local budgets, here and elsewhere, are under pressure as never before. And I know, in great procedural detail, exactly how citizens in small New England towns decide how to divvy up the pie, and how that process can occasionally become a food fight.

My first job out of college was working for what is now called the Massachusetts Municipal Association. There I edited the Handbook for Massachusetts Selectmen, a guide to selectmen’s legal and administrative responsibilities that has been updated several times since. Writing that guide helped me understand how things are supposed to work; talking to town officials and attending town meetings showed me how they work in practice. I turned to journalism almost 30 years ago, but my interest in and affection for how communities work remains.

Much has been written about the town meeting form of government. Many have argued it is inefficient, outmoded and more likely to provoke controversy than to encourage compromise. I could find plenty of examples from my own experience to support that point of view. Town meetings can be long. They can be dull and repetitive. They can be maddening.

But I love the messiness of democracy in action, and I love a town meeting. I love the theatre and the rough-and-tumble of it, the way it brings out the best and worst in people, sometimes in a single speech, how it surfaces a community’s competing priorities, enables anyone and everyone to be heard, requires neighbors to talk and argue in a structured setting and forces people to consider and confront real choices. I love the way it reflects a community’s values and sometimes redefines them. I only regret that I’ll have to choose among four town meetings to attend next week.

To me, a great community newspaper does all year long what a town meeting does in the early spring. It is a place where the key issues of the day are identified and discussed, where people can express their opinions clearly, but civilly. It should be entertaining and informative and educational and uplifting. And ultimately it should try to bring out the best in its community.

Much as town meetings are often decried as archaic, so the death knell of community newspapers has been sounded again and again. There is little question that the traditional newspaper model needs to adapt to the way people want to get information today, but the purpose of a community newspaper that Edgar Marchant saw, that Henry Beetle Hough embraced and the Reston family carried on is as relevant now as it ever was.

Jerry and Nancy Kohlberg want the Vineyard Gazette to be a resource and a voice for the many communities of interest that make up Martha’s Vineyard for the years to come, and I’m privileged to have been chosen to lead that effort. This week I met the exceptional men and women of the Gazette who are going to work with me to fortify and reinvigorate and maybe reinvent a great institution. Over the next weeks and months, I and others on the Gazette staff will be getting out into the community, meeting and talking to people who live and work and own businesses here, and find out how we can serve you better.

Like town meetings, the Gazette won’t always make you happy. Even the most reasonable people will always disagree on what is news and how it gets reported. What I will endeavor to do as your new publisher is make sure everyone with a legitimate viewpoint and a civil tongue gets a fair hearing, and that the issues that we all must deal with are represented as fairly and thoroughly as possible.

I await your thoughts, suggestions, insights and, yes, even gripes.

— Jane Seagrave