An Important Message from The Record

The Record Board plans to suspend print edition and go all-digital to keep The Record viable, more timely and more relevant.

Editor’s note: Please take our survey to help make this site better. Click here for the survey link. Only a few minutes of your time will help us immensely. Thanks.

Readers,

The Hinesburg Record has been a vital part of our community since June Giroux and Frankie Birdsall launched it from June’s kitchen table in 1987.

From the beginning it has always been a community project, staffed and funded by volunteers and local advertisers – with a focus on the people and events of our town – dedicated to providing timely and accurate information to deepen understanding and community engagement.

As the world changed around us, every month, The Hinesburg Record would arrive in our mailbox, full of community news. The long list of people who have helped bring out The Record has grown over the years, but the basic structure of the paper has not. Thanks to a small, dedicated staff and volunteers – Kevin Lewis, Cathy Ryan, Mary Jo Brace, and Laurie Wedge – the paper has regularly come out each month.

However, as the world changes, we also believe The Record needs to change to remain an essential part of our community. You may have already noticed some changes in our beefed-up weekly newsletter and news reports that cover town issues.

The first and largest change we are pursuing is to stop printing a monthly newspaper and focus all the energy and resources on timely newsletters, deeper substantive stories and an expanded web community news site.

There are solid reasons for this: most news is now consumed online, printing the paper consumed about 75 percent of our annual budget, and because of problems with the post office – delivery of The Record is unreliable. Many residents get The Record 10 days to two weeks after it is supposed to arrive. By going all-digital we can expand our core mission of providing trustworthy and timely information about our community to the people of Hinesburg. The Record will be stronger and more relevant.

Already we have 885 subscribers to our weekly newsletter (free sign-up at hinesburgrecord.org; just type in your email and ‘Skip’ the rest until you get to our home page). We have high click-through rates, timely information, calendar info and much more.

Some other advantages of going all-digital include:

• The Record can do much more with images as well as introduce audio, digital stories and video, all appealing features for you, our readers;

• We can expand our new feature, Oral Histories, so that you can meet your neighbors and learn more about them with stories they tell in their own voice;

• By incorporating chat and posing to you queries on how you feel about issues – on a real-time basis – we can deepen reader involvement and commitment, and better inform our town leaders;

• Our new site, which saves us $750 a year, is easy to navigate.

The most significant change will be that by going all-digital, we can present information in a more timely fashion and will no longer be constrained by deadlines that force us to publish information that is four to six weeks old. In this way we can be a more important part of the community and reach a broader spectrum of our town.

The board is headed for this change because we believe it is the right thing to do to both improve the paper and to make it viable and sustainable in the years ahead. We know that many people love the feel and look of a printed newspaper. We do also. We know, too, that there will be some loss of identity without a printed copy. We do not undertake this change lightly, but we firmly believe it is a necessary step for The Record to meet its mission.

We welcome your thoughts on how we can make this change as effectively as possible for you. Please take a few minutes to fill out our survey or let any of us know directly. (Use your cell phone to access the survey via the QR code or go to hinesburgrecord.org for a direct link.)

We want to recognize and applaud the amazing staff (who volunteer all or most of their time) who have enabled us to bring The Record to this point from a place of strength.

Thank you to Kevin Lewis, Mary Jo Brace, Cathy Ryan, Laurie Wedge and our most recent editor, Geoff Gevalt.

Sincerely,

The Hinesburg Record Board of Directors
Ginny Roberts, Dorothy Schnure, Thomas Giroux and Richard Watts

Tell Us What You Think

We would love you to take the quick Record Reader Survey to tell us how you feel about our intended changes and how we can make this site better. Click this link or, if you are on a cell phone, you can click on the QR reader below.

And if you haven’t signed up for this weekly email and to participate on our site: