The Record to End Print Edition after December
Costs, changing times lead nonprofit to devote all resources to this site and Monday's Weekly Record email newsletter
The Record Staff
It’s official: The December issue will be the last printed edition of The Hinesburg Record.
At its Sept. 9 meeting The Record’s Board of Directors made the formal decision to suspend the monthly printed edition and devote all resources to providing you a weekly email newsletter and timely, thorough news and information on hinesburgrecord.org
The board’s reasoning was highlighted in the September issue:
The Web is where most people now get their news;
the delays in mail delivery exacerbated the fact that the paper’s information was two to six weeks old;
the print issue is expensive and time-consuming; and
hinesburgrecord.org offers opportunities to provide you, audio, digital storytelling, video, slideshows and extensive background materials as well as future opportunities for you to interact with your neighbors.
The future viability of The Record, the board said, requires us to change platforms.
It was a difficult decision.
After announcing its intentions, the board talked more deeply with staff — not everyone was in agreement — and posted a survey. The survey was intended to see what interested you most and to see if there was solid interest in going digital.
You told us that “breaking” or timely Hinesburg news was top on your list. That was followed by your wanting stories about Hinesburg people and about town government. On our new website we’ve already created “My Story” (formerly Oral Histories) — audio stories from local residents as well as quick turnarounds of stories about important meetings and happenings in town.
The survey also indicated that 70 percent of you would shift to online. This was borne out when over 215 of you subscribed to the site — and the Monday morning Weekly Record email — in the 10 days that followed.
We know some of you who love the printed edition are unhappy with the decision. It ends a tradition. A print publication seems more permanent, offers a more tactile experience. Some of you don’t like to read on a screen. And a few of you don’t use email or computers; we are working on a solution and if you are a non-computer person, please call us at 802-482-5625 and leave your name, address and phone number and we’ll be in touch.
All of us at The Record love print, too. It’s just that we love journalism more. And if you think about the original intent of June Giroux and Frankie Birdsall when they founded this organization in 1987 and stacked mimeographed newsletters around town, the mission hasn’t changed: To provide you with useful news and information you can’t get elsewhere.
We believe we can serve you better — with more timely and thorough stories — by shifting platforms.
For the last several years, the newspaper has been assembled each month by four people who’ve worked tirelessly to keep it going. They have done so with little pay but an overriding sense of devotion and commitment to the paper and its purpose. We are lucky to have them.
Going digital will allow them to spread out their work for a more efficient and smoother work flow. Going digital will allow The Record to reinvest the costs of producing, printing and mailing the printed version to provide you more content in a more timely way. Yes, this move will affect advertising dollars, but we are confident that over time we can regain ad content and income.
Going digital also will ensure that hinesburgrecord.org becomes the go-to place for important news and information as we get it and a weekly email newsletter. In essence, The Record is shifting from a monthly to a weekly.
If you haven’t yet been on hinesburgrecord.org, we encourage you to do so. We have instructions (ON PAGE) on how to subscribe to the site — it’s free — or you can simply email editor@hinesburgrecord.org and we’ll sign you up. And, again, we already send out The Weekly Record newsletter every Monday at 6 a.m.
For all of us, this will be an adjustment. We hope that a year from now you will see a vibrant, stronger, more complete news product that helps you better understand the town, its government and its people.
Good decision. It's time.