On Monday, Joshua Benton reported for Nieman Lab that VTDigger was the 17th-most-trafficked nonprofit news website in the U.S., with about 800,000 visits in January, the most recent month for which figures were available. That’s quite an accomplishment for a media outlet operating in a state where, as legend has it, there are more cows than people. (Not actually true.)
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On Wednesday, Digger itself reported that its current fundraising campaign was proving to be a roaring success. The headline: “Donations tripled during final days of VTDigger Spring Drive.”
But all is not well at Digger, founded in 2009 by Anne Galloway after she was laid off by the Rutland Herald. Galloway left Digger in 2022 under circumstances that have long been understood not to be entirely happy. And now Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan has checked in with a detailed story (sub. req.) of turmoil at the widely admired project. “I knew we weren’t doing everything perfectly,” Galloway told Ryan, “but I had tried to do what I could.”
Still, Galloway left about four years ago. The current mishegas, stemming from acrimonious contract negotations with Digger’s union over the usual (pay and benefits) as well as how AI will and won’t be used, is a consequence of what sounds like a poisonous relationship between the two sides.
A new contract was signed Wednesday, reports Kevin McCallum of Seven Days, the Burlington-based alt-weekly that has established itself as that city’s news source of record as Gannett — excuse me, USA Today Co. — has hollowed out the venerable Burlington Free Press. Among other things, the new contract calls for a 33% raise for Digger’s lowest paid employees. As for AI, McCallum writes:
The final agreement contains a number of terms on the future use of generative AI. This includes giving the union 60 days’ notice of any plans to use AI if it will have a “meaningful impact” on the employment of guild members.
The union will also have the right to negotiate AI usage with management, and journalists will be able to withhold their bylines from stories or raise ethical objections to the use of AI in their stories.
Perhaps Digger — Vermont’s largest news outlet — will now have an opportunity to right the ship. As the Globe’s Ryan notes, chief executive Sky Barsch and editor Geeta Anand are both leaving. Anand will teach at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where she was dean before taking the top job at Digger.
There are some interesting Boston Globe ties to this story as well. As Ryan notes, Paul Heintz, now a Globe staff reporter, was Anand’s predecessor. And though Ryan doesn’t mention it, Anand was a reporter at the Globe in the mid- to late 1990s, according to her LinkedIn profile (and to my elephant-like memory). She later worked at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
The new leadership will inherit an operation that, despite the well-earned respect it has earned, has been losing money for several years. Ryan reports that Digger has 30 “staffers,” but I suspect that’s a count of all employees. Digger itself reported having a newsroom staff of more than 20 as of May 2025.
In late 2015 I paid a visit to Vermont to see how three news organizations, VTDigger, Seven Days and Vermont Public Radio (now Vermont Public, combining radio, television and digital) were filling the gap created by the Free Press’ corporate-imposed slide. I wrote about it in my book “The Return of the Moguls” as an example of a decidedly non-mogul media environment.
Among those I interviewed was Heintz, who at that time was a reporter for Seven Days. “Certainly I think that all three of us have become real competitors to the Free Press, and that’s healthy,” he told me. “But we’re responding to fill a void to a certain extent.”
I also dropped in on VTDigger, which at that time was operating out of a converted home near the Vermont state capitol in Montpelier. In 2015, the project had a total of 13 employees, seven of them on the editorial side, and was starting to expand from statehouse reporting into local coverage in underserved parts of the state.
Ellen Clegg and I also interviewed Anne Galloway on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News,” in 2022, not long after she left Digger. “In Vermont, and my experience as an editor, I understood that there was very little enterprise reporting or investigative reporting, and that had been a frustration of mine for at least several years before I started Digger,” she told us. “And so that’s why I went in that direction.”
That need is just as great today as it was when she launched 17 years ago. I hope everyone at Digger can pull together and get back to doing what they do best: holding power to account.
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