Iranian revolution

There's a revolution going on in Iran, aside from the protests. I spent much of the early morning watching the news via Twitter - which is incomplete and sometimes frustratingly vague, but nonetheless exciting. The Twitterers are sidestepping the usual power structures and centralized control of information. Watching the tag : #iranelection brings 200-400 updates a minute, too much to process, and many of them are duplicates. Many of them refer to the BBC web site, Al Jazeera, Reuters, people still depend on trusted news sources. They also need, to some degree, a filter.
At the same time, the people in Iran - despite their reports that the government is shutting down telecommunications - are doing work that is impossible or very difficult for a journalist to do: Western journalists are in lockdown.
How does this relate to Vermont? In our industry, the landscape is changing so fast it's difficult to keep up, and predictions on the future of newspapers/news are hard to trust. We're seeing a revolution in the way information is communicated - from the hourglass shape of the traditional newspaper to the full on multi-connective social networking model. Few people predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall - a landmark event of my childhood. What will I be telling my children about this moment in 20 years' time?
-Rob Mitchell

Sugaring season has begun...for now

It's official. The sap started running about 10 p.m. on Friday night and the season has begun - sugaring season is here, Mud Season is just around the corner. Actually, Mud Season is here on Worcester Road by Curtis Pond in Calais.
The Guv predicted it in this press release from Middlebury College. Grand View Farm has a good report, too - even in the world of blogging and these times of raging electrons, you can still tell sugaring season by the smoke and steam coming from the neighbors' sugar shacks. But it's a bit of a gamble - this might be just a short pre-season, with a predicted cold snap fouling things up next week. To tap or not to tap, that is the question.
One more funny tidbit - to a New Yorker, Vermont is like the French countryside...

-Rob Mitchell

Town Meeting

The staffs of the Times Argus and Rutland Herald worked a long day Tuesday, and were back at it today with follow-up calls to record the votes and events. We reported on communities from Rutland, Barre and Springfield and to Tinmouth, Calais and Chester. This is one of the things that make this state great - everyone gets a say, and everyone is doing it together.
See our town-by-town wrap ups for the Rutland/Southern Vermont here, and for Barre-Montpelier and Central Vermont here. Nearly all school budgets passed, with North Hero in Grand Isle County and Northfield in Washington County two of the exceptions. The debate over Vermont Yankee continues.

We are mourning the loss of our former sports editor, Pete Hartt. He practiced a type of journalism that is usually not mentioned while people mourn the decline of newspapers: local sports journalism. As a local sports editor, Pete carried the lore of our community, not just the points scored or wins and losses, but the memory of families and connections, of the long hours spent on sidelines watching, with a parent or assistant coach, learning about what was really going on off the field. Pete did that with good-humored grace, wise cracks and self-deprecation. He got along with everyone - just last Friday he told me he and his ex-wife had the "best divorce in the state of Vermont" because they got along so well. He was loved by all of us, and he is missed.
-Rob Mitchell

Weekend roundup

News and opinion from around the state.
From the Press Bureau:

Vermont still has many open homicide cases, despite an arrest this week in one of them, the 1982 murder of Pamela Brown. This turn brought some relief to Barre residents, and will no doubt come up in the continuing debate over DNA databanks in Vermont.

The VSEA came back with an alternative plan to cutting more than 600 state jobs, although the details to the counterproposal are still vague.
A report released this week recommends changes to the structure of Vermont's state law enforcement apparatus. This was reported at WCAX, the Burlington Free Press, WPTZ, and the Brattleboro Reformer, but there is not a copy of the report or the summary given to lawmakers available online, even at the State of Vermont's Web site. This report cost $150,000 - shouldn't it be easily available to the public, online, whether you're in Montpelier or in Brattleboro or Newport?

The state's top judge spoke before the legislature on restructuring the system, as the legislation changing the sex offender laws moved forward (and a bill changing statutory rape laws failed). 

On the blogs around the state:

VSAC is coming under scrutiny from Nate Freeman, the Northfield man who ran for lieutenant governor last fall. At issue is a $50 million moral obligation bond to back the publicly chartered entity, which has been fiscally challenged since the failure of the auction-rate bond market last year. Freeman is questioning whether we should put our money behind a student lending corporation that is in trouble.

Over at Green Mountain Daily there's a speculative piece on Deb Markowitz's ambitions and use of Vermont Democratic Party offices. This comes after the state Democratic party head Ian Carleton resigned Friday.

She's Right celebrated a 3-year anniversary this week. The blog's first post was way back in 2006. Blogger Charity Tensel has been opinionating on national issues much more since that first Burlington-centric post, but she brings a fresh perspective to the state blogosphere. We like that her posts are short and to the point, with a nice sense of irony, and as her blog says, "someone's gotta be right around here!". 

-Rob Mitchell

Sustainable Coffee for Vermont

This is either a massive PR push, or a generous act of philanthropy (maybe both), but Green Mountain Coffee Roasters has announced four grants worth $200,000 each to "support work on reducing climate change". Whether that is admirable or a waste of money probably depends on your point of view, but the way that they are doing it - using a kind of wikiproposal site to do it is interesting. The process for applying for a grant begins with submitting your idea on the justmeans.com site, sharing it with your network and then submitting a regular grant application. JustMeans is "where you can talk to companies about their social and environmental impact." We'll be following this to see how it works out - the winners will be announced on Earth Day in April.
If there is any irony in this, it's that one of GMCR's most successful recent products is a one-time-use, disposable coffee system that produces a little package of trash with every cup. It seems like they make up for it in other areas - maybe a kind of "landfill offset" the same way there are carbon offsets.
We buy Vermont Coffee Company coffee here in Rutland, but recently discovered you can order their coffee online, in 2.5-lb bags.  And they have a bag recycling program. Look here for an example of how globalization can benefit communities here in Vermont and abroad.

-Rob Mitchell

USA Spending in the 802

Congratulations to Green Mountain Daily, which just turned three years old. Not five. Three. Which makes it about the same age as Vermont View. They don't pull punches, and the diarists - is that the right term? - are not anonymouses, or at least they have online identifiers. The Vermont blogosphere is inconsistent at best - many blogrolls are outdated, linking to defunct addresses and stale cobweblogs that haven't been updated in months. But GMD is fresh just about every day, and we are proud that they link to us on occasion.
Anyway, while we wait to see what impact the stimulus package will have on the state spending, we have been looking around the Internet to see what we can dig up. There's a great site, usaspending.org, which tracks all federal contracts and grants by state - including the TARP program. They have a pretty cool mashup showing where the TARP money has gone - none of it to Vermont banks, apparently.
-Rob Mitchell

President Barack Obama

I just wanted to write that for the first time.

-Dan Barlow