It’s not exactly a revelation that Vermont’s newspapers are suffering. Ad revenues and print circulation continue to plunge, and the Internet (with or without paywalls) doesn’t pay nearly enough to close the gap. And when the paper is owned by a big corporation, the shareholders are first in line for whatever revenue comes through the door.

So, staff cutbacks. Do more with less. Work harder, not smarter. (Or is it the other way around?)

But you still gotta fill that news hole every day. And you’ve gotta have something on the front page that might entice the casual reader to plunk down a buck for today’s paper. Or at least convince subscribers not to cancel.

The solution: journalism on the cheap. And today we have two prime examples, one from the Freeploid and one from the Times Argus.  

Freeploid: No news is… news. The new, full-color Freeploid has gotten a lot of mileage out of two stories: Chittenden County gas prices (see postscript below) and the timesheet follies at the Vermont State Police. Today brings an update on the latter story, which says… er… nothing.

Vermont State Police are continuing to climb a mountain of paperwork as they try to sort out allegations of possible time sheet padding by a former colleague.

… “The investigation is not complete. It continues. We want to make sure that it is done properly and thoroughly,” [State’s Attorney T.J.] Donovan said.

Mmm, yep. The rest of the article is basically a recap of the case. It could be worse, I guess; the ‘Loid could be doing this every damn day.

Times Argus: Making a mountain out of a molehill. This morning’s paper greeted me with the screaming headline, “Incident raises questions of practice.” Which is just so adorably, absolutely generic, it almost looks like a place-holder headline that made the print edition by mistake. Tomorrow’s front page story: “Insert Headline Here.”

The T-A’s paywalled Web edition has a less fascinating but perhaps more inflammatory header, “Early voting: Does it have its downsides?” Which almost sounds like a TV news teaser: “Are Juice Boxes Killing Our Kids? The answer tonight, on NewsScream 7!”

The “incident,” as you might have inferred, involves the TJ Donovan campaign mistakenly requesting an absentee ballot on behalf of a Brattleboro woman who didn’t authorize the request. And who happens to be a Bill Sorrell supporter. Oopsie.  

This one incident, posits the T-A, calls into question the widespread practice by most campaigns of asking potential supporters if they’d like to vote absentee, and then facilitating the process of getting them a ballot.  

Well, it may raise process issues, and it underscores a campaign’s responsibility for due diligence. But no, a single mistake doesn’t raise fundamental questions about the practice. It does make for a nice, easy front-page filler: get quotes from the usual suspects, raise questions and bat them down again. With any luck, it’ll catch on and you will have created a Controversy — the mother’s milk of journalism. But even if it doesn’t catch on, you will have at least filled that front-page hole for one more day.

Postscript. I understand why the Freeploid tried to make chicken salad out of chickenshit on the Deeghan case. But it really makes me wonder why the ‘Loid didn’t give any space to Bernie Sanders’ Monday hearing on gas prices in northwest Vermont. It’s their biggest, juiciest story in quite a while. And since it was a scheduled event, it was the lowest of low-hanging fruit for a desperate assignment editor gazing across a nearly-empty newsroom.

I can only think of two possible explanations. First, the Freeploid figured that other media would cover it (VTDigger has a good writeup) so they wouldn’t be able to claim it as their own. Second, they were afraid to lose ad revenue from the Big Four gas station owners.