BRATTLEBORO — The Brattleboro Reformer’s Managing Editor Melanie Winters has been a professional journalist for over 35 years now, but her connection to the newspaper industry goes back even further than that.
As a six-year-old in the mid-1970s, she often helped with her older brothers’ paper routes, delivering The Hartford Courant house to house in her hometown of Windsor, Connecticut. She took over one of the routes on her own at age 13, delivering newspapers seven days a week in the rain, sleet or snow.
Four years later, as a senior at Windsor High School, she was editor of the school newspaper. “We won second place that year in the American Scholastic Press Association’s national annual review for high school newspapers. Also, one of my seniors won first place for an editorial cartoon and another won first place for an editorial cartoon titled ‘Homework. Homework. Give Us a Break!’”
She also worked part-time as a playback operator for the local community access station during her high school years and occasionally helped cover government meetings as a camera operator.
“I just loved being part of something important, something bigger than myself,” she said.
She went on to attend Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. to study Communications Arts. “I looked into broadcast news for a while — including a semester internship at a TV station in Kingston, N.Y. — but print journalism was always my first love.”
In her junior year – 1987-1988 – she spent a year abroad in northern England, attending Trinity and All Saints College just outside of Leeds. She also spent some time in London doing an independent research project on hospital radio stations for patients: how they operated, what their programming was… and then returned to Marist to finish her senior year.
“I got my first journalism job as a staff reporter in December of 1989 working for Imprint Newspapers, a group of community weeklies based in West Hartford, Connecticut. I stayed for seven years. By the mid-1990s, media conglomerates arrived on the scene. They saw newspapers as cash-cows waiting to be milked. They bought up small papers, sold what real estate they could, trimmed staff down to the bare minimum, consolidated papers and sometimes even closed them down. Newsrooms started to look like ghost towns. I remember after one buyout, about the third of the reporters had to pack up their belongings on the spot.”
Discouraged by the shifting winds in the newspaper industry, Winters considered switching careers at this point and started looking into opportunties in public relations, mostly in educational settings like public universities and a few private schools. But in 1996, a help wanted ad kept her in the print journalism field, this time for Soundings Publications, a group of trade magazines covering the recreational marine industry and fine woodworking.
“Fortunately trade magazines were somewhat insulated from the newspaper buyout craze,” said Winters.
For the next 13 years she traveled all over the country to cover everything from lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C. to large boat shows in Miami and Fort Lauderdale.
“Traveling around the country was a lot of fun, especially the cocktail parties, all the great swag at the boat shows, and meeting some pretty fascinating people – including actor Tim Allen and former president George H.W. Bush.
“My favorite memory was meeting Jean-Michel Cousteau at a private dinner party with Mercury Marine. He’s the son of famous ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau. I remember somebody asking him what his next project was going to be and he said he wanted to go somewhere he’s never been before. I told him I couldn’t imagine anywhere he hasn’t been. He smiled, pointed downward and said, ‘deeper.'”
It was during that time that Winters met and married Bob Mosher from Old Saybrook, Conn. They had two sons — John, born 2005, and Jerry, born in 2007 — and in 2008 moved to Vermont after purchasing some land and building a house in Whitingham. Her two sons, both Eagle Scouts, are currently attending school at the University of Vermont.
Winters continued working for the trade magazine remotely from Vermont, but then the Great Recession spread to the marine industry as people stopped buying boats. She was laid off in September of 2009 and remained out of work for over a year and a half.
“There just were no journalism jobs to be found around here. So once again I started looking at other career options like pubic relations, but I didn’t have any luck there, either. It was a pretty tough job market all the way around back then.
“It was a relief to finally land a job as night editor with the Reformer in the spring of 2011, after about 20 months of being unemployed.”
Today as managing editor Winters oversees a newsroom staff of six that covers all of Windham County and parts of southwestern New Hampshire, publishing six days a week under parent company Vermont News & Media. There’s her night editor Bill LeConey, sports editor Alejandro Cornman, photo editor Kris Radder and reporters Bob Audette, Susan Smallheer and Chris Mays.
“One of the first things I do every day is have a morning Zoom meeting with my news staff to discuss what everyone is working on that day, what the priorities are for the next day’s paper, what is coming down the pipeline the next day or two after that. I also sit in on the Zoom meeting for the Bennington Banner, our sister newspaper, to see if there’s any content we can share back and forth. In between all of that I go through all of the submitted copy that comes in steadily throughout the day, always ready to react to any breaking news.
“It’s a lot of work, and it can be pretty stressful, but in the end I think it’s worth it. I still get excited about the idea of doing something important, something bigger than myself. But it makes me sad to think of the still strinking newspaper industry and the growing news deserts all over the country. Local newspapers help keep a community connected. Communities with a strong local newspaper are shown to have more civic involvement, less corruption and lower taxes.”