Tell Me The Score

You don’t have the time to look up the details. You shouldn’t have to.

Along with publishing, I spent years in the radio business, and one of the things that drove me crazy was sports broadcasts. The announcers would do play-by-play and color for minutes on end—runs, formations, crowd noise, coach reactions—and never once mention the score. I’d call up to the booth and ask why. The answer was always the same: “There is no score. It’s 0-0.”

And I’d say: there is a score. The score is zero to zero.

More to the point, the people listening in their cars and kitchens don’t know that. They just tuned in. For all they know it’s 21-3. Tell them the score is 0-0. That’s the score.

That tiny argument—who the broadcast is actually for—is the argument I have with most journalism today.

You’ve felt it. You read about a big vote in Montpelier. The headline says the bill passed. The lede says the bill passed. Paragraph nine, if you make it that far, tells you the count was 18-12. Or doesn’t, and you go searching for someone else’s coverage.

You read about a conviction in a terrible case. The verdict is everywhere. The sentencing date? Not mentioned. The sentence itself, when it comes weeks later? Maybe a wire brief on B7.

Reporters don’t do this because they’re hiding the ball. They do it because they’ve been living inside the story for weeks and have forgotten that you haven’t.

They write for the editor down the hall who’s heard about it at every news meeting—not for you, sitting at the kitchen table with coffee, asking the most basic question in journalism: what actually happened, and what does it mean for me?

That announcer thought “no score” meant nothing to say. The reader who already knows the vote was contentious doesn’t need the tally. The judge’s clerk knows when sentencing is scheduled. Everyone in the room knows. So why bother telling the people who aren’t in the room?

Because they’re the people you’re writing for. That’s the whole job.

Compass Vermont is built on the opposite assumption. You don’t have the time to look up the details.

You shouldn’t have to.

The vote count goes in the lede. The score goes in the first sentence. The sentencing date goes in the same story as the verdict—and if we don’t have it yet, we tell you when we will. Every attributed claim carries a link to the bill, the ruling, the disclosure, so you can check our work without leaving the page.

That’s why our story on S.325 told you the Senate passed it 18-12, and that the original repeal amendment failed 13-17—vote tallies no other Vermont outlet bothered to publish. That’s why our housing series didn’t just say “more land is regulated.” It said 60.2% of Vermont land now falls under new Act 250 jurisdiction under Act 181’s road rule. That’s the difference.

If you’re looking for Vermont news that tells you the full score—every vote count, every sentencing date, every link back to the document itself, no assumptions about what you already know—Compass Vermont is here for that. That’s the whole reason it exists.

We hope you’ll subscribe. And if what we do is worth it to you, we hope you’ll become a paying subscriber, because that’s what keeps a very small newsroom telling you the score next month, and the month after that. - Tom Davis, Compass Vermont.