VTDigger's Third Editor Exit in Four Years: Union AI Fight Risks Permanent Crisis

The leadership departures and the AI dispute are not separate problems — they are increasingly the same problem.

Geeta Anand, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who left a tenured professorship at UC Berkeley to lead Vermont’s largest newsroom, will step down as VTDigger’s editor-in-chief on June 30 — less than a year after she started. Her departure, announced March 6, means Vermont’s most important accountability news organization will lose both its top editor and its CEO by midsummer, the latest convulsion in a leadership crisis that has now consumed four editorial chiefs since founder Anne Galloway stepped aside in 2022.

The upheaval arrives as VTDigger’s newsroom union wages a public battle with management over artificial intelligence protections and the organization struggles to stabilize finances after $1.7 million in cumulative losses. But the leadership departures and the AI dispute are not separate problems — they are increasingly the same problem. The Guild’s hardline resistance to AI tools risks creating hiring conditions that screen out exactly the kind of forward-looking editorial leadership VTDigger desperately needs, at a moment when newsrooms from the New York Times to Reuters to CNN are integrating those same tools into the core of their journalism.

CEO Sky Barsch told Seven Days that Anand is dealing with health issues and plans to return to teaching at Berkeley, where she served as dean from 2020 to 2025. Barsch herself announced in January that she would depart by June 1. VTDigger will enter summer 2026 without either of its top two leaders, relying on interim arrangements while conducting dual national searches — with the editor-in-chief search not launching until early 2027.

A revolving door

Since Galloway departed in May 2022 after building VTDigger from a one-woman Statehouse blog into Vermont’s largest newsroom over 13 years, the organization has cycled through editors at an accelerating pace. Paul Heintz, promoted to editor-in-chief when Galloway left, stepped down in February 2025. The search for his replacement landed Anand — a 2003 Pulitzer winner at the Wall Street Journal, former NYT foreign correspondent, and former dean of Berkeley’s journalism school. The hire seemed to signal VTDigger’s ambition to operate at a national caliber. Instead, Anand lasted 11 months.

Kevin Ellis, a former VTDigger board member, told Seven Days the loss is a blow not just for VTDigger but for Vermont, calling it a red flag about the state’s difficulty retaining talented people. Susan Allen, a veteran Vermont journalist, will serve as interim editor-in-chief beginning June 1.

The AI dispute at VTDigger’s core

Behind the leadership departures lies a bitter labor dispute that may now be the single biggest obstacle to VTDigger’s recovery.

The VTDigger Guild, representing 14 editorial staffers as a local unit of the NewsGuild-CWA, has been negotiating a second collective bargaining agreement since early 2025. Talks have deadlocked primarily over artificial intelligence. The union wants contractual job protections against AI-related layoffs and a guaranteed role for journalists in decisions about how AI is deployed. Management, while maintaining an ethics policy that already prohibits using generative AI to produce published content without executive approval, has resisted embedding those restrictions in the contract. Barsch told Seven Days she wants to keep an open mind about technology for the future.

The dispute went very public. Union members leafleted outside the Statehouse with flyers reading “Help Keep AI Out of Our Local News!” Through Action Network and Reddit, the Guild urged supporters to contact management directly, generating more than 7,200 messages. A Reddit post originally urged readers to “target” VTDigger’s CEO, editor-in-chief, and board members — language later softened to “recipients.” Ellis told Seven Days the post crossed a line and contributed to Barsch’s decision to leave. The Guild also signed an open letter with journalists from 15 other unionized nonprofit newsrooms demanding AI guardrails, and raised concerns about wage stagnation and what they allege is a 500% increase in total leadership compensation even as seven positions were lost through attrition.

What the rest of journalism is actually doing with AI

The Guild’s framing of AI as a threat to be contractually contained is understandable from a labor perspective. But it is increasingly out of step with what is actually happening at newsrooms that are using AI not to replace journalists but to make them dramatically more capable.

A recent episode of Newsroom Robots, hosted by Nikita Roy, brought together Ryan Struyk (Director of AI Initiatives, CNN), Rubina Madan Fillion (Associate Editorial Director of AI Initiatives, New York Times), Arlyn Gajilan (Global Editor of AI Development and Integration, Reuters), and Burt Herman (Co-Founder, Hacks/Hackers). Their conversation described AI settling in as infrastructure — not replacing reporters but reshaping how journalists discover information and how stories move through production. Reuters has compressed story production from minutes to seconds and feature development from three months to three weeks. CNN has embedded AI directly into newsroom workflows.

At the New York Times, an eight-person AI Initiatives Team has built internal tools that are redefining investigative reporting. Their flagship tool, “Cheatsheet,” grew from a specific need: a reporter had a list of 10,000 people who registered for a Puerto Rico tax break. Using LLMs, the tool automatically searched names, inspected results, and flagged persons of interest. The resulting investigation uncovered widespread abuse. Cheatsheet has since been instrumental to dozens of investigations and is now available to every Times journalist. A separate tool, the “Manosphere Report,” uses LLMs to transcribe and summarize dozens of podcasts daily, delivering automated morning briefings to nearly 40 reporters — providing early signals that conservative media was turning against the Trump administration over the Epstein files, intelligence impossible to gather by manually listening to hundreds of hours of audio.

Zach Seward, the Times’ editorial director for AI initiatives, has said he hopes to eventually open-source Cheatsheet. The competitive advantage, he argues, isn’t the technology — it’s having reporters talented enough to use it. The Times’ position is that creating new text for publication is not the most effective use of generative AI; rather, the technology amplifies a newsroom’s existing investigative power.

This is where VTDigger’s situation becomes particularly consequential. The Guild is not fighting against AI-generated articles — VTDigger’s existing ethics policy already prohibits that, just as the NYT, Reuters, and CNN maintain similar guardrails. The Guild is fighting against the research and efficiency applications that are becoming table stakes at competitive news organizations. The distinction between AI as author (which every serious newsroom prohibits) and AI as research infrastructure (which every serious newsroom is adopting) is the distinction the Guild refuses to make.

The Newsroom Robots episode specifically addressed why local news holds a unique advantage in an AI-mediated landscape — small newsrooms with deep institutional knowledge can use these tools to punch far above their weight, if they choose to adopt them. For a 30-person newsroom covering an entire state on a $3 million budget, the question isn’t whether AI threatens jobs. It’s whether refusing AI tools guarantees irrelevance.

The question of AI in newsrooms is a live and unresolved one in Vermont — Seven Days devoted significant coverage to the VTDigger dispute in its February 2026 Media Issue, and the broader debate about how Vermont publications should use AI tools has drawn scrutiny and commentary across the state’s media landscape. But while Vermont debates, the industry moves.

The financial picture

VTDigger relies overwhelmingly on voluntary contributions — 84% of its $2.7 million in 2023 revenue came from donations. It operates without a paywall. According to tax filings, the organization lost $1.01 million in 2022 and $726,000 in 2023, forcing the closure of its Burlington satellite office and a move to smaller Montpelier quarters. By 2024, the loss narrowed to roughly $76,000 on approximately $2.93 million in revenue. Net assets stood at $1.69 million at the end of 2023.

VTDigger’s roughly 30 employees serve 600,000-plus monthly readers and more than 43,000 newsletter subscribers, making it the 18th-largest nonprofit news site in the country by estimated monthly visits. Its donor base exceeds 9,500 contributing members, with about 40% giving monthly. Major institutional funders have included the American Journalism Project ($900,000 over three years), the Knight Foundation, and the Vermont Community Foundation.

A Vermont news ecosystem under strain

VTDigger is the only Vermont outlet providing daily Statehouse coverage. Employment in Vermont’s newspaper industry has fallen 75% since 2000. The Burlington Free Press has been hollowed out under Gannett ownership. Vermont Public lost $2 million when Congress canceled public broadcasting funding in 2025 but can offer reporters $60,000–$71,000 — compared to VTDigger’s $40,000 minimum. Seven Days reported in its 2026 Media Issue that it is now 24 fewer pages than previous editions.

A February 2026 Vermont News & Information Ecosystem Report, commissioned by the Vermont Community Foundation, surveyed 441 residents and found that 79% said they had access to a trustworthy local news source and 94% agreed local news is as essential as libraries or the postal service. Those numbers merit context: the sample is small, and as Seven Days publisher Paula Routly acknowledged, the report relies on data from a group heavily weighted toward people who already pay for news. The survey asked about access to some trustworthy source — not about trust in any specific outlet. And VTDigger served as an advisor on the report while the VCF funds VTDigger through grants. None of this invalidates the findings, but it limits how far readers should stretch them.

Press Forward Vermont, part of a national $500 million philanthropic effort, is channeling resources into the ecosystem — funding a Vermont Journalism Coalition, supporting state-level journalism awards, and underwriting VTDigger’s Community News Sharing Project. These are real investments, but they cannot substitute for stable leadership at the state’s most consequential newsroom.

What comes next

VTDigger has now burned through a founder (Galloway), a homegrown editor-in-chief (Heintz), a nationally recruited Pulitzer winner (Anand), and a CEO (Barsch) — all in roughly four years. The board, chaired by former Vermont House Speaker Gaye Symington, expects to hire a CEO this summer. The permanent editor-in-chief search won’t begin until early 2027.

Any serious candidate for that role will have spent the last several years watching AI tools transform journalism at peer institutions. They will arrive at a VTDigger interview having used these tools daily. They will look at a union contract that treats AI as an existential threat rather than a capability to be governed wisely, and many will conclude the organization is structurally committed to falling behind — at a moment when the New York Times is rolling out AI research tools to every journalist in its newsroom and Reuters is compressing production timelines by orders of magnitude.

VTDigger’s journalism continues. Its reporters cover Medicaid threats, flood recovery, and state government in real time. The question is no longer whether VTDigger matters — that was settled long ago by its EB-5 investigation and its daily Statehouse reporting. The question is whether the revolving door at the top and the resistance to the tools reshaping journalism will eventually hollow out the institution Anne Galloway built with $16,000 and a notebook 17 years ago.

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Sources: Seven Days | VTDigger | ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer | Nieman Lab | IRE | Newsroom Robots | TheWrap | Action Network | Vermont Community Foundation