COMMENTARY
What is the Essex Retorter?
How does it Compare to the Essex Reporter?
by Irene Wrenner
November 5, 2020
The Essex Reporter has been the town's "paper of record".
For years it was delivered to doorsteps, mailed to Essex households, or one could pick up the print edition at local businesses.
When the COVID crisis hit, the Reporter stopped publishing a print edition. It is available online only now.
The Reporter had not been regularly covering local governance meetings for more than a year and was printing press releases rather than writing articles about school district activity.
Being published out of Saint Albans, the Reporter and its editor, whom I met with last winter, appear more interested in being a mouthpiece for officials than a check-and-balance on their power.
The Essex Retorter arose to cover local government meetings as a printed newspaper for Essex. It’s offered to and supported by Essex residents who are interested in learning what’s going on from other residents who attend the meetings and provide historical and political context.
The Retorter aims to provide timely and accurate news from reporters who have the knowledge, perspective and integrity to offer a better read to our residents. We post new articles every few days to our website, tackling the issues that other media miss, mess up, or intentionally bypass. In short, we report "the rest of the news in the 05452".
One of our readers described the difference this way: "The Retorter is a clever, informative, sometimes ridiculous read! It’s a different perspective on what is otherwise (to many people) a very unexciting process."