By David Gordon, CVPost Board chair
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been some changes at the Chippewa Valley Post, and we’re working on several others.
Most significantly (so far), Madeline Fuerstenberg – our first community reporter – has moved on. Maddie wrote that she appreciated the opportunities the CVPost offered, but that she needed to focus on her summer TV internship. She will, however, remain available for occasional freelance assignments.
We benefited tremendously from her reporting since May, 2019, on stories ranging from Eau Claire County’s strong response rate to the 2020 census to the annual visit of the Mexican mobile consulate to a recent feature on a Memorial High School graduate who’s making his mark in advanced mathematics research. We wish her well as she moves on to the next stage of building her journalism career, and we look forward to publishing her freelance work.
We’ve been fortunate to hire Julia Lopez to succeed Maddie as our community reporter, and she is already working on stories that you’ll see in the near future. Julia, a UW-EC senior-to-be, is a double major in journalism and Spanish, and will report on events and issues in the local Latinx community as part of her CVPost assignments.
Until the COVID-19 pandemic intervened, Julia spent the 2020 spring semester studying in Spain, where she told us she developed her skills and confidence in Spanish. Last summer, she worked several days a week as a multimedia news intern at WQOW Channel 18, which provided experience in reporting with video as a primary format.
We expect to draw on that experience by beginning to integrate video into some of Julia’s reporting, when it will add depth or offer greater understanding for the reader/viewer.
Dominic Yates, our UW-Stout intern last spring, has continued to do some summer reporting for us sandwiched in among the demands of his summer job. His efforts included a first-person account of being exposed to COVID-19 and, after a worrisome couple of days, learning that he had tested negative.
Dom’s spring semester reporting focused on stories originating on the UW-Stout campus. He will be back with us in the fall, on the second half of his UW-Stout-supported internship, and we expect that his focus will broaden to include some Menomonie and Dunn County reporting as well as continuing coverage of the university.
We anticipate hiring a second community reporter this fall and, if finances permit, we’ll seek out at least one Chippewa Valley freelance reporter to dig into such topics as the human “collateral damage” from COVID-19.
Board is considering options
The CVPost Board met Monday evening to take up several aspects of what our next steps should be. Part of that discussion focused on how, or perhaps whether, we can expand our coverage to fill in some of the inevitable gaps that will result from the Leader-Telegram’s decision to end its weekend print editions.
Should we, for example, expand our Friday and Saturday coverage of the Chippewa Valley to provide some of the news that could easily be lost in the wake of the L-T’s cutback? Another alternative would be to save some of our major stories – some generated locally and others originating elsewhere – for publication on Friday and Saturday, to help you fill the looming weekend news void.
Various approaches were discussed but no final decisions were reached, in part because we don’t yet know all the implications of the L-T’s decision. We do know, however, that we need to keep our planning flexible until the effects of this current lurch toward creating a “weekend news hiatus” here become clearer.
We would be pleased to get your guidance on what the CVPost might do to lessen the impact of this weekend hiatus . . . when the news doesn’t stop happening but its delivery system has been substantially altered. Please drop us a note at cvpostwi@gmail.com (with “News Hiatus” in the subject line) with your suggestions.
And keep visiting the CVPost website to see what’s new, both in the community and with our planning efforts as we continue to figure out what the next steps should be. We’ll do our best to keep you posted.
David Gordon has chaired the CVPost’s board of directors since before the news platform was launched in 2015. He has also done some of the reporting and much of the editing since its launch. He chaired the UW-EC Communication & Journalism department for five years, until his retirement in 2002, and served a year as president of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors in 2016-17.
Chris Spaeth says
Thanks for the updates. I am happy to see mainstream reporting done right at CV Post. I am taking a different approach at Abide Chippewa Valley (abide.news.blog) and letting the photos do most of the talking, but like you, I am focusing on a community model, asking for donations and using affiliate marketing to keep things going.. I was a art photography major at UWEC and took COMM101 with David Gordon in Spring of 1998! Small world. Keep up the good work.
And here is an unusually verbose piece I wrote you might enjoy:) https://chippewaphotos.wordpress.com/2020/06/25/enjoying-local-history-books/