The sole remaining Associated Press reporter focused on Vermont will leave her job next week, marking the end of an era for what was long one of the state’s leading news organizations with, at its peak, a staff of a dozen people working in Montpelier.
Lisa Rathke wrote in an email to colleagues in local media and politics this week that she was “taking voluntary early retirement” from the AP, effective Jan. 3. She said she isn’t retiring for good, but rather, taking “a few months to figure out what’s next.”
“I’ve enjoyed my career immensely and working with all of you over the last quarter century,” wrote Rathke, who has worked at the global news service since 1998.
Rathke declined to speak further about her decision, instead referring VTDigger to an AP spokesperson, who did not respond to a request for comment this week.
The news cooperative — which shares coverage with member publications around the world — announced last month that it was starting to offer buyouts to some employees and lay off others as part of a plan to reduce its staff by about 8%. The cuts would help “accelerate a transition to a digital-first organization,” the outlet said.
Rathke wrote that the AP is hiring for a new job in Vermont, though it is not a permanent replacement for her role. Instead, according to a company job description, it’s a temporary, one-year video journalist job based either in Montpelier or Burlington.
The video journalist will report to a regional New England editor, the job posting states, and assist with covering national breaking news for the AP as needed.
Close observers of Vermont media have been watching the AP’s presence in the state dwindle for years.
Chris Graff, the longtime former chief of the state’s AP bureau, said it peaked at nine reporters, two photographers and one other staffer in the 1990s and early 2000s but had been slowly shedding personnel since then.
“It’s very sad,” he said, adding that it had been multiple years since the news service had a physical office in the capital. For many years, the outlet was housed above the former Thrush Tavern — just steps from the Pavilion building — though it also occupied other offices around the city prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The AP had six employees in its Montpelier bureau in 2007, then downsized to four through attrition by 2013, Seven Days reported at the time. Veteran photographer Toby Talbot retired that year, too, bringing the bureau to three.
In 2016, the AP cut another position in the bureau, leading to veteran reporter Dave Gram’s departure. Then, longtime correspondent Wilson Ring’s retirement in 2023 left Rathke as the AP’s only Vermont reporter.
In recent years, Graff said, he’s also noticed a shift in the AP’s coverage away from many local Vermont stories. While the outlet has long supplied local newspapers around the state with its own statewide coverage — and, in turn, benefited from the local content those papers shared with it — Graff said the AP has recently turned its focus outward, often producing stories about Vermont for readers who live in other states.
To be sure, he noted, that shift is driven in part by the hollowing out of many of those local newspapers, too. A May study from the University of Vermont found that the state has 75% fewer working journalists today than it did two decades ago.
“It’s very unlikely the AP would write a story now that would be of only interest to Vermont,” Graff said on Thursday. “It would have to be of interest to New England, or the Northeast — or nationally.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Departure of the Associated Press’ last Vermont reporter marks the end of an era in state journalism.