MANCHESTER, NH – Carol Robidoux, New Hampshire Press Association’s 2020 Journalist of the Year, addressed a group of 25 UNH OLLI life-long learning members on Friday afternoon at UNH’s Manchester millyard campus.
“Because of COVID the 2020 Press Association awards ceremony was streamed online,” Robidoux explained. Although thrilled when her name was called as “Journalist of the Year,” the usual fanfare was missing from where she sat, alone inside her office, staring at a computer screen. “Sure, it wasn’t quite the same but I still popped a mini-bottle of champagne I had next to my laptop, just in case I won.”
Robidoux founded daily online news source Manchester Ink Link in 2014 and added Nashua Ink Link a decade later. She and her family moved to the area in 2001 after she took a job as a general assignment reporter for the Union Leader – which lasted for seven years before being laid off during the recession. She returned a few months later as a correspondent covering the town of Derry.
During that time she started posting her own stories online, creating a simple website called Derry Ink Link – to give her readers “a link to the ink.” She eventually offered her modest news-link site to higher-ups as a pilot, to expand their presence online but eventually came to the conclusion, “The Union Leader wasn’t ready for the Internet.”
But she had seen the future of news in her endeavor. After leaving the Union Leader in 2011 she was hired to serve as local editor for Nashua Patch, and when that job fizzled in 2014, she decided to strike out on her own.
Ever-changing news landscape
“A community needs to have access to news,” Robidoux continued. “Right now, people also want to connect, to look each other in the face.” She aspires to do both – with two full-time reporters, Andrew Sylvia who covers city hall in Manchester, Mya Blanchard who does the same in Nashua, and a dedicated crew of freelancers who help round-out the daily content. Over the years they have organized several public forums around local elections and are currently meeting monthly at Diz’s Cafe for a News & Brews gathering, to talk about random topics of interest.
Robidoux also sends out a daily newsletter, topped off with a “Publisher’s Note,” which runs the topical gamut. Recently she wrote about how she managed to swallow the crown of a tooth she’d just paid off. With gold at $4,500 an ounce, a metal-detecting backhoe might be in order as the crown appears to be floating like a butterfly from her G.I. tract to higher up in her digestive tract. This geographic imprecision can be viewed as an analogy for our current hydra-headed attack on the First Amendment. The truth is out there somewhere. The job of a journalist is to find it and share it.
The rise of social media has created new challenges for local news organizations to stay afloat – and relevant.
“On social media, you get the feeling that nobody likes anybody anymore,” Robidoux said. “If I stopped doing what I’m doing today, I’m not sure where people would turn to for reliable local news.”
The second part of the late champion boxer Muhammad Ali’s advice is to, of course, “…sting like a bee.”
“I had to learn how to run a business,” the Manchester Ink Link founder said. She is also proud to have been a founding member of the Granite State News Collaborative, which has over 20 media partners who share content and collaborate on project stories. “Think of the Collaborative as a mini Associated Press,” she explained.
“The Granite State News Collaborative was the perfect vehicle to deal with COVID,” as partners could share stories from all corners of the state, Robidoux said, adding that her site traffic tripled during the pandemic.
The Collaborative has strengthened New Hampshire’s news ecosystem over the past several years. Robidoux’s news sites are paywall free because she believes all citizens should have access to news about the place where they live and work.
“I set out to be a community news source communicating with local people. At the heart of stories are people,” she says. Although her position as publisher means she has less opportunities to write, many of the stories she’s written over the years have stayed with her.
One such example was a Union Leader story that started when staff photographer Bob Lapree showed Robidoux a picture he took of a barefoot farmer working his Mammoth Road fields in 2007. Her curiosity piqued, the reporter sensed a story and sought out the farmer. She learned that John Giovagnoli had recently lost his wife, generally traveled by bicycle despite his age, and that walking his fields barefoot allowed him to assess the moisture of the soil. A single interview turned into a friendship. Pride in his work showed one afternoon when Giovagnoli took the journalist into his cornfield, shucked an ear on the spot, and bit into several rows of kernels.
“You try it like this and you’ll never eat it any other way.”
Robidoux learned that Giovagnoli set aside four months each winter to travel the world. Not that kind of travel. He only took what he could carry in a single backpack and like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, cast his lot with the kindness of strangers in Vietnam, China, Syria and Africa. Today, we call it eco-tourism.
Robidoux readily recalled his “Imagine there’s no country advice.”
“If we could sit down and break bread with our enemies, the world would be a better place,” he told her.
Amen to that. May we all shine on.
Robidoux recalled the things she learned about Giovagnoli in a tribute column she wrote for the Union Leader the morning she got the word that he perished in a fire that consumed his farm.
The journalist used the term “news ecosystem” several times and to ensure the future of local news she pointed to something emerging, the Local News Lab Mentoring Program through Granite State News Collaborative. The opportunity will provide high school students with education, the thrill of seeing his or her name in print and a stipend for their work.
How meaningful might this mentorship be? Sylvia Plath and James Baldwin both wrote for their high school literary magazines. Kurt Vonnegut wrote for his high school newspaper. Carson McCullers penned The Heart is a Lonely Hunter when she was 19. Charlotte Bronte’s third book, Jane Eyre, was published when she was 21. S.E. Hinton started writing the teen classic The Outsiders when she was 15. “It’s a brave new world,” the publisher said. “This profession is rapidly changing.”
Robidoux’s mother was a social worker, a career she first considered herself. She got emotional while talking to the group at UNH Manchester, talking about the toughest local stories Ink Link has covered extensively, the decades-long physical and sexual abuse of children at Manchester’s Youth Development Center, and the extended abuse and murder of young Harmony Montgomery at the hands of those claiming to have loved her.
Robidoux has a special interest in the unhoused members of our communities. She sees addictions and living on the streets, in many cases, as the direct result of mental health injuries sustained at a young age. “I hear the pain of broken humanity every day in the stories of sexual assault and abuse,” she said. “As a state and as a country we have to confront how we treat our children.”