While it makes sense to start this note about Chestertown Spy’s future by recalling a story from when the first began in 2009, I’d like to go back four decades ago.
It is 1979, and I am living off-campus just off of Johnsontown Road in Quaker Neck. It it winter, and I am renting a cottage at Rigs o’Marlow, which some may know is where Chestertown’s beloved Mike Lawrence lived for many years.
I was leaving to make a class on a morning after a major snowstorm, and as luck would have it, my car broke down. I was left with the only one option — to hitchhike on a country road where the traffic flow was about one car an hour.
And yet, within minutes, a station wagon appeared out of nowhere with a fellow named Gil Watson II at the wheel.
I had no idea who Gil Watson was, nor the fact that he and his wife owned the large property just over from my small place. But in the ten minutes it took to drive into Chestertown, this stranger would change my life.
After a pro forma description of my circumstances that morning, we inevitably touched on where we had come from to arrive at this very isolated part of the Eastern Shore.
In Gil’s case, he had retired early from a career in government to raise his family in the simple life of rural Kent County. But the motive, he said, was also to start a small-town newspaper called the Chester River Press.
It was then my turn, and I started out chronologically with the fact I had been born and raised in Winnetka, Illinois. And with the mention of “Winnetka,” we found ourselves enjoying an extreme irony that we had grown up in the same town.
As we dug deeper, it turned out the Watsons and my mother’s family were part of a small tribe of large families living next to each other in Winnetka for three decades. In Gil’s case, my uncles had been his closest childhood friends. All of a sudden, six degrees of separation turned into one.
When I exited the car in front of WC’s campus lawn, we humorously shook our heads in disbelief and agreed it had been quite a ride.
I only saw Gil one more time after our Johnsontown trip. He asked his wife to seek me out for a visit the following spring when I learned he had terminal cancer. By October of that year, he had passed away at 62 years old.
There were many takeaways from this brief encounter. The first was the unmistakable joy Gil Watson had when talking about being a publisher of a small-town newspaper. He clearly was also aware of its real purpose when he added to its masthead, “Truth is your right and our obligation.”
The second takeaway was to listen to someone with a surprisingly similar background as my own, who had created a second life for himself and devoted that life to giving back to the community he had come to love.
Fast-forward to October 2008, some thirty years later, when I was pondering the usefulness of my own life after a project I was working on at UC-Berkeley had blown up in the great recession.
The choice for me was to either find another job in the same profession or, like Gil, come back to the Eastern Shore, where I already had bought a second home a few years earlier, and give back to the Chestertown I had known and loved since I arrived as a freshman at Washington College.
It was simple. On March 15, 2009, the Chestertown Spy appeared online for the first time, and its publisher dedicated it to Gilbert L. Watson II’s memory.
Ten years later, I think Gil would have been pleased with how it all turned out. While he was not around for a final judgment, his son, Gil Jr, who had also moved back to Chestertown after a distinguished career as the metro editor of the Baltimore Sun, confirmed that his father would have been delighted with the Chestertown Spy.
I also believe that Gil would be pleased with my plans for the Chestertown Spy for the next ten years.
After five years as serving as the executive editor of both the Chestertown Spy and the Talbot Spy, I concluded this summer that the duality of managing two publications in two different towns was 1) unsustainable for one person, and 2), poorly serving the communities the Spy was committed to serve.
I realized it was time to let go of the Chestertown Spy.
Even though I always saw the Spy as a permanent gift to the community, the reality was that if a proverbial bus ran me over in front of WC’s Starr Center, the Chestertown Spy would quickly dissolve.
In short, I was hoarding the Spy. Rather than building a structure that could survive sans Wheelan, I continued to hold on to it, even five years after I had established a residence in Easton to start the Talbot Spy.
And so the epiphany this summer was that if I was seriously interested in having the Chestertown Spy become a long-term community asset, things had to change.
With that in mind, I have started a four-month process to restructure the Chestertown Spy. This includes transferring editorial control to a Chestertown-based publisher and the development of a twelve-member advisory board who collectively is devoted to the Spy’s mission of covering the public affairs, the arts, and regional culture of the greater Chestertown community.
I hope, with the community’s assistance, the refreshed Spy will truly mirror the depth and the profound sense of place of its readers.
I also have the conviction that the new Chestertown Spy will stand out as a remarkable model for other communities, many of whom are suffering the loss of their local newspapers.
To answer this need, I have created the non-profit Spy Community Media, the parent organization for the Chestertown Spy and Talbot Spy, as well as other possible Spies in the future. It will be the SCM’s purpose to use the Chestertown model to train, technically and financially support, as well aas mentor other communities on the Eastern Shore and beyond.
I am pleased to say that our plans for the restructured Spy are already taking place with the appointment of Chestertown attorney Stephen Meehan as the publisher of the Chestertown Spy.
Steve has lived and worked in Chestertown for 35 years and created The Pilot, a weekly newspaper he started in 1986 while at Washington College. And I join the newly established Spy Community Media’s board of advisors in affirming our complete trust in his commitment to the Chestertown Spy’s mission.
Over the next few months, Steve will be reaching out to the community through the use of professionally-facilitated focus sessions, one-on-one meetings, and reader polling to define not only what the Spy covers in the arts, culture and public affairs, but also how it covers it.
This feedback will also provide invaluable information for Steve and his local advisory board on how to use the Spy as a constructive, non-toxic portal for different points of view and opinion.
And while I am “letting go” of the Chestertown Spy, this change does not mean I am letting go of Chestertown. I will continue as both a regular contributor but be active in my new role of being the SCM’s representative on its advisory board.
Just like Chestertown’s other “country editors” like Gil Watson, Hurtt Deringer, and Bill Chaze, there is an unmistakable sense of gratitude for this role of looking over this very special place. I have no doubt that I’ll have similar experiences as the Chestertown Spy model becomes a possible blueprint for the future of local news.
Please help the Chestertown Spy succeed in this effort by contributing to its future here.
Steve will continue tomorrow with his first Chestertown Spy “Publisher Notes” to talk more about its future going forward.
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