A Brief Update on Feather Ruffler
What you can expect from this page moving forward
In High School I worked for a video game website where I was sent to events around the country to cover the industry. I went to college for journalism. My first (real) job after college was in journalism. After leaving the industry, I continued to write pseudo journalistic opinion pieces for a variety of outlets including the Stamford Advocate.
When I launched Feather Ruffler as a Stamford-focused news blog in January, it was a natural fit. Journalism was my first passion, and I was applying it to the community where I live. I thought this would not only be a worthwhile endeavor, but relatively “easy” because I was already deeply familiar with Stamford – which I couldn’t say about my previous beats in many different jobs. I was confident I could try it out for a few months, then announce on April 1 I was committing to maintaining the work I’d done into the future.
After 4 months, my thoughts are very different from what I expected. I’m reducing the scope of this project. If you’ve ever wondered: “Why is it so hard to stay informed about things in Stamford?” The answer is because Stamford’s culture is resistant to sharing information.[1]
If that sounds obvious, then you might be from Stamford! That has not been my experience anywhere else in the country. Let me give two examples.
My first (real) job out of college was for The Malibu Times based in Malibu, California. Malibu is a ritzy town with identical political arguments as Stamford. They didn’t like development and they didn’t like all the new people moving in. When I started that job I knew nothing about the town. I commuted 90 minutes to get to my job every day, so I wasn’t even “local.” Additionally, I grew up in Massachusetts. I had been in California for 2 years when I worked there. Despite that, within my first month on the job I had two different 3+ hour conversations with 1) a board of education member and 2) the mayor of the city, specifically on the premise of “well, I gotta tell you all about our Malibu.” Similar things have happened in all my others job across many different communities.
A more recent example. In pursuit of reporting on Mayor Caroline Simmons’ first budget for her second term, I was following up on the claim made by our mayor that “this is the first year we haven’t gotten any federal grants for capital projects.” I reached out to the City of Stamford and asked a simple question: “what’s an example of a grant we got last year that we didn’t get this year?” I sent my question to Mayor Simmons’ communications staff, the grants director, and the (interim) Director of Administration. The first communication was sent three weeks ago and none of these people have responded with so much as a “I’ll get back to you.” Given that experience, I reached out to the federal Department of Transportation and asked a similar question, and they got back to me in less than week. Their email began with “Thank you for your patience.”
Donald Trump’s Department of Transportation is more accessible to my local news blog than the mayor of the city where I live.
This isn’t unique to our mayor. A number of local officials — who I have maintained good relationships with even during my whackier projects — have decided to stop talking to me at all.[2] This is not because I am asking “tough questions.” We’re talking about refusing to confirm something as simple as “who is the Interim Director of Administration?” I was able to report on that because a non-communications staff city official forwarded me an internal email confirming the information. Which is another way of saying, it’s not that local officials can’t manage to respond — they already sent the information to hundreds of people — they are choosing to not respond.
This has also been true for local businesses and nonprofits, who give me the run around re-directing me to corporation communications and legal experts before ultimately ghosting the request. Again, not for “controversial” stories.
In February I pursued many different stories and they all went nowhere. I felt guilty about that so I published a statewide story at the end of the month so there was something published within 30 days. This post is relieving me of that obligation.
Here is the reduced scope of Feather Ruffler:
I will continue to pursue an AI workflow that generates meeting transcripts, summaries, and articles based on publicly accessible meetings. All of these are checked by me personally, so they don’t have false information. So far the only AI-generated articles were the explainers on Public Safety and Operations. I’ve been holding off on other articles because I wasn’t happy with the writing output, but it’s pretty close now.
I am currently focusing on the Board of Representatives and may expand to committee meetings, Board of Finance, and other land use boards (Planning and Zoning).
I will continue to feed my quarterly desire to post hot takes about the local community.
I am open to receiving “tips” and researching topics if someone points me toward a direction.
That’s it. A repository of what happened in public meetings + occasional hot takes.
None of this is very labor intensive, so all of the content will continue to be free. I don’t think this content scope is worth the $5 a month subscription. However, the annual cost for this reduced scope is roughly $350. That’s really just the cost of my software subscriptions which I would probably pay for anyway. If you choose to support the project, I’ll take that as a signal to reconsider at some point when people stop being so risk averse.
[1] You might call it anti-social.
[2] Not the first time this has happened to me in Stamford.