Ouch. Daniel Barlow has announced he’s leaving his reporter job at the Vermont Press Bureau this month. For those who don’t know how it works, the Bureau is a group of, at present, three reporters (Barlow, Louis Porter, Peter Hirschfeld) who provide the political reporting for The Times Argus and the Rutland Herald. And of those three, Barlow stood head and shoulders above the others in terms of his thoroughness in covering a story, and his clarity in presenting unfiltered facts.

Hirschfeld tends to skimp mightily on details – particular in the “both sides” department. Possibly he just has a tendency not to look beyond the press releases he’s received from the Douglas administration. Whether its that or ideological leakage, a political story under his byline is often not the full story, and has tended to only support the Governor’s messaging.

Bureau Chief Porter on the other hand, tends to comes off as the sort of journalist who doesn’t want to simply report the news, but wants to be its gatekeeper, deciding what really matters and what doesn’t in an idiosyncratic way and reporting from that subjective position (this was often Chris Graff’s problem at the AP as well). I suspect he’d be much happier as a columnist. A particularly disturbing example comes from earlier in the year, and his bizarre (and repeated) brazen misrepresentation of Governor Douglas’s budget proposal in a manner consistent with GOP talking points (see here and here).

So anyway, it’s not hard to understand how someone with Barlow’s obvious talent and intelligence would like to move on, but its a blow for Vermonters – and another nail in the coffin of the Times Argus and Rutland Herald, who seem to be determined of late to hasten their own demise.