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1 week ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
When we were researching the idea of launching the Independent, one big question was whether the Outer Cape economy was strong enough to support a newspaper. We had looked across the country for examples and learned that in communities where Main Street was deserted and storefronts were empty, formerly thriving newspapers were among the casualties. Where towns were humming, however, and the local paper did its job, there was reason for optimism. Our local economy is admittedly weird.
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2 weeks ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
“Please cancel my subscription,” a reader wrote to us the other day. “We subscribed to your paper to get the local news from the Outer Cape, but lately it seems to be all politics, all the time. We subscribe to multiple newspapers and get more than our fill of political vitriol, anger, and downright hatred.
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3 weeks ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
Words matter to us in this line of work. Maybe we don’t always choose just the right ones, but we spend a lot of time worrying over them. When writers try out new words on us, editors will ask, “What does this mean?”And so, we are struggling to parse the language of this new government. On Jan.
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1 month ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
All our towns have now navigated through another annual town meeting cycle, and it’s worth stopping to consider the significance of this peculiar New England tradition. Wellfleet Town Moderator Dan Silverman provided a helpful lesson when, during last week’s debate over the development of housing at Maurice’s Campground, he admonished people in the audience for booing one of the speakers. “You do not boo speakers,” Silverman said.
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1 month ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
Conservative columnist David French writes in the New York Times this week that he has “a complicated relationship with Harvard.” So do I. French grew up in a small town in Kentucky and went to Christian schools, then to Harvard Law. As an evangelical, he found the law school’s atmosphere unwelcoming. Harvard “has maintained one of the least tolerant cultures in American higher education,” he writes. Still, he admits, the law school set him on a great career.
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1 month ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
At first it seemed that if this experiment in authoritarianism was going to break our hearts, we’d somehow stand firm. Now it’s pillaging our very minds. The National Science Foundation last week canceled hundreds of grants to researchers studying the spread of disinformation online.
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1 month ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
“America is now divided between two opposing forces: woke revolutionaries and those who believe in the ideals of the American revolution.” As the New Yorker’s David Remnick points out, that’s from the opening paragraph of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the “mandate for leadership” that is guiding the current dismantling of our government. Reading through last week’s Independent, I had a hard time figuring out which of those two camps the people we wrote about were members of.
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1 month ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
The opponents of affordable housing in Truro have rallied around the slogan “Keep Truro Rural.” Now we are hearing the same line about the Maurice’s Campground project in Wellfleet. We should ask what they mean by “rural.” With much of the land in a national park, it can’t mean open space. One of those questioning the master plan for Maurice’s last week was Gerry Parent, chair of the Wellfleet Planning Board.
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2 months ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
Saturday was a dreary day. A good example, I think, of what Wyman Richardson was talking about in the chapter of The House on Nauset Marsh titled “The March Doldrums.” We were at the Inn at the Oaks in Eastham to hear readings from Richardson’s book. Wyman Richardson was a distinguished physician and professor at Harvard Medical School, but The House on Nauset Marsh is about the place he loved more than any other — the old farmhouse on the marsh in Eastham that was his family’s refuge and retreat.
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2 months ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
What is the purpose of newspaper headlines, and who should write them, people or computers? At the Independent, we work on headlines at both ends of the editorial process. We ask reporters to write them for the first drafts of their articles, because we believe it helps them think about the purpose of the piece. Having to distill a thousand words into one short sentence that accurately conveys the most important element of the story is an excellent way to focus the mind.
