Brianne Goodspeed: VTDigger’s story on the sale of Chelsea Green lacked depth and perspective

This commentary is by Brianne Goodspeed, senior editor at Chelsea Green.

As one of the employee owners who will benefit from the sale of Chelsea Green Publishing to “international publishing behemoth” Mondadori, I found your story about the sale (“ Chelsea Green to be sold to international publishing behemoth ”), as well as your characterization of the company and the company’s cofounder and publisher, Margo Baldwin, to be lacking in depth and perspective. I’d like to offer a different take.

I’ve worked at Chelsea Green for 16 years, first as an assistant to the publisher and then in various editorial roles. During that entire time, I’ve worked closely with Margo on countless books and with countless authors on a near-daily basis.

I have also seen many employees come and go — some almost unbelievably talented who poured their hearts and souls into our books, others bringing little more to the table than complaints and grievances. What most staff have had in common is a resonance with the company’s mission, as set forth by Margo and Ian Baldwin decades ago.

The opportunity to own a stake in the company through the establishment of the ESOP in 2011, and then the transition to 100% employee-ownership in 2019, means that staff — some current and some former — will now reap the financial benefits of this sale to Mondadori.

My own sense about the sale, despite the picture you paint in your article — which seems predicated on a preexisting ideological bias against our publisher more than anything else — is that Chelsea Green’s sale to Mondadori is a good outcome for the company, not least of all for the employee owners who will collect the proceeds.

And while the sale is, of course, bittersweet for a small, independent company, the transaction has been characterized, in my opinion, by immense consideration for staff, authors, the mission and the future of the company’s publishing program — on the part of the Baldwins, Chelsea Green’s board of directors and, yes, even our new “behemoth” owners.

The not-so-subtle subtext of your story, however, seems to be VTDigger’s disapproval of some of the books we’ve published — books that, yes, were championed by Margo often at great personal and professional cost — and her position on the fundamental importance of questioning the official narrative, rather than swallowing it whole — hook, line and sinker. In fact, Chelsea Green has published many such books, but never did it cause such a stir — or, notably, so much support — as when we published “The Truth About Covid-19” by Joseph Mercola and Organic Consumers Association cofounder Ronnie Cummins in early 2021.

Since most people who have criticized this book and the decision to publish it seem not to have read it or know anything about the arguments it advances, I’d like to point out what I think is its major, though not only, contribution: At a time when it was verboten to question the origins of the virus and the possibility of a lab leak, Mercola and Cummins were among the first to suggest that there was, in fact, good evidence to support such a hypothesis and that it was incumbent upon our elected officials (and the press) to investigate that.

That strikes me as an eminently sensible position to take, and I still wonder why the question of the virus’s origins — along with so many other important questions — was so taboo at the time.

Then again, “sensible” is not a word I would use to describe most of the events that occurred between the years of 2020 and 2022, and the backlash was never about the substance of any given argument anyway, but about silencing those who dared advance them, the First Amendment notwithstanding.

The bottom line is that although VTDigger might not approve of some of the books we publish or our outspoken cofounder, Chelsea Green has been a Vermont business for 40 years, we have a backlist of hundreds of titles that have helped people build meaningful and self-sufficient lives (in addition to the few you object to because the New York Times told you to), and many people have started and built careers and livelihoods with the opportunities we’ve found here.

Whatever happens next, I think that’s an incredible legacy for a small, Vermont-based business, and, in my opinion, it warrants a more nuanced story about the company, its founders and Chelsea Green’s next chapter than what was dished about our acquisition by a “sprawling transatlantic media empire” and our controversial publishing program.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Brianne Goodspeed: VTDigger’s story on the sale of Chelsea Green lacked depth and perspective .