SANDUSKY —
A local writer I met three years ago launched his own Substack this week, somewhere between outrage and wonder. I don’t know where he learned to write, or what made him so prolific, but he’s hatching stories they’re like baby bunnies in a warm hutch.
Read it for yourself: Click here
At Terry Burton’s Substack there’s already a piece about Elsebeth Baumgartner, the aging viral queen who went to prison two decades ago for crimes on the internet similar to what Ashli Ford was convicted on in May. For those who care about her, life seems to be rotting for Elsebeth, still.
“What’s on my mind? The carnival of corruption that is Elsebeth Baumgartner — once a lawyer, now a felon, and still stiff-arming the county with $22,000 in unpaid taxes,” Burton writes in Disbarred Lawyer, Convicted Felon — and Now a Tax Deadbeat.
Terry Burton was a war correspondent for the Sandusky Register when he was in the Ukraine as an infantry soldier with the foreign legion fighting the Russian army in the early stages of the war. Before he went there, Burton proposed the idea and followed through with it. His Diaries from Ukraine series in the Register published in 2023 was a big hit with local readers and with readers around the state and country.
Burton does well under pressure. At his Substack, launched Monday, he’s showing his versatility.
In The Men in Masks Are Not the Good Guys, Burton writes about the men and women who work at the Border Patrol in Port Clinton.
“History has never remembered the masked, nameless enforcers as heroes. Northern Ohio’s agents should think hard about which side they’re writing themselves onto,” the piece opens.
In A Marine’s last battle, Burton writes about care for veterans in the age of Trump, in the age of Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted in the U.S. Senate.
“The nightmare never ends. You think the PACT Act, passed with fanfare and fake smiles, was supposed to put an end to this grotesque carnival — veterans poisoned by the government’s own burn pits, begging for medicine like beggars at the king’s gate. But here we are, five years later, watching it all happen again.”
Burton is a reporter hired by the Norwalk Reflector in February. He was the first to report that Ohio’s two senators – Moreno and Husted — would vote to gut veterans healthcare benefits by cutting $23 billion in funding for the PACT Act.
Moreno, at first, through his staff, denied voting against the PACT Act, and later refused to answer any questions about his vote. Husted also never answered questions about it after he voted to defund the PACT Act. Moreno, especially, is on the attack against the press.
Burton’s Substack is local, but he’s fully undeterred from writing about statewide issues, national and international topics at the same time, weaving it altogether with a deft hand over the keyboard.
“This is my line in the sand,” Burton wrote in an introduction letter at the Substack. “A refusal to accept silence when silence only protects the powerful. A refusal to watch rural communities lose their lifelines, or neighbors be written off as numbers, without calling it by its name. A refusal to let lies, neglect, and extremism pass as normal.”
A Letter to the Reader
Dear Reader,
I am writing to you because stories matter. Not the polished ones handed down by press offices, but the stories that live in the marrow of everyday life. The kind that rise from county roads and courthouse steps, from neighbors who have seen too much, from families who know what it costs when services fail or justice bends.
But these stories do not stop at the township line. They stretch to the statehouse in Columbus, where laws are shaped in ways that ripple back home. They reach to Washington, where decisions made in grand halls strike hard in small towns. And they reach across oceans, to places of war and upheaval, where struggles of survival and freedom echo in the price of grain, the service of soldiers, and the conscience of communities here.
That is why I am starting this Substack. This is my line in the sand. A refusal to accept silence when silence only protects the powerful. A refusal to watch rural communities lose their lifelines, or neighbors be written off as numbers, without calling it by its name. A refusal to let lies, neglect, and extremism pass as normal.
Here, you will find:
Investigations pulled from records, budgets, and court files—because truth often hides in the paperwork.
Community reporting carried in the voices of those who live the story, not just watch it.
Human interest stories that remind us of the dignity, humor, and heartbreak in ordinary lives.
Satire, sharp and necessary, because sometimes laughter is the only tool left to confront the powerful.
And, at times, lighter stories—because the world is heavy enough already.
I believe the local, the state, the national, and the international are not four separate worlds. They are threads of the same fabric. What happens in a township budget meeting is tied to the policies of a state, the struggles of a nation, and even the wars of distant lands.
This Substack is the line in the sand—drawn against neglect, against silence, and against those who profit from both. From here on, the stories will be told plainly, whether they comfort or confront.
Thank you for reading, for listening, for standing on this side of the line.
Yours,
Terry Burton