Thirty Reasons Seven Days Newspaper Is Alive and Kicking

The newspaper industry looked very different when the first issue of Seven Days rolled off the press in September 1995. Websites, email, search engines and smartphones didn’t exist yet or were still years away from widespread use. Reporters, salespeople and delivery drivers navigated the state using folded paper maps, not GPS, and “social media” meant going to the places where clients and sources hung out.

Thirty years later, Seven Days presses on. In an era when so many other news outlets have thrown in the towel or become shadows of their former selves, here are 30 reasons we’ve lived to tell the tale:

Seven Days is still free. When others built paywalls, we built bridges.
Our faithful advertisers, who week after week keep our lights on because they know that local matters.
What’s a 15-letter phrase for black-and-white wild game? Crossword puzzle! Ours has a loyal following.
We need print media: You’re not going to start your woodstove with a rolled-up tablet.
Seven Days is chock-full of news you can use, including politics, art listings and a preview of that new punk-Cajun-polka-grass band playing at your local dive bar.
iSpys. Maybe this week, right?
We’re locally owned by our publishers and staff. That means we answer to our readers, not Wall Street or some megalomaniacal billionaire.
We offer deep dives into issues that matter, not simplistic splashing around in the shallow end.
Our living, breathing Vermont journalists report stories about real people who live here. They don’t “generate content for algorithmic optimization.”
Speaking of AI, Seven Days is always hallucination-free — during regular business hours, anyway.
Are we willing to quote the occasional potty mouth? Fuck, yeah!
Being Stuck in Vermont isn’t so bad through the lens of Eva Sollberger and her award-winning videos.
What other newspaper in America devotes an entire issue each year to journalistic cartoons?
Our events calendar has it all. No other Vermont outlet employs a full-time calendar writer to wrangle all those deets.
Jobs, jobs, jobs! Our employment listings are all local and scam-free.
We’re not afraid of pointed critiques. If it’s relevant, under 250 words and includes your real name, we’ll run it in our Feedback section.
“Alternative weekly” doesn’t mean we publish every other week. It means we have moxie, grit, snark and a wicked sense of humor.
Would you rather get restaurant reviews from trusted writers who’ve authored cookbooks and earned advanced degrees in food science — or from Reddit?
Our “Life Stories” keep alive the memories of locals we’ve lost. If you didn’t know them already, you’ll wish you did.
Margot Harrison’s movie reviews. Whip-smart and entertaining, she’ll never steer you wrong.
Seven Days has a personality — because our staffers do. Just check out the office bathroom: It’s like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, with lots of biblical references. Not for prudes or the easily offended.
The Daysies. More than a popularity contest, these best-of awards are an annual celebration of our state — the antidote to bad news.
We’re still local, organic, non-GMO and gluten-free! (Except on Bagel Tuesdays.)
Snopes has never debunked a single one of our articles — and international news outlets have picked up multiple stories that we got first.
We respect none of Vermont’s sacred cows, including its beloved bovines.
Our design team makes everything eye-catching — ads included.
Does anal-retentive have a hyphen? Rest assured that the grammar nerds on our proofreading team know the answer.
None of us is getting rich doing this work, so we must love what we do.
Super Readers help pay for our free journalism — without ’em there’d be a lot less of it. Haven’t donated yet? $30 a month makes a great 30th birthday present.
After three decades, we still have issues. Our state may be small, but we’ve never run out of interesting and unique Vermonters to write about.