Seven Days’ first issue, published on September 6, 1995, was 28 pages long, mostly black and white, and had a “long-tab” format — meaning the paper had a vertical orientation and a fold. Compare that with the thick, colorful, compact paper you’re holding in your hands today — or scrolling online, something that would have been impossible for our website-free business to offer in the mid-’90s — and even our readers who weren’t born at the time can grasp how much our operation has changed and grown over three decades.
From the beginning, we promised to be “the weekly read on Vermont news, views and culture.” That’s one thing that has stayed the same, even as pretty much everything else — our media landscape, editorial ambitions, ownership structure and business strategy, for starters — has undergone dramatic transformation in the course of some 1,500 issues.
Not all newspapers get to stick around long enough to see that happen. An extensive report on American journalism published last fall by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism was mostly full of bad news: “Since 2005, more than 3,200 print newspapers have vanished. Newspapers continue to disappear at a rate of more than two per week; in the past year alone, 130 newspapers have shut their doors,” The State of Local News 2024 reads. “In addition to these closures and mergers, papers are reducing their print coverage, including shifting from dailies to weeklies or ending print publishing altogether.”
Thankfully, despite all we’re up against, that’s not the case at Seven Days. The Medill report surveyed the media landscape across the country, taking stock of information deserts, and identified a dozen “Local News Bright Spots” — outlets that “provide their communities with excellent reporting essential to democracy while progressing in the quest for stable, sustainable business models.”
Seven Days is one of them. In a candid conversation with “Bright Spots” editor Autumn Brewington, publisher Paula Routly opened up about the paper’s editorial objectives, business model and what she wished she knew back in 1995. The resulting article, titled “How Seven Days Defies the Odds,” was published on October 23, 2024. It has been excerpted, updated and reprinted here with permission.
Autumn Brewington: How has the appetite and opportunity for journalism in Vermont changed since you began publishing?
Paula Routly: The Vermont media landscape has changed in the past three decades — though not as dramatically as in some other states. Here, there’s still a strong appetite for local news, served by community weeklies and the emergence of a very popular social media platform that connects rural communities called Front Porch Forum. The two statewide dailies that once dominated here — the Gannett-owned Burlington Free Press and the Rutland Herald — are shadows of their former selves. The AP bureau has also been hollowed out.
Seven Days has expanded to fill the local news void. For the first seven years, it was primarily an arts and culture newspaper — a free weekly in the tradition of “alternatives” such the Boston Phoenix and the Village Voice. As we have grown and have built an enterprising news team — including many journalists who left or were laid off from the Burlington Free Press — we have become much more than that. Seven Days is now the largest print-circulation newspaper in Vermont and, some would say, the paper of record.
We have steadily taken on more and more ambitious projects. Readers notice and appreciate it. Though we’re still free in print and online, thousands of readers now make financial contributions that help sustain us.
Autumn Brewington: How do your goals differ today from your objectives in 1995 — in terms of journalism or growth?
Paula Routly: When we started Seven Days, Pamela Polston and I created the local newspaper we wanted to read on Vermont culture. We both came from arts backgrounds. For years the paper’s news “coverage” was limited to a popular political columnist. We didn’t employ a single staff writer until 2002.
In other words, the paper evolved slowly from an upstart, sometimes snarky weekly to a rigorous and reliable practitioner of serious journalism.
We are still fully committed to the arts. Seven Days employs seven full-time news reporters and the same number of culture writers.
We do chase some daily stories, especially food news and stories about Burlington. But we’re generally more selective, focusing on quality over quantity. Today our objective is to publish the kinds of stories you’d expect to find in a national magazine.
Attracting and retaining writers is a big priority. Young people are hearing that the industry is dying, so fewer are pursuing print journalism. The ones we employ get the opportunity to write long form as well as the training to do it properly.
All of it is part of a larger effort to bring up the next generation of reporters and editors.
Autumn Brewington: When conceiving events such as Vermont Tech Jam, what’s the strategy driving your approach to community engagement?
Paula Routly: We want to be useful to our readers in as many ways as possible. Whether they are looking for a place to eat or hear music; if they need a date, a job, a summer camp for their kids or an obituary — we want them to come to us.
Anticipating their needs has guided our product innovations, from a pandemic-era quarterly called Staytripper, geared to Vermonters vacationing within their own state, to our ticketing service, which gives event organizers a local box office option that includes promotion in the paper and on the Seven Days website.
When we found ourselves in the path of totality for last year’s solar eclipse, we produced an online and print guide — and licensed some of the content to the state’s tourism website. We come up with events that serve our advertisers and readers alike. In other words, there has to be enough potential revenue and sufficient audience to justify the significant work involved.
Autumn Brewington: When did employees become part of the ownership model, and how does that work?
Paula Routly: Until 2010, Pamela Polston and I owned Seven Days 50-50. She is 11 years older than me, so I figured she would retire first and began to strategize how I might replace her. Three invaluable employees stood out: Sales manager Colby Roberts, creative director Don Eggert and deputy publisher Cathy Resmer had already emerged as essential associates for me and company leaders in their respective departments. Each year, we bonused the trio through earnings to slowly buy out Pamela’s shares.
In 2019, right before the pandemic, we widened the net to include our 13 longest-serving employees. They “bought” the balance of Pamela’s shares. Cathy, Don and Colby now each own 12 percent of the company. The other 13 each own 1 percent. I have 51 percent.
The goal was to reward these loyal employees but also to create a multigenerational group representing various departments who feel seen and appreciated and who act like owners, coming up with cost-cutting and revenue-generating strategies. Not sure we’re totally there yet, but the 1 percenters definitely helped us hold things together during the dark days of the pandemic.
Autumn Brewington: Has that business structure changed your approach to covering Vermont?
Paula Routly: I don’t think that hybrid employee ownership has changed our approach to covering Vermont — except perhaps to make us aware of how few companies plan for succession. We haven’t asked much of our employee-owners beyond serving on a few committees — the pandemic got in the way — but most of them are still with us. More than a half dozen “Seven Dayzers” have worked at the paper for more than two decades.
Autumn Brewington: Is there anything you have learned in the past five years that you wish you had known in 1995 or 2005, or even 2015?
Paula Routly: Running Seven Days for the past 30 years, through one of the most disruptive periods in media industry history, has required every brain cell and ounce of energy in my body. I’m not sure that knowing more than I did at specific times would have resulted in better decisions. Do I wish I’d invented Craigslist? Sure, though it would have meant cannibalizing our classified section, some of which remains viable.
As for the internet, I knew early on that it would imperil our business model. In retrospect, we rushed into some things that we could have taken longer to think through. But at the time, the digital revolution felt existential. While we didn’t have to immediately put everything online, and on phones and tablets, readers expected us to; the effort became a sign of future viability. Both the success we’ve had, combined with an enduring will to survive, have motivated me to push the paper to be better and better — and, always, to find new ways to pay for it.
Autumn Brewington: Seven Days provides content free thanks to support from advertisers and Super Readers. Have you noticed any encouraging trends in reader support?
Paula Routly: When we reluctantly started our Super Reader program in 2018, we didn’t feel too comfortable asking our readers for financial support; we thought it might be viewed as a sign of weakness that could potentially turn off advertisers. The pandemic fixed that.
In 2020, after we lost 50 percent of our advertising overnight, suddenly there was no shame in asking for help. Donations poured in. We learned who was actually reading the paper and how they felt about it.
As the COVID threat receded, we worried about losing the monthly recurring donors who had been supporting us through the pandemic, to the tune of $2,500 a week. By all indications, they are
sticking with us, and new ones sign up every week. We are on track to earn $250,000 in reader revenue in 2025, though that’s still a drop in the bucket of our overall expenses. Philanthropy is up 100 percent over last year.
We’ve found that donors generally don’t need to receive perks to be convinced to give — they just want the paper and the journalism we do to survive. The main way we communicate with them is through my weekly “From the Publisher” column, which I started writing in March of 2020. It started as a series of letters to readers to reassure them we weren’t going under. Over time, it evolved into a useful way to humanize Seven Days — I wrote about my mom dying of cancer during the pandemic, for example, which was cathartic and also, sadly, very relatable. We’ve also used it to peel back the curtain on our process. We think it helps our Super Readers feel connected to us, and it’s been useful as a fundraising tool.
But the very best fundraising tool remains to find compelling local stories and report the hell out of them. Readers respond.
Autumn Brewington: What is your commitment to print in the next five years?
Paula Routly: We print 35,000 copies of Seven Days every week and distribute them free of charge within two hours of Burlington. Our circulation is audited, and the return rate is between 2 and 4 percent — our readers and circulation director would like us to print more papers, not less. Until the return rate suggests readers don’t want the paper in that form, we’ll keep producing a print product.
Autumn Brewington: Are there other platforms on which you plan to connect with people?
Paula Routly: Seven Days has long been a multimedia company. We employ a full-time video journalist, Eva Sollberger, who has been telling stories with images since 2007. Our current media partners include Vermont Public, WCAX-TV and Front Porch Forum. We’re also on Facebook, Instagram, X and LinkedIn. We haven’t ventured onto TikTok or Substack yet, but we may.
Like many local news publishers, we’re trying to reach audiences where they are — and we’re creating new ways to engage when we see an opportunity. For example, in 2018, we launched a nonpartisan youth civics project called the Good Citizen Challenge. It invites kids in grades K-8 to do various activities that help them learn about and connect with their communities — things like going to the library or a community event, researching a deed at the town clerk’s office, and reading the news … We’ve built a connection with hundreds of Vermont families this way and underscored the link between civics and keeping up with local news. We’ve raised money from foundations through our fiscal sponsor to support it.
Autumn Brewington: What do you wish people knew or would ask you about Seven Days?
Paula Routly: It takes a crushing amount of work and dedication to produce Seven Days each week. It starts with good intel and story ideas and involves many hands to report, edit, fact-check, illustrate, design and sell ads into a quality publication. We push ourselves to deliver compelling, responsible journalism and never stop hustling to pay for it. None of us earns as much as we might elsewhere, but those who stay do so because they appreciate the chance to do meaningful work alongside creative, talented and discerning colleagues. We care about words and wordplay; we value great design. We collaborate across departments. We strive to get it right, and we own up to our mistakes when we don’t.
Many of our readers understand the value of our efforts, too. Will their appreciation pay the bills to the extent that advertising once did? If not, this country needs to devise another way — before every reliable media outlet, including Seven Days, disappears. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Ask Us Anything | Publisher Paula Routly opens up about Seven Days’ three-decade evolution and quest to stay in business”
This article appears in 30th Birthday Issue.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!