In celebrating three decades of Seven Days, we’ve tried to acknowledge the range of people who have contributed to the paper’s success. The 30th Birthday Issue on September 3 called out former columnists, award-winning reporters, the graphic designers and production folks in our staff band, eloquent Super Readers, and our longest-serving delivery driver.
One group left largely unsung, however, was our editors, who quietly toil away, week after week, to make every story in Seven Days accurate and a pleasure to read. Each piece goes through two of these story surgeons. Later in the process, a pair of proofreaders scours and fact-checks it.
Unwavering attention to the craft of writing is what makes Seven Days articles “sparkle,” as Patrick Mullikin, a former freelancer, phrased it in a letter to the editor this week. In the same missive, he described getting a piece of writing to that point — aka through the editing process — as “humbling.”
You could argue that spending hours bent over someone else’s prose — cutting it open, pulling out the bad bits and stitching it up again — is the more thankless task. While there’s an Academy Award for best film editing, newspaper editors don’t traditionally get public credit for what they do. The byline belongs to the reporter.
And yet editors are involved in every step of the reporter’s pursuit of journalism, from vetting story ideas to writing the headlines and other packaging elements that “sell” them to readers in print and on the web.
So much happens between those bookends: guiding the writer to home in on the story and through any reporting complications that arise; helping structure the narrative so the storytelling is both logical and compelling; acting as a proxy for the inquiring reader; and decluttering each individual sentence to make it sing.
Our staff editors — Dan Bolles, Carolyn Fox, Sasha Goldstein and Matthew Roy — do it all. Dan is the paper’s best headline writer; one of his weekly jobs is to come up with the clever teasers on the front cover.
In addition, we call on consulting editors to help. When Seven Days reporters get lost in their notes, they often seek out writing coach Ken Ellingwood, who listens carefully to what they have discovered and nudges them in the right direction. The tireless Candace Page, a stickler for structure, carefully explains every modification she makes. No one knows grammar better than Margot Harrison, a published author and award-winning critic with a PhD in English.
When they team up on a piece, editors learn from reviewing each other’s work, which is, in the end, subjective.
Meanwhile, Seven Days writers see every iteration of their story as it moves from editor to editor to proofreaders. They can argue against the proposed changes, but in the end the invisible editor has the last word.
“I find Seven Days editors and the editing process a huge asset and a comfort,” said Melissa Pasanen, who wrote this week’s epic cover story on Shelburne Farms. “The trick is to focus on what will make the reader care and what will carry them through the story, which can be incredibly hard to do when you’re so close to the topic.”
In this case, first editor Candy helped Melissa cut to the heart of the story while second editor Carolyn clarified smaller details and gaps and came up with the headline. “Having the two layers of editing is such an amazing support,” Melissa said.
Writers who study the feedback as a way to improve eventually develop the ability to edit themselves — the most reliable indicator of a future editor.
When she was on staff at Seven Days, Chelsea Edgar wrote long, complicated cover stories that always required multiple rounds of editing. In the end, she would change hats and inflict some of the most painful cuts on her own work. Now, she’s regularly editing her former colleagues on our culture team.
My first editor is deputy publisher Cathy Resmer. She’s my sounding board for column topics, and she reads the first draft and marks it up, often adding essential context.
Second editor Carolyn expertly smooths sentences I didn’t realize were tangled, fixes typos, suggests more accurate wording and makes everything read better.
Proofreaders Angela Simpson and Alice Dodge inevitably propose more tweaks.
I’m so grateful to the quartet that puts my work through the paces and to the larger team of the editors who make this paper “sparkle” every week.
This article appears in Sep 17-23 2025.
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