In April 1997, Michelle Brown took a risky job at an upstart media company in Vermont. She’d worked for some radio and television stations in the Northeast Kingdom that were certainly better known. And the new gig involved selling print ads into a newspaper that published some risqué stuff.
Michelle was four months pregnant with her first child when we hired her at Seven Days. Unlike most of our account executives at that time, she had real sales experience. Her work helped transform our edgy alt-weekly into the must-read news source it is today.
Two daughters and 29 years later, Michelle is retiring. She has been on our payroll longer than anyone in the history of the company — except me — with a slight edge over 28-year veteran creative director Don Eggert. Sales director Colby Roberts and art director Diane Sullivan both started a little later, in 1999.
Michelle’s work helped transform our
edgy alt-weekly into the must-read
news source it is today.
Along with the rest of the crew, Michelle has busted her butt every week to sell the advertising that pays our bills: for writers, designers, printing and circulation drivers. It takes persistence and a thick skin. Last week Michelle recalled a typical telephone exchange from the early days.
“I’d be like, ‘Hi, I work for Seven Days. Would you be interested in…’”
“Seven Days Adven— what? Is that religious?”
“No, no, we’re the alternative week—”
“Oh, that college paper? No, thanks.” Click.
Michelle worked with clients in the retail sector until she returned to the office after baby No. 2, when we asked her to focus on populating our classified section with help-wanted ads. “The Free Press was killing it,” she recalled of the opportunity we all saw in black and white.
Three years in, she started to make some headway. “I went from 1.5 pages to three, then I remember the jump from three to five, five to seven, seven to 10, then 15. By year five, I was cooking,” she said. For more than a decade, Michelle was single-handedly generating half of the company’s annual revenue. We invested that money in building the news side of the operation and hiring staffers who could reliably deliver all manner of great stories week after week.
The employment section got so big, it had to be printed separately from the rest of the paper. For years, before the pages were sent electronically to the printer, Michelle delivered the page layouts to a Franklin County press on her way home every Tuesday night. Although we fully expected Craigslist to decimate this part of our business by 2010, as it had done to every other newspaper across the country, the Seven Days employment section miraculously survived. No national platform could deliver the same quality — or quantity — of local jobs, and our secret weapon remained human interaction, aka Michelle’s personal customer service.
Nonetheless, it’s been a bit of roller coaster. Michelle works on straight commission. During the 2008 recession, she lost 75 percent of her employment advertisers over a six-month period. The same thing happened — overnight — in March 2020. We’ve got lots of local competition now. Almost every Vermont media outlet sells employment ads. So does Front Porch Forum.
Through it all, Michelle never complained about the fluctuations in her paycheck. “I feel like I’m the canary in the coal mine,” she explained. “If things are starting to get good, I see it first. If things are going bad, it’s me first, too.” As revenue from job ads waned after the pandemic, we asked Michelle to take on legal notices and paid obituaries, too.
I guess I should have seen her retirement coming. But I was still shocked and saddened when I got an email from her on February 11 with the subject line “It’s Time.”
The message was warm but also efficient and matter-of-fact — Michelle’s trademark. She explained that her husband, Mike, a teacher and coach at Bellows Free Academy in Fairfax, had done the calculations. They’re young to retire but plan to travel. “Thank God you guys started a 401k,” she told me later.
Hiring someone to replace Michelle was a daunting prospect, in part because we had never had to do it! But we had a pretty good idea of her plate-spinning skills. The last time Michelle went on vacation, it took three coworkers to cover for her.
For the past 10 days, she’s been training her successor, Gillian Comito, a Monkton native and Smith College grad who worked in inside sales for seven years at IBM. The two women have been in the office, shoulder to shoulder, transitioning Michelle’s accounts before her last day on April 7.
Like so many Vermonters, Gillian found her new job from an ad in Seven Days.
The original print version of this article was headlined “End of an Era”
This article appears in Money & Retirement Issue • 2026.
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