In the early years of Seven Days, writers hand-delivered their stories on physical floppy disks, and the designers “pasted up” the paper using hot wax as adhesive. For a time, every Tuesday night cofounder Pamela Polston and I transported a box of soon-to-be newspaper pages to a parking lot in Barre, where we handed them off to an ink-stained emissary from the Bradford press. The paper would get printed overnight, while the two of us, driving north on Interstate 89 in the dark, hatched all the story ideas for the next issue. Everything had to be ready for editing in three days — five, if writers could work over the weekend. This wasn’t a leisurely brainstorm session but a weekly gun-to-the-head, pants-shitting moment.
I remember one night, for example, when we had to come up with a cover story for the next week’s paper. We noted that Anita Roddick, the British founder of the Body Shop cosmetics company, was coming to Burlington to give two talks: for the Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility conference and the Trinity College graduation. We knew that she and Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s were friends and that their respective businesses had recently faced some common headwinds — “negative press, growing pains, how success changes your relationship with the company,” according to Cohen.
Why not preview Roddick’s visit by getting the two “crunchy capitalists” on the phone together and printing their conversation as a cover story? Eureka.
That’s exactly what we did for the issue of May 8, 1996. Illustrated by Tim Newcomb, “Talking Shop” was a tantalizing, f-bomb-filled eavesdrop on two business giants. I mean, they dished. I transcribed and edited the conversation and wrote an intro to put it all in context.
The Seven Days archive is full of such gems — wildly creative, seat-of-the-pants stories that, mixed in with all the serious stuff we’ve covered, have made the paper a delightful read, week after week, year after year, for three decades.
Yes, I’m biased. And, like most publishers, usually too busy to look back. But this issue marks the big 3-0 for Seven Days, so we’re celebrating it. Combing through past issues, I’m struck by both the sustained invention and the vibrancy of voices in all those pages, from Peter Freyne writing about politics in his “Inside Track” column to rants by Peter Kurth, Ron Powers and Judith Levine.
For the first seven years, Pamela and I each wrote at least one story a week alongside some of the best writers in the state, who worked for us as freelancers: Bryan Pfeiffer, John Dillon, Erik Esckilsen, Ruth Horowitz, Nancy Stearns Bercaw, Amy Rubin, P. Finn McManamy, Rick Kisonak, Anne Galloway, Kevin J. Kelley, Molly Stevens, Marialisa Calta, Barry Snyder, Jeanne Keller and David Healy, among others.
In the 23 years since, as finances have allowed and the Burlington Free Press has shrunk, we slowly assembled a hardworking team of full-time staff writers and editors to anticipate the news that can be planned for — and to jump on the kind that can’t. There’s no other way to operate this kind of publication. The in-depth, long-form cover stories now regularly published in Seven Days often take weeks to report, and for almost as long as we’ve had a website, circa 2000, we’ve tried to respond to breaking news online.
I remember Freyne’s surprising embrace of the digital realm, which disrupted his longtime habit of holding back juicy news items for his column in the Wednesday paper. Although it amounted to “scooping” himself, he learned to blog and came to enjoy it. When he was diagnosed with lymphoma, in January 2007, Freyne wrote about the experience in detail from his hospital bed at Fletcher Allen Health Care, now the University of Vermont Medical Center, complaining the whole time about its poor connectivity. Two years earlier, he had relentlessly covered the hospital’s $367 million Renaissance Project and the criminal role its president and CEO played in misrepresenting its cost. As a result of his reporting, Bill Boettcher was fired and sentenced to two years in a minimum-security prison for defrauding a state agency.
Too bad Freyne didn’t live long enough to have a podcast. Or to cover the current Burlington City Council. When he died, in January 2009, we gave him a secular Irish funeral, complete with speeches from the politicians he skewered and the daughter of UVM prof and political observer Garrison Nelson singing “Danny Boy.”
So much has happened in Vermont since the first issue of Seven Days, on September 6, 1995, and the paper has documented most of it, including the presidential campaigns of governor Howard Dean and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the locavore food movement, the opioid and homelessness crises. We’ve listed, previewed and reviewed countless shows, exhibits and events. No other media outlet in the state has devoted so much ink to local culture. Ditto cartoons, original photography and illustration.
And the ads! In the early 2000s, almost every small business in downtown Burlington had a regular presence in our pages. Some have gone; others have shrunk or cut back on traditional marketing.
While it’s a chronicle of local history, for me, the archive is also personal — an emotional journey through my life’s work, some of which I’m starting to forget. As we embarked on the impossible task of choosing 30 stories that best represent Seven Days, I relived the experience of capturing a changing community through its highs and lows. I rediscovered projects and stories — including my own!
A timeline of Seven Days‘ three decades snakes through this week’s 30th Birthday Issue. Compiled by deputy publisher Cathy Resmer, it calls out some highlights in our history. The past 10 years have been rough, but despite the challenges of the pandemic and its continuing economic aftermath, the paper has steadily stepped it up and produced some of its most important, ambitious work. Before the COVID-19 lockdown, we published the “Our Towns” issue and award-winning series such as “Worse for Care,” “Hooked,” and “Give and Take.” More recently, we took on two of the state’s most intractable problems in separate, yearlong reporting projects: “Locked Out,” an exploration of the state’s housing crisis, and “This Old State,” about the demographic reality that exacerbates so many problems in Vermont. In 2023, Joe Sexton gave us his shocking exposé of child abuse at Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center.
From those first, story-hatching drives in the dark, it’s been a wild ride, indeed.
One thing hasn’t changed: Every week we have to bring in enough money from advertising, sponsorships and event ticketing to pay for our journalism. Our sales reps hustle to pay the bills, and, since the pandemic, generous readers and local foundations have pitched in, too.
The result is the miracle before you: a deeply reported, well-written, relevant and lively local print publication in the age of AI news summaries, social media influencers and Donald Trump.
Pamela and I couldn’t have imagined this reality on those long-ago drives, and no one can predict with certainty what’s around the next bend. But as long as you continue to read, engage, advertise and donate, Seven Days will keep on. As the rich and readable archive of this paper proves, stranger things have happened in Vermont.
This article appears in 30th Birthday Issue.
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