One of my favorite keepsakes from a career of chasing news is a 1993 photo that topped the front page of La Opinión, the main Spanish-language newspaper in Los Angeles. The photo, taken from a helicopter, shows a hilltop mansion in Malibu about to be swallowed by a wall of wind-blown flames. At the bottom, tiny but plainly visible, sits a white Honda Civic — my car. I was somewhere below in that scene, doing what would become a professional habit: covering disaster.
California has its wildfires, landslides and earthquakes. Elsewhere, it’s hurricanes or tornadoes that deliver calamity.
In Vermont — at least in 2023 — it was a historic flood. And Seven Days was there in force.
Every such catastrophe presents journalists with urgent, clinical questions: How bad is it? Where is the story best told? How can you get there? How to get word out?
There are times when the event carries personal stakes for those trying to cover it. That was the case for several of our reporters during this summer’s floods, when battering rains pushed rivers and streams over their banks, swamping downtowns and mobile home parks and displacing hundreds of residents.
The state’s July floods figure prominently in this year’s Backstories — our first-person accounts of how Seven Days’ stories and images make it onto the page. One writer describes covering damage in the Marshfield area while her own basement and yard remained a sodden mess and, like the rest of the village, without running water. Another juggled reporting duties with the sadness of watching the Winooski River overrun her beloved community garden in Burlington’s Intervale. For a separate writer, hometown roots came in handy when she traveled to Barre to write about a flooded hardware store that stayed open to help residents mop up. Still another reporter saw grace in the willingness of flood victims to welcome him, even as they were coming to grips with their own homes in ruins.
The stories are personal and revealing, and they underscore what it means when a news organization is determined to cover its community amid the most trying conditions.
But there are plenty of other writerly delights here, too: Stories of immersive puppeteering and ill-advised roller-coaster rides, of a Montréal “cowboy” and a food writer’s race to deliver a story on deadline, with her first child on the way. There’s even one about lying to the boss. It doesn’t end in disaster.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Backstories 2023 | Seven Days writers reveal how they nailed the news”
Related Stories
This article appears in Dec 27, 2023 – Jan 9, 2024.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
