In the lead-up to Valentine’s Day, NBC’s “Today” show is looking for love, or at least stories about it. The show’s search led a film crew to the Seven Days office in Burlington. In a segment that aired the morning of Friday, January 16, host Yasmin Vossoughian explored the new, retro trend of finding romance through personals ads, including those in Seven Days.
Thanks to the trend, “Looking for love in 2026 looks a little more like dating in 1986,” Vossoughian said in the four-minute segment, which also features the personals listings in “The Cut,” a New York Magazine newsletter.
An NBC film crew, including Vossoughian, producer Hannah Van Winkle and cameraman Bill Angelucci, visited the Seven Days office in Burlington on November 17. They interviewed publisher Paula Routly, personals coordinator Jeff Baron and two happy Vermont couples that connected through the personals ads: Brandi and Brian Littlefield of Burlington and Marcia Gauvin and Chris Leister of Bethel.
In the “Today” segment, the Littlefields shared their love story, which started in Seven Days’ online personals ads in 2010. “The first time I saw Brandi, I turned about the same shade as her sweater,” Brian told Vossoughian, nodding at Brandi’s dark red top. The couple married in 2011 and today share a blended family of seven.
Gauvin and Leister, meanwhile, met through the personals in 2021. Leister’s ad made it clear that “any respondents had to be game for frequent outdoor adventures,” he told Seven Days reporter Ken Picard in October. Gauvin reached out, and their first date was a bike ride. The couple’s romantic adventures have continued, and they recently completed an ambitious project of gravel biking all 252 towns in Vermont.
“So, do you see yourselves spending the rest of your lives together?” Vossoughian asked the couple.
“Yeah, actually,” Gauvin said.
“Absolutely,” Leister agreed.
“We’re going steady,” Gauvin added with a grin.
Seven Days has run personals ads since shortly after cofounders Routly and Pamela Polston published its first issue in 1995. The independent weekly expanded the print-only ads to an online platform in the early 2000s. It also offers an often quirky “I Spy” section where readers can seek out their missed connections from real life. (“You were playing violin at the U-Mall stoplight. Ummm, hello, gorgeous?” reads a recent one.) And a “Love Letters” service provides old-school snail-mail connections for singles.
In the era of dating apps, Seven Days’ newspaper personals ads have caught attention from far beyond Vermont.
“The national media can’t get enough of the personal ads in Seven Days, which, in the age of swiping for sweethearts, are viewed as old-fashioned — presumably, in a good way,” Routly wrote shortly after the “Today” crew’s visit.
Beyond that televised segment, the paper’s personals section was the subject of a New York Times story on November 25, 2024. “Dating App Fatigue? In Vermont, Personal Ads Still Thrive” describes Seven Days as “one of the last bastions of newspaper personal ads.” A producer from the BBC saw that story and expressed interest in spotlighting the personals, Routly noted in her “From the Publisher” column, but the timing didn’t work out.
What accounts for the personals section’s enduring allure? As Katie Flagg — an Addison County woman who met her husband, Colin Davis, through the personals in 2008 — told the Times, “This isn’t the big scary internet. This is an online version of the small town I live in.”
“We’re tickled that our personal ads are drawing attention around the world,” Routly wrote in November. “It’s no wonder, I guess, since the quest to find love is universal.”
“We try to be as useful as we can to people here, whether they’re trying to figure out what happened at a city council meeting last night or they’re looking for a job or they’re looking for love,” Routly told Vossoughian in the “Today” segment.
Vossoughian described Seven Days’ personals as “a staple … with care and consideration as key for their readers.”
Indeed, as personals coordinator Baron said in the clip, the ads “that get the most responses are ones where people say something really genuine and kind.”
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