Make products “with hair.” That’s one of many insights, mostly on tech tools and the evolving nature of journalism, that I’ve scribbled while attending conferences for Seven Days over the past 20 years. Thinking about the future has always been part of my job here, from when I was our first blogger to now as deputy publisher.
That handwritten note stands out in part because it was about our original product: the newspaper. The remark came from Gen X writer, cultural critic and early internet adopter Virginia Heffernan at Vermont Humanities’ 2017 conference on “The Double-Edged Sword of Technology.”
Heffernan’s talk, in a conference room at the University of Vermont’s Davis Center, focused mainly on the positives of digital connectivity. During the Q&A, I asked what advice she’d give to a media business navigating the rapidly changing technological landscape. Focus on tactile experiences, she advised. As more and more of our lives migrate to screens, people will crave objects that they can touch and interact with physically — products “with hair.”
Seven Days is obviously bald, but the idea stuck with me. Heffernan was essentially predicting that people will want to pick up our newspaper as a welcome escape from the online experience.
Eight years later, I’ve come to believe she was right. The pickup rates of our print editions are as high as they’ve ever been, and we hear from people all the time who read Seven Days online but love the paper. I just met a social media strategist in her early thirties who, unprompted, described her weekly reading ritual: Every Wednesday she goes to a coffee shop to sit down, without distractions, and savor the latest issue. She reads it cover to cover and feels a sense of satisfaction when she’s finished — something that’s elusive when scrolling online. We hear variations of this from our Super Readers, too.
Of course, we’re still investing and innovating in the digital realm. Just last week we launched our redesigned website. As a result, it’s easier to read Seven Days on a phone or tablet, which is how most people find our content online.
The hot topic on the conference circuit now is how to ethically integrate artificial intelligence tools into our workflow. We’re having those conversations at Seven Days, guided by our commitment to producing local journalism powered by human intelligence.
One prediction: People will want to pick up our newspaper as a welcome escape from the online experience.
Training young readers and writers is a big part of that. In 2018 we launched the Good Citizen Challenge, our youth civics project for kids in grades K through 8. This summer we invited participants to do 25 activities to win prizes, including a trip to Washington, D.C. Four of the tasks were about getting to know trusted sources of local news.
Entries poured in from kids who read their community newspaper, watched the news on TV, or found the masthead of their paper or news website, which lists who owns it, who writes it and where it’s located. Hopefully turning to local media becomes a habit!
Better yet, those kids will develop enough curiosity to pursue careers in journalism. Seven Days hosted three interns this summer, two from Middlebury College and one, Sam Hartnett, who just graduated from the University of Vermont; we’ve kept him on as an editorial and marketing assistant.
And we partnered with the first Green Mountain Summer Journalism Institute, a four-week program for high school students interested in the field. The teens spoke with some of our reporters and editors, sat in on a news meeting, and each wrote a story for the Back-to-School Issue of our parenting magazine, Kids VT.
Maryn Kerrigan, a sophomore at Burlington High School, described thrifting her school wardrobe — a story illustrated with sassy and confident photos of her modeling what she found. After it was published, she said, “One of my friends told me it was giving 2000s girl-fashion-magazine chic, and I just fell in love with that.”
A woman from the Department of Environmental Conservation saw Kerrigan’s story and invited her to be part of a new network supporting the state’s reuse and repair economy. Not bad for a first foray into journalism.
Jasper McGibney, a junior at South Burlington High School who writes for his school paper, the Howling Herald, let students around the state sound off about the new bell-to-bell cellphone ban coming to Vermont schools next year. He told me that he got positive feedback about the piece from friends — and from a stranger who recognized him from his photo in the paper.
Seeing his work in print was rewarding, he said: “It made it feel very real.”
Both of them are eager to do the program again next summer. Who knows? One of them may end up on our masthead someday.
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Next 30 | With products and people, Seven Days is preparing for the future.”
This article appears in 30th Birthday Issue.
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