It’s over. After publishing a Vermont-related social media post in every issue of the newspaper for nearly 16 years, Seven Days is calling it quits. The final “X Post of the Week,” formerly “Tweet of the Week,” ran last week.
The Love & Marriage Issue seems an appropriate place to announce the breakup: Not all relationships last forever.
There are lots of reasons this one ended. Elon Musk, for one. When he bought Twitter in 2022 and changed its name to X, he cut staff and made changes that resulted in users leaving the site. Advertisers, too. When I check X these days, I see more spammy ads, more bot-generated content and more conspiracy theories circulating — and so many more posts by and about X’s mercurial overlord.
But also: The posts themselves are less interesting than they used to be. The quirky, revealing comments about Vermont life from people who live here have mostly vanished, either because the authors left X for other platforms such as Bluesky or because they stopped sharing their thoughts publicly online, now that doing so could mean losing a job or being targeted by a virtual mob. Because of the way X’s search functions, those locals who are still posting are now harder to find. Deputy news editor Sasha Goldstein, who picked the “X Post of the Week,” said that increasingly he was using posts from tourists.
It wasn’t always this way. I know because I’ve read every tweet and X post Seven Days has ever published. We launched the feature when we redesigned the paper in 2009; I was the online editor then. Creative director Don Eggert and I wanted to give digital readers a reason to pick up the newspaper. It worked: Lots of them shared photos of their tweets in the paper, proving the continued relevance of print!
To eulogize the “Tweet of the Week,” I flipped through the digital editions of every issue since October 7, 2009 — all 783 of them.
I noticed a few themes. The most prominent, by far: the weather. Thundersnows, late freezes, early thaws, freezing fog, leaves turning red at the end of July. Also: flooding. The collection includes multiple references to Tropical Storm Irene and recovery efforts; ditto the catastrophic floods of 2023 and 2024.
There were several celebrity sightings, including Paul McCartney — with a photo. Multiple celebrity accounts made the paper, including ones belonging to Luis Guzmán, Anaïs Mitchell and then-president Barack Obama, who noted the death of former senator Jim Jeffords in 2014.
On a lighter note, I laughed out loud several times at tweets that responded creatively to the news of the day, sometimes from accounts that were clearly fake. In 2014, after Fletcher Allen Health Care changed its name to the University of Vermont Medical Center, an account called @FletcherAllen tweeted “AVENGE ME.” In January 2017, after Donald Trump’s first inauguration, @VTFakeHeadlines tweeted “Chopper Crews Almost Ready to Lower Pussy Hat onto Camel’s Hump.”
The “only in Vermont” tweets included three over the years from people who tried to open the wrong Subaru in a parking lot. Vermont Community Foundation president Dan Smith confessed to actually climbing into the driver’s seat before realizing he was in someone else’s car.
His 2021 tweet is one of a couple dozen we collected in an online slideshow to memorialize the Tweet/X Post of the Week.
You can still find Seven Days‘ content on X — and on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Bluesky and YouTube. Eva Sollberger also shares her “Stuck in Vermont” videos on TikTok; we’re flirting with the idea of posting more there.
Look for our replacement feature, “Town Crier,” on page 5 of this week’s paper. Rather than choose a post from another social media platform, Seven Days will highlight a local story from a news outlet instead. We’ll choose a variety of articles from trustworthy sources, including Vermont’s community weeklies. Some of the stories will likely be ones we’ve linked to in our Daily 7 email newsletter.
We want to help you find more local journalism that matters, and we hope you’ll follow and support some of these media outlets. Unlike X, they’ll love you back.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Farewell to an X”
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This article appears in Love & Marriage Issue 2025.
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