Inside Seven Days

Seven Days, Vermont’s free, independent newsweekly, won four first-place awards from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia in a virtual ceremony on September 18. One of the winning entries, a joint project with Vermont Public Radio about Vermont’s state-licensed assisted living and residential care homes, received a national Edward R. Murrow award for investigative reporting from the Radio Television Digital News Association on October 10.
The AAN Awards recognize the most artful, compelling and courageous journalism produced each year by the alternative newsmedia. AAN member publications from cities like Austin, Chicago, Boston and Burlington compete against each other. This year’s contest included entries submitted by 55 publications in the U.S., Canada and Norway.

Vermont Public Radio and Seven Days have won a 2020 National Edward R. Murrow award for their 2019 series “Worse For Care,” a joint investigation into Vermont’s assisted living and residential care homes for the elderly. The award for Investigative Reporting in the Small Market Radio Division was presented by the Radio Television Digital News Association on October 10.

“It’s an honor to win for a collaborative journalism project that pulled together the best reporting, editing and data skills at our two organizations,” said Sarah Ashworth, VPR’s vice president of news. “By working together we were able to do something much larger in scale than we would have been able to do alone. It’s a good reminder that when two organizations set aside competitive pressures and work toward a common goal, we can have a big impact.”

VPR and Seven Days reporters obtained five and a half years’ worth of complaints and state inspections, detailed in thousands of pages of documents. The series revealed troubling patterns of inadequate care that led to dozens of injuries and indignities, and at least five deaths.

“Worse for Care” was produced by Emily Corwin and Mark Davis of VPR, and Derek Brouwer, Matthew Roy, Candace Page, Andrea Suozzo and James Buck of Seven Days. In addition to a series of print, digital and on-air stories over four weeks, the project included Vermont Elder Care Navigator, a searchable database at eldercare.sevendaysvt.com, built by Suozzo, Seven Days data editor, and populated by the project team.
"This project was months in the making," said Seven Days news editor Matthew Roy. "In November 2018, both of our newsrooms reported that the State of Vermont had seized control of three eldercare facilities from an out-of-state owner after food shortages and financial problems. That's what prompted Andrea Suozzo to file our initial public records requests in January 2019. Unlike nursing homes, which are regulated by the federal government, Vermont's eldercare facilities are monitored by the state and the recordkeeping discourages public scrutiny. This series helped shed light on the cracks in the system, and made the state's inspection reports readily accessible. It also familiarized our newsrooms with these issues — knowledge that has helped us cover the coronavirus pandemic."

Since 1971, RTDNA has been honoring outstanding achievements in broadcast and digital journalism with the Edward R. Murrow Awards. Among the most prestigious in news, the Murrow Awards recognize local and national news stories that uphold the RTDNA Code of Ethics, demonstrate technical expertise and exemplify the importance and impact of journalism as a service to the community. Murrow Award-winning work demonstrates the excellence that Edward R. Murrow made a standard for the broadcast news profession. A full list of 2020 award winners is available here.

In addition to the Murrow Award, “Worse For Care” won an Association of Alternative Newsmedia award — first place in the Innovation category. Find a full list of 2020 award winners here. The AAN awards recognize the most artful, compelling and courageous journalism produced each year by the alternative newsmedia. AAN member publications vary in size and circulation; publications such as the Austin Chronicle, Chicago Reader and Seven Days compete against each other. This year’s competition consisted of entries submitted by 55 publications in the U.S., Canada and Norway.

For as long as I can remember, exercise has been my go-to cure-all, meditation and antidepressant. Every day, I either swim a mile — 72 lengths in a lap pool — or spend at least an hour walking outside or in the gym on various machines. Every workout feels like a miracle, as I'm transformed from an aching, anxious mess to a postmenopausal superhero. Especially in the pool, which is basically a chlorinated sensory deprivation tank, the routine offers an uninterrupted break from all the rest of my business.

That came to an abrupt end in March, with the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic. There was no swimming — anywhere — for the next two and a half months.

Like many Vermonters, I lost my most reliable coping mechanism and, with it, any illusion of control.

The timing was terrible. Ad sales at Seven Days dropped 50 percent overnight. And I found out my mom was dying. I spent half of April and all of May working from her apartment at Burlington's Converse Home.

I missed swimming every time I felt my lower back seize up in her gold Archie Bunker chair, from which I was applying for government aid, writing fundraising appeals, and reducing and rehiring staff. There was just enough floor space at her place to get down and stretch once in a while. I'd squeeze in a walk when she was napping or after I got home at night, on the bike path, in the dark.

By the time my mom died, I was a mental and physical wreck.

I wasn't the only one. More than 210,000 Americans have died of COVID-19; 58 of them were in Vermont. Many others, like my mom, died of other causes. Their families have been unable to gather and mourn.

We're all facing incredible stressors — the pandemic, the climate crisis, reckonings with racial justice, and an unpredictable and unprecedented U.S. presidential race. Our way of life in Vermont has changed, too, at work, in schools and, soon enough, on the ski slopes. We've all had to adapt and adjust to get through the past seven months. Found a good work-around? Next thing you know, that's disrupted, too.

The challenge of living with so much uncertainty is what inspired this week's cover story package. It offers a few ways to soldier on, from decluttering your home to punch needle rug hooking. We hope you discover something useful in it.

As for me, I'm finding ways to get through this horrific year. Writing about it, for one thing; that's been cathartic. An outdoor pool that I used most of the summer wasn't a long-term solution — it's closed now — but floating in sun-dappled water was great while it lasted. In August I hurt my shin, and the doctor made me swear off swimming and walking for the entire month of September. Post X-ray, he called it "the next worst thing to a stress fracture," and we agreed that was a well-worded metaphor for our times.

Doing meaningful, rewarding work sustains all of us at Seven Days. Hearing from readers who've taken our Staytripper recommendations. Knowing that some advertisers are supporting us because they understand the importance of local journalism. Seeing our collaboration with Vermont Public Radio recognized with a national Edward R. Murrow Award, one of the highest honors in broadcasting. Receiving timely federal and state aid. All of those things have helped to offset the significant personal and professional losses.

Special thanks to our Super Readers for sending checks and notes encouraging us to "keep up the good work."

That's the plan.

I'm back in the water, swimming in whichever Chittenden County pool I can book a lap lane. Here's hoping I'll be able to keep that up, too — and we'll all be able to find outlets for our stress — this winter.

After this year's presidential election, the next one takes place in 2024. The other day I realized that my son will be able to vote in it.

That blew my mind! Graham is 14 now, and though he's almost a foot taller than me, I still think of him as a kid. But in four years, he'll be getting his own ballot in the mail — or driving himself to the polls.

I think he'll be ready. For the last three years, both he and his younger sister, Ivy, have been helping me develop activities for the Good Citizen Challenge, a youth civics initiative organized by Seven Days and Kids VT and funded by the Vermont Community Foundation.

We started it to bolster students' knowledge of our government and how it works. If they can memorize arcane Harry Potter trivia, surely they can grasp the difference between the House and the Senate, right?

The Good Citizen Challenge also addresses political polarization by focusing on our shared civic heritage, from the First Amendment to the Gettysburg Address. It encourages young Vermonters to practice writing letters to elected officials, having civil conversations with people who disagree with them, and learning how to spot sources of reliable, fact-based journalism.

Seventy-seven students finished the first Challenge over the summer of 2018 and attended a celebratory day at the Statehouse the following spring. The second Challenge started in the fall of 2019 and ended in March, two weeks before the schools shut down. About 800 kids from all across the state participated, and more than 200 finished it. Sadly, we had to cancel the gathering in Montpelier.

In response to the coronavirus pandemic, the project went remote. To aid parents and teachers with in-home learning, we created a weekly Coronavirus Challenge, with support from the Evslin Family Foundation. For 10 weeks in the spring, we introduced weekly activities focused on history, news literacy and making positive contributions to the community. My kids helped me raffle off prizes during Wednesday afternoon Facebook Live broadcasts.

Over the summer, we switched to easier-to-organize monthly Challenges. In September, we invited participants to create a poster encouraging adults to vote. We got a bunch of sweet submissions; this one appeared in Seven Days' 2020 Voters' Guide, published in last week's paper. We showcase more of them on page 22 of the October Kids VT, which is inside this week's Seven Days.

For this month's Challenge, we're asking students to contact their legislative candidates — with their parents' or teacher's permission and assistance — to find out about the issues driving their campaigns. We hope to organize another, more ambitious Challenge again soon.

In the meantime, if you'd like to try some of the activities we've developed, find them at goodcitizenvt.com. Or improvise your own.

For example, on Saturday morning, I sat down with Graham to review candidate Q&As in our Voters' Guide. I asked him to study their photos and responses. What kind of experiences did the candidates cite? Who seemed trustworthy, and why? What did all those acronyms mean? Those questions led us in interesting and unexpected directions.

Such conversations have grounded me during this tumultuous election year. I can't control what's happening in Washington, D.C., but I can help my kids decipher what's going on and show them how to participate in our democracy.

This is no time to sit on the sidelines. Our country needs all the Good Citizens it can muster.

Last week Seven Days' Chelsea Edgar wrote just shy of 6,000 words about the Black Lives Matter activists who have spent the last month occupying Burlington's Battery Park. In her first-person piece, "Battery Power," she chronicled what she saw and heard over many days of reporting.

This week Seven Days is devoting almost as much space to reader reactions to the story, which was summarily condemned by the protest organizers. Letters to the editor occupy four full pages of the paper. Published critics, who objected to Edgar's tone and characterizations, outnumber proponents by roughly two to one.

What remain unseen are dozens of private emails of support that we've received from readers, fellow journalists, business owners and fans since the story's publication.

You won't read their words of encouragement, or be persuaded by their arguments, because many didn't want their names in print — a requirement for sharing feedback in Seven Days. Why? They're afraid that what's happening to us could happen to them.

The day after Seven Days hit the streets, a number of protesters removed hundreds of copies from our distribution racks in private businesses. They defaced them to use as protest signs. A few were shredded and set on fire. While they marched, protesters chanted "Fuck Seven Days" and "Chelsea 'bout to lose her job."

That was tame compared to the vitriol unleashed on social media. Our staffers endured personal attacks, graphic humiliations and bullying of every variety, including profanity and sexual harassment.

Nothing prepares you for the indictment of a mob in the digital era and the subsequent online public stoning.

Protecting free speech and the press from government interference was so important to the founders of this country, they codified it with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The law protects all speech, not just the speech we agree with. While the Burlington protesters exercised their rights — camping in a public park, assembling on a public street, protesting and posting on social media — we reassured jittery reporters, circulation drivers and other staffers who felt targeted by association.

My guess is that all of them applaud the passion and empathize with the outrage that's fueling the Battery Park encampment. Some are reporters who have worked hard to expose police misconduct and the actions of the officers the group is seeking to remove. There's so much to be angry about in this moment, from the coronavirus pandemic's outsize impact on communities of color to the lack of justice in the killing of Breonna Taylor, the Black woman shot by police in Louisville, Ky.

We at Seven Days expect — and appreciate — criticism of our work. It affirms that our readers care deeply about our community and results in constructive discussions about our editorial approach and decision making, as Chelsea's story has. But last week's backlash feels more ominous.

The protesters themselves have experienced extreme reactions from those who oppose them. We've seen vile racist comments directed against them on social media, often disturbingly personal, often anonymous. On September 1, Burlington police arrested a counterprotester who stood near the encampment for three days while openly carrying an AR-15 rifle — illegally, as it turned out.

These kinds of intimidation and the corresponding fear of retribution are threats to our democracy and to civil society — unacceptable, no matter the cause. If people don't feel they can speak freely — or have disagreements or ask questions or write a story — without being bullied and shamed, they'll hold their tongues. We'll all be the lesser for it.

To report her 2019 cover story about milking cows on a Vermont dairy farm, Seven Days writer Chelsea Edgar immersed herself in the experience. She spent a week in muck boots and coveralls avoiding projectile poop, actually doing the job. There was no other way to fully understand, and explain, the daily labor of the state's migrant farmhands.

With similar motivations, Edgar spent dozens of hours over the past three weeks talking with Black Lives Matter protesters on the streets of Burlington and at Battery Park for this week's cover story. Her presence was not always well received by the participants occupying public property, despite her goal to share their aims with our readers — and the fact that Seven Days broke many of the stories about police misconduct that informed their demands.

Edgar endured insults and overcame resistance to report on the meaning and methods of the movement that claimed a partial victory on Monday night.

During the same time period, Burlington reporter Courtney Lamdin was up late covering the city council. Almost every week, she sits through hours of public comment, council bickering and the solitude of waiting out executive sessions to make sure she doesn't miss anything. Deputy news editor Sasha Goldstein stays up as long as it takes Lamdin to process and write up what happened. The time stamps on those wee-hour blog posts say it all. On Wednesday, September 9, Lamdin's story published at 1:53 a.m. On Tuesday, September 15, it was 1:21 a.m.

Three days later, at 7:45 p.m., Seven Days and the rest of the world heard about the death of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Paul Heintz immediately called Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) for comment. Within three hours, Heintz had spoken to the senator and reported his reaction to Republicans' rush to replace Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. Time: 11:06 p.m.

Journalists at Seven Days regularly go out of their way — and occasionally stay up all night — to report the news, whether it's a breaking story about Burlington buying out a problem police officer to end a protest, or a complex account of how COVID-19 swept through a Vermont nursing home.

Last Friday, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia recognized some of those efforts. Competing with newspapers across the country for work published in 2019, Seven Days took first place in health care reporting for "Hooked," last year's series of stories in which writer Kate O'Neill explored Vermont's opioid crisis following the death of her sister. The judges wrote: "Passionate, intrepid reporting. The personal story of loss blends with the big opioid crisis picture in exactly the right ways."

They also liked "Worse for Care," a Seven Days collaboration with Vermont Public Radio that exposed the poor reporting of safety violations in state-regulated eldercare facilities. In addition to a series of articles, Seven Days created a user-friendly database that offers access to inspection reports and details their findings. The project, which earlier this year won a regional Edward R. Murrow Award, took first place in AAN's innovation category.

Eva Sollberger's video series "Stuck in Vermont" and our guide for Burlington newcomers, What's Good, also took top honors in the competition. Seven Days placed second in investigative reporting, LGBT coverage and cartoon categories, for work by Heintz, Edgar and Tim Newcomb, respectively; Margot Harrison's "Quick Lit" book reviews took third in arts criticism.

It was a fitting way to wrap up our first quarter century in this crazy business that rarely affords a moment to look back.

In a normal year, this would be the week we'd publish Seven Days' annual Performing Arts Preview, a look ahead at what arts presenters have in store for Vermont audiences this season. Sadly, most of the series — shows for which you buy tickets in advance — have been canceled because large indoor gatherings aren't advisable during the coronavirus pandemic. Six months into the public health crisis, assistant arts editor Dan Bolles takes the temperature of Vermont's cultural sector and considers the economic impact on the businesses it supports. There's some good news...

Before I covered the state's arts ecosystem, I worked in it. My first job out of college was at the Flynn in Burlington, which in 1983 was just beginning its renovation from an art-deco vaudeville movie house to a world-class performing arts center. The only office space in the theater was the size of an accessible restroom — big enough for a desk and a copier. A small group of us used an office on College Street, above where Sherpa Kitchen is now.

As a full-time intern, I was in charge of marketing, membership and education — each of which has since become a separate department. I got a crash course in arts administration that has served me well as a journalist and business owner. I watched as the stage went from hosting "opportunity" rental bookings to one proudly hosting the Flynn's own season. And I saw Burlington transform from a sad commercial crossroad to a vibrant cultural destination where people wanted to be.

While the Church Street Marketplace set the scene, the Flynn brought business to its retail shops, bars and restaurants. Out-of-towners coming in for a show would make a night of it. It took a while for merchants to realize they should staff up on show nights, even midweek. The first annual Burlington Discover Jazz Festival, in the summer of 1984, dispelled any lingering doubts about the positive impact of this cultural activity on the downtown.

The Flynn's success attracted more artists, too, who flocked to the Queen City looking to perform their work. Pretty soon we had FlynnSpace and the performing arts center at Main Street Landing. Visual artists got on board, too, launching the South End Art Hop in 1993.

Towns outside of Burlington saw the benefits and also worked to create, or revive, a cultural niche. Some of them had their own version of the Flynn — a glorious venue that had fallen into disrepair over the decades. The Barre Opera House started hosting shows in the early '80s "in spite of the dingy walls, broken windows, lack of proper seats and heating," according to the venue's website. The Vergennes and Haskell opera houses were back in business by 1997. Renovations at the Chandler Center for the Arts in Randolph started in 1972 and continued for decades.

Jay Craven didn't have a building when he first started Catamount Arts in St. Johnsbury, but the aims of his itinerant performing arts series were the same wherever he presented shows: to create "ever more vibrant downtown areas" and "moments of shared community, and the goal of exposing individuals — who might not otherwise have the chance — to world-class cultural events more commonly booked in large cities," reads the mission statement of Catamount's successor nonprofit, Kingdom County Productions.

This is the environment that also spawned Seven Days. With our performing arts backgrounds — cofounder Pamela Polston's as a singer in a rock band, mine as a would-have-been ballet dancer — the two of us were eager to explore Vermont's cultural riches and share our findings with readers. In 25 years, the staff of the paper we created has never run out of artists, musicians, actors, dancers and impresarios to write about.

Those folks are up against a huge challenge this year — in which planning is almost impossible — but we have faith that their creations will be worthy of your support and Seven Days coverage.

Seven Days has found plenty of fascinating characters tucked away in these Green Mountains and valley s over the past 25 years. On the road less traveled, which inevitably turns to dirt, we’ve turned up a tornado chaser, two Vermont Supreme Court justices and the first female football coach in NCAA Division 1 history — at Dartmouth College. Almost all of them were eager to talk about their lives and work.

One exception: Republican strategist Stuart Stevens resisted Seven Days for two years before finally agreeing to be profiled. In a 2017 cover story titled “GOP Refugee,” Paul Heintz wrote 5,000 words explaining the “Trump-bashing, ad-making, novel-writing adrenaline junkie” who worked on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign — and four other White House races. After the 2016 election, Stevens retreated to Vermont to “lick his wounds” and ponder his next moves.

Three years later, his Stowe home has become a film set for powerful television ads for the Lincoln Project, in which a former Navy SEAL calls out President Donald Trump for cowardice and worse. In his new book, It Was All a Lie, Stevens describes Trump as a “traitor.”

Political operatives, poets and professors. Entrepreneurs, attorneys and activists. When you read about a Vermonter in Seven Days, you get the full story of a life. Our reporters spend weeks researching and interviewing their subjects, and that includes speaking to other people, friends and foes, about them. Does a person’s background and experience predict their passions? Their successes and failures? Reading about others gets at the heart of human nature and, in the hands of a good writer, reveals something about ourselves.

If you appreciate Seven Days’ in-depth profiles of Vermont people and can afford to help us financially, please become a Super Reader.

For the past 25 years, our local media company has depended almost entirely on advertising revenue from local enterprises to pay the bills. Since March, COVID-19 has severely challenged that business model.

To thrive for another 25, we need your help. Can you cover us?

For the past 25 years, our local media company has covered news, arts, music, food and culture in Vermont. To celebrate the milestone, we asked Seven Days staffers, local celebs and one lucky Super Reader to "pass it on" in this video by Eva Sollberger. It features lots of familiar faces and an original song from the Seven Days house band Enemy of the People.

I used to say that the six weeks leading up to the first issue of Seven Days, on September 6, 1995, represented the hardest stretch of my life. Now, mid-pandemic, I'm not so sure.

The challenge of starting this labor-intensive local media company was assembling the pieces within a compressed amount of time: funding, office space, people, sales, production and distribution. The order of the steps was important — each one built on the one before — but the process wasn't as simple as crossing things off a list. It was like building an orchestra, the parts of which were meant to swell into a decent-sounding symphony. But the musicians had never played together. Neither Pamela Polston nor I had ever held a baton. And we were attempting to perform on a set date that had been widely publicized.

Adding to the pressure: recognizing faces in the audience. That is, we were spending other people's money and hiring employees without knowing how long we could afford to pay them.

A few folks didn't like the music, including my then-husband, but other spectators filled their empty seats. Pretty soon we needed a bigger concert hall.

The digital archive on our website includes the contents of every Seven Days since the inaugural issue. Reviewing 25 years of cover images recalls the weekly struggle behind each one of them: finding a dozen or so good story ideas, convincing people to report and photograph them, making the result readable and visually appealing. And, of course, selling enough advertising to pay for it all.

On top of those fundamental publishing challenges were so many others over the years: staffing up, quality control, collections, getting ad agencies to take us seriously. Circa 2000, we got caught up in the world wide web. While it facilitated fact-finding and made Seven Days accessible to readers everywhere, the internet threatened our business model in every possible way.

Craigslist, Match.com, indeed, cars.com and others targeted our classifieds, personals, employment and retail advertising. Heeding the warning "If you're not on the web, you don't exist," we pushed ourselves to keep up with the digital arms race, feverishly adapting our original content to be deliverable on multiple platforms.

Today we're breaking news at sevendaysvt.com, as well as showcasing videos we've produced, linking to public records databases we've built, and promoting virtual job fairs and home-buying seminars we've organized. It's hard to imagine what we'd do without all this connectivity — especially since it's enabled us to continue producing a finely crafted newspaper while working remotely.

COVID-19 has made just about everything else about our work much more difficult, from protecting the people who cover the news and distribute the paper to managing a precipitous drop in advertising revenue related to events and food-service businesses. As in the fall of 1995, we face an existential challenge — only now with so much more to lose.

Our talented and dedicated staff — pictured on the rocks by the bridge that connects Burlington and Winooski — is producing some of the best newspapers in our company's history. Since 2010, we've helped 16 of them become owners, ensuring that they're invested in the future of our shared enterprise.

Government loans and grants have supplemented our ad revenue, helping to keep us all employed. So, too, have donations from our 1,950 Super Readers. Total reader contributions during the pandemic have reached almost $150,000, with recurring donations generating more than $2,000 a week — roughly the equivalent of two reporter salaries. The snail-mail checks and accompanying love notes have been huge motivators for all of us.

For a quarter of a century, we have managed to produce and distribute a weekly newspaper that aspires to magazine quality, to be "the New Yorker of the north," as a contest judge once described Seven Days — except it's free.

Please help us sustain this community resource by becoming a Super Reader. We're in for another 25 years if you are.