Burlington, Vt.-based Seven Days built a decent online following on the strength of its quirky, personality-driven video series "Stuck in Vermont," and has turned the site into a money maker primarily from display ads and classifieds.
Burlington, Vt.-based Seven Days has announced the purchase of Kids VT, a monthly parenting publication.
Seven Days associate publisher / online editor Cathy Resmer has been named one of Vermont's "Rising Stars" by Vermont Business Magazine.
The Burlington, Vt., alt-weekly has promoted three longtime employees to associate publisher positions. Online editor Cathy Resmer, creative director Don Eggert and sales director Colby Roberts will retain their current roles while taking on an increasing number of projects in the publisher realm. "Cathy, Don and Colby have emerged as real leaders at Seven Days and have a lot to do with how far we've come as a media company," says publisher and co-editor Paula Routly. "We want to recognize that by entrusting them with more responsibility for our future growth and development."
StoryCorps, a national oral history project sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, has recorded more than 7,000 interviews over the past three years. Cathy Resmer was invited to participate after a producer read an essay she had written for Seven Days, where she is part of the editorial staff. Since StoryCorps subjects interview each other in pairs, Resmer recruited Jules Fischelman, a friend who donated the sperm that Resmer and her partner used to conceive their infant son. Resmer describes the recording experience in an Aug. 9 Seven Days feature; an excerpt, in which Resmer explains how Star Wars influenced her desire not to use an anonymous donor, was broadcast Thursday on Vermont Public Radio and is now available for download.
Yesterday morning, Cathy Resmer, a staff writer for Seven Days in Burlington, Vt., discovered text and images snatched directly from Seven Days' Web site had been posted on Explore New England's Vermont blog. (Explore New England is managed by the Boston Globe and its Web site, Boston.com, both of which are owned by the New York Times Co.) Resmer contacted the blogger's boss at Boston.com, who apologized, terminated his contract and promptly deleted the blog. "I think we should all be paying attention to who's writing about our circulation areas online," Resmer tells AAN News. "I think it's worth having somebody on staff who's monitoring local blogs. It's a great way to find out what readers are saying, and in this case, it helped us protect our material."
In a Feb. 1 editor's note, the Bay Guardian's executive editor responded to Craig Newmark's AAN West keynote by arguing that the Craigslist founder's "building community" rap is "bullshit," and that his creation is the online-classifieds equivalent of Wal-Mart. The blogospere responded quickly. Tech exec Anil Dash says he lost his job at the Village Voice when the paper's classified revenue was decimated by Craigslist: "I am exactly the person Redmond is ostensibly arguing on behalf of, and so I can say with certainty that he's profoundly wrong," writes Dash. At BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis calls Redmond's editorial "jealous whining," then seizes on his example of Burlington, Vt., as a community where Craigslist's arrival could hurt locally-owned media. After doing a quick once-over on Seven Days' Web site, Jarvis declares the Burlington alt-weekly insufficiently digital, which leads to comments from Seven Days writer and blogger Cathy Resmer (who blogged about Redmond, too) and co-publisher and editor Paula Routly, who writes, "If we're behind Craig Newmark technologically, it's because we’ve been busting our asses for ten years trying to put out an excellent newspaper that serves, and reflects, this community." Click here to watch the blogosphere stomp on Redmond in real-time.
For the first time, Seven Days was named Vermont's best non-daily newspaper, beating out 59 other non-dailies in the annual competition. The alt-weekly also won six writing awards. "We've clearly grown from being just 'that arts paper' over 10 years," says co-publisher Pamela Polston.
