The Vermont Press Association awarded the alt-weekly first place in its General Excellence (non-daily newspapers) category, The Barre Montepelier Times-Argus reports. Seven Days won five additional awards, with a one-two-three sweep of the Arts Criticism (daily and non-daily) category, and a second place finish in both the Feature Writing (non-daily) and Photo Feature (non daily) categories. Winners were announced at a luncheon yesterday.
Co-publisher/co-editor Paula Routly says the remaining advertisers on her paper's voice-personals system now have a choice: "Find an internet connection at the local library, or a real one at the nearest bar." The Burlington, Vt., weekly switched to online personals about a year ago but kept the old system "for those dial-up, off-the-grid or never-adopter readers." Nevertheless, it has seen the number of users dwindle "to a handful." One 36-year-old reader isn't happy about the switch. "I have an old-fashioned view of what it means to be close," Nick Zandstra says. Although he admits his resistance is "futile," he has no intention of getting a computer. "I can better observe the phenomenon by not being in the phenomenon," he says.
Seven Days' Peter Freyne was recently diagnosed with lymphoma and immediately began chemotherapy treatments. He blogged about this turn of events prior to being admitted to the hospital, and his post has attracted dozens of comments, making it a virtual get-well-soon card. Most of the comments are from readers and fans, but several state politicians and even the deputy police chief of Vermont's largest city have weighed in to wish him well, says Seven Days' online editor, Cathy Resmer. Freyne has been writing about Vermont politics since the state's new, socialist senator Bernie Sanders won his first term as mayor of Burlington in 1981. He brought his popular column to Seven Days shortly after the paper was founded in 1995.
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.
The March 15 issue of the Burlington, Vt. weekly contains a letter to the editor from Donald Fell, who was sentenced to death for the 2000 kidnapping and murder of Terry King. In the letter, which can be read here (fourth item down), Fell writes, "I live every day in abject sorrow. Not for myself, but for these righteous people, these innocents whose lives I have destroyed." Fell's trial was the focus of media attention because he is the first person to receive the death penalty in Vermont in 50 years; a representative of The Campaign to End the Death Penalty forwarded the letter to Seven Days. Burlington TV station WPTZ interviewed his victim's daughter, who said, "He sums it up in two paragraphs. That's not remorse."
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.
Don Eggert is an art director who loves deadlines: he thrives on the challenge of working against time constraints and enjoys the sense of relief that a job is done. He spent two hours, start to finish, creating his award-winning layout, "The Blogger." This is the 35th in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
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.
