• James Buck
• The Seven Days crew at the office, September 2024

I didn't know the first thing about running a newspaper when Pamela Polston and I started Seven Days in fall 1995. The two of us were arts journalists, not businesspeople, who shared a vision for a lively, smart, irreverent local publication that would accurately reflect the cultural richness of Vermont. We sought out and published the area's strongest voices, including the late, great Peter Freyne's.

By default, the number crunching fell to me, the daughter of an astrophysicist who insisted I should learn to save and help pay for the things I wanted — and to take care of them, too. I didn't have a car until I was 28.

Though unschooled in accounting, I willingly tackled the finances of publishing, the gist of which, in some ways, is pretty basic: to bring in more revenue each week than we spend. To control expenses, for the first seven years Pamela and I were the only writers on the payroll at our free weekly; every other contributor, including Freyne, was a freelancer, paid per piece that appeared in the paper.

Today, as Seven Days turns 29, the masthead lists more than a dozen full-time staff writers on our news and culture reporting teams. They range from veteran Ken Picard, our first editorial hire in 2002, to recent journalism school grad Hannah Feuer and Report for America corps member Rachel Hellman. The Seven Days newsroom is big and broad enough to accommodate both investigative reporter Derek Brouwer and our forever-funny music editor, Chris Farnsworth.

I'm immensely proud of the work they do every week, from the piping-hot restaurant news delivered by food writers Melissa Pasanen and Jordan Barry to enterprising cover stories you'd expect to read in a national magazine. Maintaining that level of excellence is a tall order in any business; in local journalism, it's almost impossible.

Add in the myriad challenges of publishing a newspaper in the digital age and the rising costs of everything, especially health care, and Seven Days looks like a not-so-small miracle. The paper has earned plenty of regional and national recognition over the years — we have collected more awards than we can hang on the walls — but nothing means more to us than the financial support of our readers.

Since 2018, almost 4,000 Super Readers have helped pay for our journalism. Nearly 1,000 are recurring donors who contribute monthly to help Seven Days keep going. Income we can count on, it amounts to roughly $3,000 a week.

If we can grow those numbers, it will vastly improve our chances of making it to year 30. (We're cutting costs, too. For example: As of this week, circulation of print copies to Plattsburgh, N.Y., has been discontinued. We had been paying our printer an extra fee to drop 1,000 papers there, and the amount was about to double. Plus, there's already more demand for the paper in Vermont than we can meet, so we decided to circulate those copies here rather than sending them across the lake.)

• James Buck

If you're not on our payment plan, please consider it. And if you're donating already, here's motivation to dig a little deeper in celebration of our birthday this month. Anyone who commits to at least $10 — or $10 more — per month will get a copy of our once-in-a-lifetime eclipse cover as a thank-you gift.

After I wrote in July about the financial challenges facing local news publishers, one Super Reader couple, who have contributed $100 a month since we started asking in earnest in 2020, increased their donation to $200 a month. They wrote in an email:

"It reminded us again how much we love your paper each week and how we have been Super Readers for a number of years at a fixed monthly sum, forgetting the serious impact of inflation over those years on your operating costs!"

They suggested challenging others to double their donations, too. "Happy Friday!," they added.

Happy Friday, indeed.

Another reader recently upped her contribution from $21 to $26.64 per month. When I thanked her and told her about the idea of a Super Reader "challenge," she said, "You can use me as an example, too. My increase was a modest one, so that might encourage others to give just a few dollars more. I hope so!"

Us, too.

As long as our readers find value in Seven Days, and can help us pay for its miraculous weekly creation, we'll keep sweating over spreadsheets and calculators to make it work.