Whoever decided Tuesday was the best day of the week for Vermonters to exercise democracy did not have this newspaper in mind. Seven Days has to be completely edited, designed and proofread by 7 p.m. on Tuesday night — coincidentally, the same time the polls close. Our Canadian printer needs roughly 12 hours to get the paper on the press and trucked over the border for an early Wednesday morning arrival in Burlington.
But on election nights, we get an extension — until 11 p.m. In those extra hours, the news team breaks as much election news as possible online while also crafting print coverage for the next day’s paper. To do it, we need timely results.
And to make sense of the results on Town Meeting Day, we need Burlington reporter Courtney Lamdin.
“I love town meeting,” Courtney said two days before her favorite work “holiday,” which she also calls “Journalist Christmas.” She didn’t experience the traditional version of it — meaning in-person potlucks and floor meetings — in her hometown of Barre and still doesn’t in the city she now covers. But, she said, “I just love that … people can have a direct effect on how their government functions.”
A reporter’s job is to make sure those people are well informed — an endeavor Courtney has embraced since she ran the student newspaper at Spaulding High School and, later, at Saint Michael’s College, where she majored in journalism. Before joining the Seven Days news team, she ran three community papers — the Colchester Sun, the Essex Reporter and, for eight years, the Milton Independent.
Courtney thrives on deadline and prepares for it by writing draft stories that imagine different possible outcomes: whether or not voters approved a police oversight board, for example, or potential winners of the most competitive city council races. In the final hours before the paper ships, she directs colleagues in the field to gather color, images and quotes for her write-ups.
“No one else is as excited as me,” she conceded.
The quality of her breaking-news coverage is informed by the hard work she does in the weeks leading up to the election — a time period that, for better or worse, mail-in voting has compressed. Between the end of January, when ballot items and candidates emerge, and the second Tuesday in March, when Queen City citizens vote on them, Courtney tries to write about it all in Seven Days.
Town Meeting Day is “the culmination of all of these issues and debates that I’ve been reporting on for the past few months,” she explained. “I finally get to learn what happens.”
Before and after, Courtney is there, too. For the past four years, she has thoroughly studied Vermont’s largest city. She attends its contentious city council meetings and files wee-hour reports online after they’ve adjourned; with deputy news editor Sasha Goldstein, she wrote a thorough explanation — two cover stories and a news feature — of a citywide reappraisal that sent some residents’ property tax bills through the roof.
The Burlington police know Courtney well, too. In 2019, she caught the former police chief in a lie that cost him his job. More recently, she revealed that local cops were hiring themselves out as private security during what their superiors described as a labor shortage.
While she ably covers the day-to-day news out of Burlington, “She loves getting the story that no one else has,” Sasha said, describing Courtney as competitive, passionate and “graceful under fire.” Sources unhappy with her coverage today will talk to her tomorrow “because she treats people fairly,” he added. Courtney’s articles about Burlington’s 2021 mayoral race won a first-place election coverage prize last spring in the New England Newspaper & Press Association awards. She shared another first-place win for reporting on Burlington High School.
Her work shines that much brighter at a time when local journalism — and democracy — is in crisis across the country. Vermont is better off because Courtney is on the Burlington beat, every day, asking hard questions, staying up late and holding those in power to account.
This article appears in Mar 8-14, 2023.
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