Anne Galloway Credit: Courtesy In April I was on vacation in Mexico, on strict orders to avoid email, when I saw a message in my inbox from Anne Galloway. The subject heading: “Time sensitive freelance piece.” Of course, I read it! Galloway wrote freelance stories for Seven Days for more than a decade in the early days of the paper — features, art reviews, profiles — and we had a productive relationship until she started VTDigger in 2009. Like me and my cofounder, Pamela Polston, Galloway built a Vermont media outlet from scratch. Also like us, her success surprised people. Although she was soft-spoken and unassuming, Galloway turned out to be a ferocious reporter, editor and publisher who worked ceaselessly to create a nonprofit news website for Vermont. Five years in, she single-handedly broke one of the biggest stories in state history. Her dogged reporting showed that a development project in the Northeast Kingdom, funded by foreign investors buying U.S. EB-5 visas, was a Ponzi scheme. Galloway’s reporting put VTDigger on the national radar. Meanwhile in Vermont, the media landscape had changed: As the daily Burlington Free Press declined, Digger and Seven Days tried to fill the news void and became rival operations, competing for readers, stories, news tips, reporters, editors and, more recently, philanthropic support. Vermonters benefit from this one-upmanship. That both outlets want to be first to report every significant story generates more and better news. Or so the theory goes. Predictably, Galloway and I became respectful adversaries. Here’s a true story that sounds like a metaphor: One summer I was hiking around an island 10 miles off the Maine coast on a miserable, rainy day. I encountered only one other party, trekking in the opposite direction: Galloway and her husband, Patrick. To the Vermont media’s shock, Galloway resigned from VTDigger in May 2022. “I did choose to leave,” she told me, noting that there were a lot of internal “pressures” and she probably should have moved on sooner. “It’s all-consuming when you’re in it. I definitely had a case of ‘Founder Syndrome.’” Two weeks after her departure, on a road trip with her daughter, Galloway started having trouble with her eyesight. Back home in Vermont, she learned that both of her retinas had partially detached. She has endured multiple surgeries, with grueling recoveries, infections and redos, over the past few years but remains almost blind in one eye and sometimes walks with a white cane. She said the experience of becoming totally reliant on others “made me a better person.” Somehow, in that same time frame, Galloway also started a consulting firm, NewzOps, that assists independent newsrooms across the country. She has worked with about 20 clients so far. Considering all that, her email came as a surprise on that Monday morning in Mexico. “I’m writing to see if you’d be interested in the article that follows,” Galloway wrote. “I happened to be in D.C. last week visiting my son and got an in-person interview with Peter Welch. The piece is tied to the Senate vote on the tax bill.” I could see why she wanted to publish it; what she gleaned from the sit-down was intimate and revealing — the work of a pro. Galloway even suggested headlines. I sent the story to news editor Matthew Roy, and we scrambled the jets to get it into that week’s paper. Galloway told me later that she’d first offered the story to her former colleagues at Digger, but they turned it down. It was the first thing she’d written for publication since March 2021. The experience of working with Matthew was so good, she agreed to take on more assignments. We’ve since published half a dozen of her stories — about the Vermont Lawyers March, Burlington landlord Stu McGowan, the bankruptcy of Gardener’s Supply — all of which have been well observed and reported. For this week’s cover story, Galloway turned her attention to the University of Vermont’s new president, Marlene Tromp — an unabashedly progressive and personable academic leader with a PhD in English who ruffled feathers in her last job guiding Boise State University. Galloway spent time with Tromp and interviewed plenty of others about her. But nobody wanted to discuss what happened in Idaho; in fact, an administrator for the lawyer representing BSU hung up on Galloway. When she called back, the same woman told her: “Nobody in this office is going to talk to you.” So Galloway did what she does best: dug in. “I really had to do a lot of reporting on the BSU stuff,” she explained, though it wound up being just a small part of the story. “You start digging, and you don’t know where it’s going to go.” The post From the Publisher: Deep Digger appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less