On November 25, 2024, the New York Times published a story about a weekly newspaper in Burlington, Vermont, that still ran personal ads. The piece ran in the Style section under the headline: “Dating App Fatigue? In Vermont, Personal Ads Still Thrive.”
Within days, a BBC producer had reached out to the paper. Months later, NBC sent a film crew. The Vermont story set off a coverage cascade that ran well into 2026 — not because it revealed something new, but because it put a face on something a lot of people had quietly been feeling.
“These personals offer a new-old way of approaching dating — farmers’ market rather than meat market.”
What the coverage had been building toward
The Vermont piece didn’t come from nowhere. The mainstream press had been circling this story for most of 2024.
In May, the San Francisco Standard covered a grassroots campaign in which people stapled handmade dating flyers to telephone poles on behalf of their single friends. One campaign went viral on Instagram and ended in a party at Fort Mason, with dozens of people showing up to meet a man they had read about on a piece of paper attached to a pole. It was a personal ad, just posted in public instead of online.
In March, the Washington Post had written about the return of speed dating. In July, the same paper dispensed with diplomatic framing entirely.
What Pew shows about the market
The numbers behind the fatigue had been accumulating since 2023. Pew Research, in a February 2023 report, found that about three-in-ten U.S. adults had ever used a dating site or app. Usage was concentrated in the under-30 cohort: 53% of adults under 30 had used one. The market was enormous. Current satisfaction was a different question.
The Vermont story and what it actually showed
The Times piece landed because it was concrete. Jeff Baron was a real person in a real office doing a real job. The Littlefield couple — who met through Seven Days personals in 2010 and married the following year — made the story feel grounded. The point was hard to miss: a format that many people considered outdated was still producing actual relationships.
Seven Days founder Paula Routly offered a simple explanation for why the paper’s personals section had survived while most alt-weekly sections hadn’t: “One of the reasons we’ve survived is that we have a real community in a geographical place.” The paper wasn’t competing with the apps on the apps’ terms. It was doing something different.
Baron’s editorial finding — that the ads generating the most responses were the ones where people said something “really genuine and kind” — gets at the appeal directly. A personal ad works best when the writing sounds like a person, not a profile strategy.
Why a story about Vermont went national
The Vermont piece resonated beyond its subject because the subject was legible to a lot of people who had never heard of Seven Days. App fatigue was widespread. The experience of spending months swiping and matching and messaging and going nowhere was common enough that a story about a newspaper that had never stopped running personal ads — and that had produced real couples who got married — felt less like local color and more like a point of reference.
A BBC producer saw the story and asked about a segment. Months later, NBC sent a crew to Burlington. The coverage cascade it set off — into 2025 and early 2026 — is what the Epilogue documents.
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