It’s been almost two weeks since well-known political columnist John Walters announced his departure from the Burlington-based alternative weekly Seven Days.
On Aug. 7, Walters took to Twitter with cryptic tweets and changed his social media profile to “free agent,” marking the end of his time at Vermont’s largest newspaper by circulation.
On Tuesday, Walters explained on his personal blog why he had lost his job.
“I had trouble achieving the paper’s exacting standards for accuracy,” Walters wrote on his blog. “I also had trouble distilling all the information and producing a strong point of view on deadline.”
Walters wrote that he had thought many times about quitting, but was surprised when he was forced to resign, just hours after his last column was published on Aug. 6.
“By the time the paper hit the streets, I’d been given the choice of quitting or being fired,” Walters said. “By the time my exit interview concluded, my Seven Days email account had already been canceled.”
Beyond discussing his difficulty with meeting his editors’ demand for accuracy and late hours, Walters did not go into specifics about what sparked his forced exit.
“They had their reasons. I have a hard time believing my trespasses were severe enough to warrant immediate expulsion,” he wrote.
A regular feature of Walters’ weekly Fair Game column was a media note section, in which he pressed news organizations for information on employee turnover.
However, as was often the case in those columns, little information is being shared by Walters’ employer. Two staff members at Seven Days declined to discuss the reasons behind the dismissal, on or off the record.
In a statement, Matthew Roy, the news editor for Seven Days, said the organization does not “typically comment on personnel matters” and that he would not elaborate on the reasons for Walters’ departure out of respect.
“It’s true that the work we do is very demanding, and it’s also true that accuracy is a chief concern. We wish our former colleague well,” Roy wrote.
Walters also declined to comment about his situation, beyond what was in his blog, saying in a text message “technically I’m on vacation.”
A VTDigger review of Walters’ tenure at Seven Days found he wrote 396 columns and articles during his two and a half years at the organization (or at least that’s how many appear online). Of those columns and articles, 51 had corrections, or about 13% of Walters total output.
In 2019, Walters wrote 65 columns and articles, 19 of which required corrections (a 30% correction rate), ranging from misstating towns where people live to overstating Gov. Phil Scott’s support for education policy and mischaracterizing U.S. Attorney Christina Nolan’s position on the forfeiture of property owned by drug dealers. Some corrections weren’t his fault, such as one for his last column on newsroom diversity, in which VTDigger gave him incorrect information on the number of people of color in its newsroom.
Since Walters was forced to resign, he has rekindled his political blog, recently beating both VTDigger and Seven Days to advance a story on the Vermont Democratic Party embezzlement scandal. Citing anonymous sources, Walters said the problem was bigger than previously known.
