Matt Vautour
Alumni Spotlight:
Photo Credit: Jimmy Murphy
By Kaitlyn Gilmartin '23
Since 2018, Matt Vautour has been the sports columnist for MassLive. He covers all the New England sports teams, but his primary focus is on the New England Patriots.
“MassLive takes doing journalism well very seriously, and it is a great opportunity for anyone that wants to do that,” Vautour said of his job. “I feel fortunate to work there, and I have a fun job.” He has won multiple awards throughout his career, including two recent first-place awards for sports stories at the New England Newspaper and Press Association's annual convention. Vautour was also named as one of the Top 10 Sports Columnists nationally in the circulation category by the Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE).
Before working at MassLive, Vautour worked at the Daily Hampshire Gazette for 20 years covering UMass sports teams. For a small newspaper, everyone took the coverage of UMass sports seriously, which gave him a reason to stay for as long as he did.
“I felt like I was in my 20s for a long time because I was still getting Antonio's Pizza in Amherst for years after I graduated,” Vautour said of his time at the Gazette. “It was fun to still be around the college campus.”
UMass Amherst and the surrounding area have always been a big part of his life. Vautour invested in writing for The Massachusetts Daily Collegian and graduated from UMass in 1996 with a degree in Journalism. “My existence at UMass circled around the Daily Collegian,” Vautour said. For him, The Collegian was as much of a career path as it was a clubhouse in a lot of ways, and it was where he found his home at UMass.
His time at the Daily Collegian is still a memorable part of his life today. He was covering the 2019 Super Bowl when it occurred to him that many other UMass Journalism alumni were covering the same game. “To think back to the dreams that we all had back in the mid-90s, to think that we were all sitting in the Mercedes Benz stadium, it was kind of cool to think that all of our different highways lead a life I very much enjoy," Vautour said.
This profile was written as a part of the 2021 Alumni Spotlight Series by students in the Writing for Public Relations course.