Crystal Graham: Join AFP at Taste of the Town
I got a feeling Jonathan Hunley does not know what I’m talking about.
My friend Teresa and I have been busy prepping for the Taste of the Town benefit for WDDI on Tuesday night.
We’ve been up to our elbows in garlic, onions, jalepeno peppers and green peppers for most of the morning. I even made Teresa cry when she was peeling onions. Read more
AFP taking part in Taste of the Town
Augusta Free Press vice president Crystal Graham will square off with News Virginian editor/general manager Jonathan Hunley in a cook-off in the 13th annual Taste of the Town event on Tuesday, March 27.
The event is sponsored by Waynesboro Downtown Development Inc.
Graham will pit her Moroccan White Bean Turkey Chili against Hunley’s Butternut Squash Soup in the Best Culinary Newshound competition.
The Taste of the Town event is 5-8 p.m. at the Waynesboro Country Club.
Media General explores sales of newspapers
Media General announced on Wednesday that it is exploring the sale of its newspaper operations, including the Waynesboro-based News Virginian.
The Richmond-based company said it has received inquiries from third parties regarding the potential sale of its newspapers. Media General’s newspapers include The Richmond Times-Dispatch, The (Charlottesville) Daily Progress and The (Lynchburg) News and Advance. Read more
If it’s broke, fix it
“Government isn’t designed to do a whole lot. It’s working the way our founding fathers planned for it to.”
At least Tim Williams is being honest about where he’s coming from. The quote is from a story in the News Virginian on Sunday looking at the long-delayed South River Greenway, which I’ve been writing about since my first couple of years in local journalism.
Dirt is finally supposed to turn on the project sometime next year, though I’ll believe that when I see it happening. Three city managers and four mayors, including Williams, have made similar pronouncements over the years.
To be fair, a big part of the holdup is the complexity of getting property owners along the river to sign off on having people walking and biking in their residential and corporate backyards. We’re not talking about a project where the city is, say, the owner of a parcel of land with the money and all the i’s dotted and all the t’s crossed just twiddling its thumbs waiting for Christmas.
The characterizations to the otherwise in the story from Williams and his successor as mayor, Frank Lucente, are interesting in and of themselves.
Read the rest of this column at TheWorldAccordingToChrisGraham.com.
The World According To ChrisGraham.com: Keepin’ it real
I’m still here in Waynesboro playing journalist – and that suits me just fine.
The good news for my fellow News Virginian alums who had inexplicably followed Todd Foster down to Bristol – dude has moved on, which I’m sure suits them just fine.
Link to column on TheWorldAccordingToChrisGraham.com.
Phil Winter: Zero-based budgeting debate
Letter from Phil Winter
Submit letters, guest columns: freepress2@ntelos.net
The News Virginian’s April 24 article about “zero-based” budgeting brought back memories of the federal government’s use of this approach more than 15 years ago. It proved then to be a quickly passing, inefficient, and ineffective, fad. Current City Council member, and candidate for reelection, Lorie Smith has it right; the budget preparation process should focus on efficiently utilizing taxpayers dollars, not on starting over every year from a “zero base.” Read more
Blast from the past
Posted by afp on December 20, 2010 · Leave a Comment
The resulting eight-part series never ran. It was to have debuted in the Saturday paper – back then the NV didn’t have a Sunday edition, so this was the big paper of the week, with all the sales papers in it and everything. The publisher, on an out-of-town trip, called in late Friday night and ordered the story off the front page. The reason: He’d been getting phone calls all day about the teaser that we’d run in the paper promoting the series.
Apparently, our effort to shed some light on how Waynesboro was embracing a new immigrant community didn’t sit well with the people who had the publisher’s ear. I resigned in protest, returning to the paper a year later after the publisher had been sacked, and in 1998 led a staff effort to chronicle the local Latino community that won the paper an award from the Virginia Press Association for in-depth and investigative reporting.
That feels like a hundred years ago now. Waynesboro has matured a bit since the old days. Which isn’t to say that we still don’t have some growing up to do.
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