The quote from Walt Disney, “We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies,” best describes my approach to our efforts here with Augusta Free Press.
We’ve been able to build, over the past 24 years, a pretty cool little engine that could – a viable local news organization with a website that gets 7.7 million page views a year, a Facebook page with 97,000 active followers.
We get to make a positive impact on our community on a daily basis – highlighting the efforts of people to do good things, holding government to account, keeping tabs on the cops, breaking down what’s going on within UVA Athletics.
I feel blessed that we get to do what we get to do.
Somebody needs to be here to make sure the people in charge of things at City Hall, in Richmond, in DC, are doing what we need them to do in our names.
The stuff with basketball, with football, with the local entertainment scene, that’s fun stuff, but also important – life can’t be all hard work and seriousness; gotta be able to loosen up and have a good time every so often, right?
There’s money to be made in the media business, for sure – there’s a reason the news is full of headlines about billionaires buying up TV networks, and the control of the news divisions is a big part of the motivation with those moves.
I’m probably dumb for thinking the way I do about the money part, but to me, as long as we can continue to do what we get to do, and keep the lights on, and the fridge full, I’m good.
My mindset is, you get too big, and you’re eventually going to lose sight of what it is you’re really trying to do – or rather, what you’re really trying to do will change.
We want to do good stuff for the community that we’ve had our roots in since we were little kids in local elementary schools.
The psychic income from doing good things has a lot more value to me than any number of zeroes on the left side of the decimal point on my net worth.
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Chris Graham
