We wrote a couple of weeks ago about how us folks in Augusta County, Staunton and Waynesboro live in what the media analysts call a “news desert,” with a dearth of local journalists serving our 130,000-resident market area.
Well, add to the list how we just lost one of the six full-time journalists working in the market, from the roster at the News Leader, the legacy newspaper owned by the USA Today Network.
Lyra Bordelon reported on social media on Friday that “USA Today is eliminating my position,” the effect of which leaves the outlet with three remaining full-timers.
Throw in the two for us here at AFP, and our FTE here locally is 3.8 journos per 100,000 residents.
That’s less than half the national average of 7.8 journalists per 100,000 residents nationally, per a measure from Local Journalism Index 2026, a joint project of Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News.
That 7.8/100K number itself, incidentally, is not what you’d call good: in 2002, there were 40 journalists per 100,000 residents nationally.
That was back before Craigslist, and then Facebook and Google, took away the advertising base for local papers.
As it happens, we launched AFP in 2002, back when there were still more than five times the number of employed journalists covering local and state government, local issues, law enforcement matters, the local school systems, the other important stuff.
Government is running amok at all levels as it is; we don’t want to see what happens when there’s nobody watching what’s going on at City Hall or the County Government Center.
Speaking for our little team of two here at AFP, just in the past few months, we’re the ones responsible for the only local reporting raising questions on an officer-involved shooting in Augusta County, on all six of the public schools in Waynesboro getting failing grades from the Virginia Department of Education.
We badgered the Virginia DEQ to set two public hearings on the controversial pollution permit request made by Northrop Grumman.
Dirty stuff going on behind the scenes in a Waynesboro School Board race got exposed because we didn’t wait for a press release.
That’s the kind of thing that communities miss out on when the likes of USA Today Network own the local legacy paper, and decide to cut corners.
Lee Enterprises, another non-local entity that owns the News Virginian, already did its bean-counter magic on our local news market, slashing the last full-time reporter from the other legacy paper in our area earlier this year.
That cut, and the recent one over in Staunton, leave our decent-sized market with the three folks over at the Leader, who just got gutted by losing another colleague, and then, the two of us over here at our mom-and-pop, where the owned and operated by part of how we do things is important to us.
We own, we operate, and we decide what to write, and how to write it – stubborn as it is for us to do this, we’ve not followed other online news outlets, like the one down in Southwest Virginia, in taking money from the likes of Dominion Energy to pay our bills, because not having somebody telling us how we can report on what’s going on is important to us. We are extremely thankful to the 378 readers who help power AFP through a one-time or monthly contribution.
For Crystal and for me, both of us products of Augusta County – Crystal is a graduate of Fort Defiance High School; I’m an alum of Wilson Memorial; she grew up in New Hope and Verona, me, in Crimora – staying here where we grew up and doing what we get to do to try to make our hometown a better place to live isn’t something we hope works out.
This is our life.
If Augusta Free Press ends up not working out, we don’t pack up and go home; this is home.
We didn’t come here trying to effect change; we stayed here because we want to lead the change.
We went all in back in 2002, back when the News Leader and News Virginian were still making money hand over fist, and the main point of concern for the people in the front office was who they were going to play golf with that afternoon.
As for how long we’re going to be here, well, my next day off is the day after I die.
Until then, there’s a lot to get caught up on, and not a lot of us left to try to keep up.
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Chris Graham
