Twenty-four years ago today, July 2, 2002, AFP was breathed into being.
Looking back on July 2, 2002, it’s safe to say, we didn’t think we’d make it 24 years.
My goal was much more modest – to just make it three months.
How things started was, my wife, Crystal, and I had just left jobs at The Observer, a weekly paper based in Charlottesville, which was on its last legs – the publisher was having trouble making payroll – and we were at a loss for what to do next.
The two of us had met as fresh-faced young journalists at The News Virginian, and our venture to jobs in Charlottesville to work for a mom-and-pop publisher was intended to give us a window into the business side of the news business – with an eye on launching our own weekly paper in Waynesboro at some point down the line.
Some point down the line became July 2, 2002 – the big issue with what we were scheming to do being, neither Crystal nor I come from a background of any kind of family money, and despite our best efforts, we couldn’t find anybody willing to invest in our new venture.
AugustaFreePress.com wasn’t intended to be the end goal; it was meant to serve as a launching pad for the weekly newspaper that we’d been thinking about for a couple of years.
The weekly paper, turns out, never came about.
Our early years were spent trying to convince readers and advertisers that we didn’t need print to be a news outlet.
We were about to turn a corner a few years in, before the 2008-2009 recession almost wiped us off the map.
We sustained ourselves through the early years and then the recovery years by taking on every possible outside job we could – freelance writing and publishing, web design, marketing.
Finally, around 2019 – 17 years in! – we’d gotten to a point where we thought we might actually be able to both commit ourselves to the news on a full-time basis.
And yes, that was a scary time, particularly when the pandemic hit in 2020, and we feared what had happened back in the 2008-2009 recession coming back to fruition.
Another scare manifest itself in 2021 when I almost moved on to whatever is next after suffering a life-threatening pulmonary embolism, which factored into our decision to sell the AugustaFreePress.com domain to a UK-based marketing company in 2022 – to basically cash in, the hope being, in the event that something would happen to me, at Crystal would at least be taken care of.
ICYMI
As of March 17, AugustaFreePress.com is 100 percent back in our hands, with the added benefit that, three years under another corporate thumb breathed some new life into the website – because of their work on the back end of the site, we were able to grow readership on the site by leaps and bounds: from 1 million page views in the 365 days leading up to the transfer of the site in May 2022 to 7.7 million page views in calendar year 2025.
Meaning: the site that we got back from the folks in the UK has many times more reach than the one we sold them.
I remember looking at our daily web traffic back in the summer of 2002 and being happy when we’d have 100 page views in an hour, thinking, Wow, we’ve made it, 100 people read something on the site between 2-3 p.m. yesterday!
We’ve come a long way there, and from a community standpoint, it’s probably a good thing that we were able to withstand the challenges.
When we launched in 2002, the Greater Augusta County community – 130,000 people live in the county and the two cities, Staunton and Waynesboro – had two still-thriving, well-staffed daily newspapers.
The News Virginian, where Crystal and I met as young reporters in the 1990s, now exists in name only – the paper’s parent company laid off its last full-time news reporter earlier this year.
The News Leader, for its part, is down to four full-time reporters, and an operation that feels like it may be winding down.
For a sense of scale there: when Crystal and I were roaming the halls at The News Virginian in the late 1990s, we had an editorial staff of 20 covering the local area, and felt like we were short-staffed at that level, given the challenges of keeping up with the goings-on in a region with more than 100,000 residents.
Now, between AFP and The News Leader, there’s a total of six of us – and it’s not like life is less complex today compared to the 1990s.
Honestly, there need to be more operations like AFP just here in our local market – and with daily and weekly newspapers dying every day, there’s a need for AFPs in every community in the country – to keep tabs on City Hall, the police department and sheriff’s office, the state legislature, the local member of Congress, the local schools, local courts.
We can’t do anything about what isn’t happening in other markets in terms of other AFPs coming into being, unfortunately.
Our plates are full just trying to keep on top of things in Augusta County, Staunton and Waynesboro, and surrounding areas.
One thing I hope is, that our success – or at the least, our longevity – can inspire people in other markets to try to do what we’ve been able to do for the past 24 years.
The other hope: that we continue to be blessed to be able to do what we’re able to do.
Augusta Free Press really is a labor of love.
I feel like I’m doing what I was born to do.
As such, I feel like a very lucky person.
To those who have been along for the ride: thank you!
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Chris Graham
