The guy that we hired to manage the back end of the AFP website says we need to brag about what we’ve accomplished over the past, gulp, 24 years.
I don’t feel that old.
Still think of myself as early 30s.
Anyway.
Sometimes it takes seeing things through a fresh set of eyes to make you realize, maybe you are doing something halfway decent.
The one thing he emphasized: you guys should be making a lot more money with AFP than you are.
That excited me, not so much because I need more money – we live in a really nice house, best backyard of anybody I know, have six awesome puppy dogs, the property is ringed by flowers, trees and bushes in every color of the rainbow.
More money could get us back into the hiring business, though, so that we can maybe do more of what we do; that’s what excites me.
When we launched way back in 2002, when I was still in elementary school (ahem), we were thinking what we really wanted to do was start a print weekly paper.
That was the dream.
Couldn’t afford to do that right off, so a friend gave us an idea – start an online newspaper, build an audience, and once you get enough readers, then launch your print paper.
We never did end up starting that print paper.
We were ahead of the curve in online news – probably 15 years, give or take, ahead of the curve, given how long it took us to be able to pay the bills while keeping AFP afloat, often on fumes.
Wanna know how I worried myself into a pulmonary embolism in 2021? I was afraid COVID would zap us into oblivion, business-wise, just when we’d started to make it.
ICYMI
It’s funny to me that we got a slew of negative comments on a column that I wrote last week about how that near-death experience led to me deciding to cash out in 2022, because I was afraid that 20 years of willing AFP into existence was going to kill me, and leave my wife a widow, with nothing to show for our hard work.
I won’t forget that those negative comments came from people on our side of the ideological fault line.
We’ve worked at trying to give a voice to the voiceless for nearly a quarter-century, and that’s the thanks we get.
Much appreciated.
Moving forward, gotta be honest here – the monetization that can get us to whatever the next level is, the more we look at our numbers, wouldn’t be a function of the pro-democracy journalism that we prioritize.
We have three buckets of readers, when we look at the data – pure local news, local/state/national politics news, and UVA Athletics.
You can guess which one of the three makes money.
There is no local advertising base – that’s why the News Leader and News Virginian are on their last legs, why a lot of local papers, across the country, are on their way out, if not already dead and gone.
Advertisers are loathe to put their brands beside content that reports on politics, because though there are a lot of us who work hard to keep up, most people have had enough of the nonsense being done in our names to view any reporting on politics as toxic.
It’s the sports content that will help us sustain and build.
The paradox here: if I want to get us more money for more reporters to produce the pro-democracy stuff, I’m going to need to put more of my time and effort into the sports content, because from a look at the Google data, we’re head and shoulders the #1 source for news content on UVA Athletics.
Not that the folks who run UVA Athletics necessarily like this, because we don’t just write about the games.
ICYMI
- UVA Basketball: We flew the women’s team to the Sweet 16 on ICE Air
- Bond set for former UVA Football wideout Jahmal Edrine in rape, abduction case
- Cav Aquatics, UVA Swimming coach Gary Taylor on probation after admitting to emotional abuse of athletes
In case you were wondering, that was all me trying to brag – that we’ve been around since 2002, that we worked our asses off to build and then keep this thing afloat, that working our asses off dang-near killed me five years ago, that we’re still here, and that we’re #1 online at, something.
I’m not good at bragging, obviously, because this column ends up being more about being transparent about where things are going than it was to self-gloss.
Some of y’all are going to complain, There’s too much sportsball on here!
Unless we win Mega Millions sometime soon, the sportsball is how we’re going to get back to doing more of what we want to do on the change-the-world side of things.
Pleading here with you, be patient.
That, or send me more of your negative comments about how I’m a sellout, because those sure have worked.
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Chris Graham
