Can a newspaper have no reporters and still be a newspaper?

The News Virginian exists, in name, but in name only, and it’s sad for me to see, because that’s where my journalism career started, way back in 1995.

Quick personal history: I was in between my semester of law school and starting the MFA program at UVA, and answered an ad in the paper promising fifteen bucks a game to cover local high school and college sports.

What was supposed to be a temporary stopgap became a lot more.

I was at the NV for five years; before I left, I met the love of my life, the former Crystal Abbe, who was the features editor at the paper.

So, I got a career, and a wife.

Never did start that MFA program, incidentally.

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The News Virginian is where I learned journalism; UVA didn’t even offer classes in the media or journalism back in the 1990s, so I was winging it when I started out, then talked my way into a full-time news job, covering local government and politics.

Back in my days at the paper, in the mid to late 1990s, we had a good-sized staff – all told, including the reporters, editors and photographers, we had around 20 people employed on the news side.

Now, the NV literally has nobody in news, which you can tell when you go to their website, which features, under the Local News tab, news that is local to readers in Nelson County, Charlottesville, Roanoke, Richmond, but not Waynesboro.

This is the fault of Lee Enterprises, the Iowa-based publisher that owns several newspapers in Virginia, and has stripped them all down to the studs.

I imagine that the only reason Lee Enterprises still does anything with the News Virginian brand name is, there are still people who pay for subscriptions, though I can’t imagine why, and they still have a handful of advertisers, though again, I can’t imagine why.

It’s the point of, last one to leave, turn out the lights.

I’ll miss it, when that comes to be.

My history with the paper predates me working there; we had a subscription to the News Virginian growing up, and it was my favorite of the two local papers, because I grew up in Crimora, 10 miles north of Waynesboro, on the eastern side of Augusta County, and Waynesboro was where we got groceries, went back-to-school shopping, where the Leggett’s had the only escalator in town.

The News Leader, over in Staunton, the other side of the world, which itself is circling the toilet bowl, was always too hoity-toity for my liking.

They also paid better over there, from what I heard; when I left the NV in 2000, I was still making $19,000 a year.

Which is $19,000 a year more than they’re paying anybody to write there today, unfortunately.

We need more local news sources, to keep the people who run things – in city and county government, the local schools, the local police and sheriff’s offices, the shadowy folks behind the scenes who pull the various puppet strings – in line.

I don’t want to be the last one standing; I don’t get a day off as it is.

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