People who read AFP for our sports coverage know that I got the label “fringe media” from a mainstream sportswriter last year, and decided to adopt what was meant as an insult as a badge of honor, because that’s how you disarm people who want to diminish you – by making their attempts at insults into a big joke, to point out the absurdity.
What I’m going to do here today is tell you, it’s not just the dwindling numbers in what is left of the sports media profession who treat us as fringy outsiders.
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The self-appointed gatekeepers in the Virginia news media and Virginia Democratic politics keep signaling to us that they see us as being oddballs, which, fine, such is life, I guess.
We don’t come with official blessing, which is by design.
I’ve been fighting that battle since a guy who won a Pulitzer and went on to write part-time for an ad shopper picked a dumb fight with me 20 years ago.
Only thing I regret about any of it is that, early in our run – we launched in 2002, so, we’ve been around for a minute – we made an effort to become a member of the Virginia Press Association.
As things would work out, that attempt at seeking sanction was, rather haughtily, denied, the reason being, we were “just a website,” weren’t in print, and the VPA said, thank you, but no.
Now, yes, the VPA has long since recognized that print is dying and decided to start admitting online-only news outlets into its membership – cue the scene from “Animal House,” with one of the brothers in Delta saying, Hey, we need the dues – but my take on that early diss continues to be, if we weren’t good enough when you turned your noses up to us back in the ‘aughts, basically, bugger off.
What we lose there is, not much, if anything.
For an example of what I am missing out on: for some reason, I was added to an email chain of publishers who are trying to lobby the General Assembly to require local governments to place their public notices with local online news orgs, the motivation behind that effort, obviously, being, Hey, we need money!
We, fortunately, don’t; we had to figure out the hard way back in the day how to stay afloat without government subsidies, without having big-money donors, like you see funding the online news outlets that are in the good graces of officialdom, and it took some time – years, honestly – but we were able to get it figured out.
I remember being asked once by a gubernatorial campaign staffer, early on in our run, if I was “independently wealthy.”
Answer: I grew up in a trailer park; that teaches you how to do more with less, or practically nothing.
Not being beholden to government subsidies or wealthy donors is why you see us not afraid to take on anybody and everybody – one for instance there, I got a phone call from a staffer in Mark Warner’s U.S. Senate office earlier this year because we were writing critically of Warner’s votes to confirm several questionable Trump administration nominees.
I like Mark Warner, but is he above being questioned?
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To this day, no one in the legacy media has built on our reporting to take on the University of Virginia for its continued employment of a competitive swimming coach who admitted to emotional misconduct of athletes and was put on probation by a national watchdog.
I’m an alum of the University of Virginia, but again, is UVA above being questioned?
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The folks who win journalism contests and host conferences on ethics aren’t filing complaints with a magistrate when the local police fail to bring charges against a reckless driver threatening a sidewalk full of anti-Trump protestors, and then trying the case as an amateur prosecutor when the Commonwealth’s attorney begs off the case because he’s scared of MAGA.
I’m neither a cop nor a lawyer, but if the people who are paid to do those jobs don’t want to do them, you know, somebody has to.
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The nice folks who get pats on the head for stepping up to nobly fill the void left by the slow death of print newspapers aren’t giving Richmond and DC Democrats hell because the suits ignore us out here in the hinterlands, which to me is to the detriment of people in my home base – who aren’t given much in the way of voting alternatives to MAGAs who bend the political arc in favor of cutting services for working-class and middle-class folks, so that they can give tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires, which my folks here are decidedly not, nor ever will be.
ICYMI
- Richmond Democrats continue to ignore us out here in the hinterlands
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It’s not important to us to market ourselves as independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan – because the stakes, frankly, are too high to put on that level of bothsides-ism pretense.
Innocent people are being rounded up and sent to overseas gulags; women are being denied access to basic healthcare that could save their lives and fair wages that could improve their families’ lives; the economy is being run into the ground as the oligarchs and their living, breathing bots in Congress manipulate the levers to amass more for themselves.
We’ll play nice when the situation allows.
That approach, admittedly, doesn’t win us any friends.
The gatekeepers don’t send out our headlines to their email lists when we break stories on issues of import.
We’re on track to reach 10 million readers this year and have approximately one million impressions on Facebook each month, so, we’ll be OK.
Our requests for one-on-one interviews with Abigail Spanberger, with Ghazala Hashmi, with Jay Jones, actually get replies like this one:
“We are currently working to help plan Sen. Hashmi’s schedule for the weeks and months ahead and will follow up with an update as soon as we can on whether we can fit this in the schedule.”
That email exchange is dated Aug. 8, so, a month ago, almost, at this writing – we’d also reached out to the other statewide Democratic Party nominees at the same time.
Same basic message.
They’re all seeing if they can fit us into the schedule.
I’m not holding my breath.
I mean, sure, I’d love to get them one-on-one, to be able to ask, you know, lots.
One obvious question would be, why do Democrats don’t seem to care about voters in red areas, not that I’d expect an honest answer there.
I’d love to get them on the record on why their campaigns seem to only want to highlight why people should want to vote against the MAGAs, given that, seems to me, and plenty of other folks, our side has been trying that approach since 2016, and look where it has us.
Look, I get it – in addition to being a 30-year veteran of the news business, I was also, for three years, a local Democratic Party committee chair, in addition to running for local office (and losing in a landslide, because I’m a Dem in a red area).
Interviews in a campaign season are PR – in essence, they’re free campaign spots.
If I’m in the PR folks’ chairs budgeting time for my candidates, I’d prioritize sitdowns with editorial boards that I know are going to ask wonky questions about policy positions that nerds like me with BAs in American government can’t get enough of, and nobody else will read, and thus won’t get my person in any trouble, over talking with those fringy folks, who might ask questions that get them to maybe actually say something meaningful, but, gasp, might run the risk of offending somebody.
Putting my own hat back on, so, because we don’t play nice, we don’t get to hang out with important people for a few minutes.
Life will somehow go on.
Thirty years in journalism has put me in situations where I’ve spent the day at the White House and a Habitat for Humanity house, in the halls of Congress and a medium-security prison, in the mansions of millionaires and the trailer parks of undocumented immigrants.
What I’ve learned is, everybody, no matter who they are, puts their pants on, no matter how nice those pants might be, one leg at a time.
In this business, absurd as it is to say it, thinking that way makes me “fringe.”
In case it isn’t already obvious, I don’t want to do those dumb interviews.
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Chris Graham
