The crisis at The Washington Post, which is reportedly about to undergo another round of massive newsroom layoffs, only reinforces for us here at Augusta Free Press that our move more than two decades ago to strike out on our own was the right one.
We were independent online news back in 2002, when independent online news, to say the least, wasn’t cool.
But what we saw in 2002, probably way early, in retrospect, was that the news business was going to get bigger, and then smaller, in the online era – bigger, in that, the entities that could figure out the best way to get eyeballs would be the ones to dominate the market; and smaller, in that, those who didn’t get things figured out would go the way of the dinosaurs.
It took us, you know, a while, to get on the right side of the line; the legacy media hung on a lot longer than we foresaw in 2002, though in ways that would not prove sustainable.
The biggest issue there: the fallback has always been, cutting staff to balance the books.
That can work in the short term, the medium term, but over the long haul, you need somebody at a desk somewhere to produce the content.
The Lee Enterprises newspapers in Virginia, from the storied Times-Dispatch down to the small-town dailies, like The News Virginian, here in our backyard, are prima facie evidence of the irrefutable fact that, the news can’t write itself.
ICYMI
- Fewer trees being cut down is good | Four Virginia papers scale back on print schedules
- Media | Staff layoffs impacting operations at two Virginia newspapers
You’re only going to read so many press releases disguised as actual news before you realize you’re being sold something.
No, the world we live in needs good journalism now more than ever.
That’s what we try to provide for our community here every day.
We can’t do everything, because as a mom-and-pop shop, we have to be lean and mean.
Just looking at what we’ve been into lately, though, nobody else is taking the Augusta County law-enforcement and criminal-justice apparatus to task for the officer-involved shooting that took the life of a Staunton man last month.
We were out front of the pack on the machinations of MAGA appointees on the UVA Board of Visitors to sack Jim Ryan so that they could name a partisan of their liking to the presidential post; and now we’re the newsroom telling you that it won’t be as hard to reverse their political move as some would have you believe.
We stuck our necks out way, way, way back in 2005 to raise awareness of how the gay-marriage ban then under consideration would negatively impact the lives of hundreds of thousands of Virginians.
Ten years later, the U.S. Supreme Court finally caught on to what people like us were saying on that.
More recently, we’ve used our pages to advocate for meaningful work toward solutions to our region’s affordable-housing crisis.
We hope it doesn’t take as long to get there as it took society to catch up on gay marriage, but, you know.
We’ll continue to pressure our local and state elected leaders to work toward building a fair and equitable healthcare system; to prioritize public K-12 education; to protect the civil liberties of all – not just the privileged, but also those on the margins.
What we need from you: your continued support.
Keep reading; share our stories with your friends; if you feel so inclined, purchase a voluntary subscription.
Every bit helps, seriously.
Now, we’re not Jeff Bezos, jetting off to Paris Fashion Week and plunking down tens of millions to promote the new “Melania” documentary that Bezos funded through Amazon to pay fealty to Donald Trump as he also pleads poverty on behalf of his newspaper.
In other words, no, we’re not going to take our subscription revenue and try to send somebody to outer space.
A trip to a Final Four or College World Series – which, hey, that’s work – maybe.
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Chris Graham
