It’s not enough, to the gatekeepers on these kinds of things, to call out the MAGAs in our midst for being ogres.
Gotta do it the way they want you to do it, or you’re another bad guy.
ICYMI
The issue that this media relations person at Bridgewater College, and others in a small group of malcontents, had, was, the issue with the Library Board of Trustees vote had come into the public domain because a local Substacker attended the meeting and wrote about it on her blog.
I wish I was making this up, but there’s a whole thread online from the Substacker in which she solicited advice on how she could sue us for not mentioning her reporting on the matter.
News flash: I still haven’t been to her Substack.
Need to note here: if she had written me and said, Hey, how about linking, instead of taking out the flamethrower, I mean, come on, look at all of the bylines on our website.
We have a long list of people who submit reporting and commentary to us on a regular basis.
AFP has been an incubator for people who put pen to paper since our launch.
I’m fully aware that I’m not going to be here forever, and my thinking is, we need to use AFP to lift up other voices, because the end goal here is, just making sure somebody is keeping tabs on things.
In my mind, I’m no different than the Substacker – no more important, no less important.
Only advantage that I have is, I happen to have been at this for a while, so more people read what we write, which, great, means we can get more people’s attention on the bad stuff going on around these parts than we could when we started out back in 2002.
I write about a lot of stuff that I hope other media outlets decide to pick up on, and the last thing I care about, for example, when I broke the story on a UVA swim coach who was put on probation by a national sports body for emotional abuse of athletes, is somebody saying or writing, AFP had this first.
I wanted other local and regional publications to write about that, and was flabbergasted when literally no one else did.
I want others to write about Waynesboro Public Schools being in crisis, and in need of a change at the top; about Waynesboro City Council selling us out to Northrop Grumman, and how we need to fight back.
The more of us who point out the stupid stuff being done in our name, the more likely we are to effect positive change.
Picking fights on the matter of who owns public information is just dumb.
Because, to be clear, on the matter of what people say at a public meeting:
Nobody can claim copyright on what other people say at a public meeting!
Use my words – that is, my thoughts, my sentence constructions, my framing of a particular issue, totally original to me – that’s one thing.
Quotes of others at a meeting that I happened to be at and capture, they’re not mine.
So, if you see me quoting somebody, and the quote can help you make your case, go for it!
Which gets us to today, when we got a request from the aforementioned director of media relations at Bridgewater College, Heather Cole, asking us for a copy of our new logo, so that Bridgewater College can use the logo alongside any future stories that we write about the college.
I’m sorry, you somehow think we’re going to write stories about Bridgewater College going forward?
I can’t imagine why Ms. Cole would want us to write stories about Bridgewater College going forward, given her view on the editor’s lack of ethics.
It’s not like it’s the biggest thing in the world, for either side – so, we’re going to miss out on having items on our site about a music program or theater production or research project at BC, which aren’t the kind of things that drive traffic; and on their side, they still have the local Harrisonburg paper, and I assume the Staunton paper, and the community calendars at WHSV and WSVA, I don’t know, to help them get the word out.
I can’t say for sure there, because, I don’t scan other local news sources to see what they say is going on.
I’m trying to keep my head above water here, with everything else that is going on in the world.
Point here being: a PR person at a local college or nonprofit sending us a press release is asking us to do them a favor.
This probably goes without saying, but you don’t get to talk sh-t about us, or this news outlet that we launched in 2002 that we call Augusta Free Press, and then come asking for a favor.
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Chris Graham
