
Soft news sells ads in a rural county
Danny Clark takes exception to the State of Local News project’s judgment that King and Queen County is a news desert. “We’ve had a local paper for the last 33 years,” said the publisher of the Country Courier, a twice-a-month publication filled with feel-good features and ads. But the State of Local News counts only dailies and weeklies, and it assesses whether they publish enough hard news, including covering local government and school boards.

‘We don’t want to shut down’
Norman Styer has devoted his career to reporting news in Loudoun County, an outer Washington suburb that has quintupled in population over 30 years and is now Virginia’s third-most populous county. He signed on as Leesburg Today’s first full-time reporter in 1989 and was editor-in-chief in 2015 when rival Leesburg Times-Mirror purchased it and shut it down the next day.

Visions of Style
How Black Virginians used the camera to define themselves at the turn of the 20th Century.

Getting the Past “Right”
The efforts of Colonial Williamsburg to, in the words of the New York Times, get the past “right” continue to make news. As we noted recently in the EV Blog, Colonial Williamsburg moved the building that housed the Bray School for enslaved and free Black children to a more prominent location in an effort to center the stories […]
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Bernadette “B.J.” Lark and Alanjha Harris
Handpainted symbols hang on the walls of Trinity Missionary Baptist Church in Roanoke, Virginia, where Bernadette “B.J.” Lark hosts CommUNITY ARTS Roanoke, an after-school program for children. A black, green, …

Kazem Davoudian & Alexander Sabet
Kazem Davoudian of Sterling, VA, is an experienced ustad (master artist, in Farsi) of Iranian classical music. He is teaching Alexander Sabet of Washington, DC, how to play the tar, a traditional long-necked string instrument.
VPM Fills News Holes Across Central Virginia, Shenandoah
VPM, the public broadcaster in Richmond, calls itself “Virginia’s Home for Public Media,” but not long ago it had only a skeleton news staff that basically was just reading news briefs, according to Elliott Richardson, the current news editor. “It was effectively three people.”
WHRO Builds an Endowment for News and Investigative Reporting
WHRO Public Media began broadcasting educational television shows in Norfolk and Hampton in 1961 and went on to expand in reach and capabilities through four television and five radio stations.
Nonprofits’ Sole Mission: Helping Local Papers Survive
Two weeklies in rural counties near the Blue Ridge struggled to get by with staffs too small to cover all the issues important to residents’ lives. Then they got help from two tax-exempt community organizations created to save local journalism.

Virginia Mercury: Scrutinizing Richmond’s Impact
The Virginia Mercury is part of States Newsroom, a national network of nonprofit, digital news enterprises stretching across 33 states that relies on philanthropy and other donors and doesn’t run ads or accept corporate donations or underwriting.
Charlottesville Tomorrow Seeks to Unite Community
The site was launched in 2005 by civic activists to provide nonpartisan information on land use, public education, transportation and other issues to “protect and build upon the distinctive character of the Charlottesville-Albemarle area.”