Editors work to hold onto readers and advertisers

A nonprofit digs deeper into news online

Six years out of college, Sarah Vogelsong made $11 an hour when she landed her first newspaper job at the Caroline Progress in 2014. The minimum wage in the Commonwealth was $7.25 at that time. She left in 2016, two years before the paper closed.

“I was really the only staff reporter and then there were an editor and a page designer, and occasional freelancers,” said Vogelsong, now editor-in-chief of the Virginia Mercury, a nonprofit, online news enterprise that covers politics and policy.

“I think so fondly of my time at the Caroline Progress,” she said. “It was a hard job, but did I ever learn a lot. I went to every meeting in the county and spent a lot of time driving. That was when I started understanding and feeling very passionately about the value of that kind of local and statewide coverage because it was crystal clear how many stories were not being told.

“I imagine a lot of journalists have this moment in their first jobs where you’re just like, ‘How can this possibly be? How is there so little scrutiny going on?’” said Vogelsong, who subsequently did stints at the Progress-Index, a daily in Petersburg, and the Chesapeake Bay Journal in Maryland, which covers environmental issues.

From thumbing through the big, bound volumes of old editions of the Progress, “you could see that it used to be a much, much bigger paper,” she said.

And the empty desks that surrounded her in the Progress-Index’s newsroom signaled how much that paper had shrunk. “We had three reporters, a city editor, a managing editor and a photographer,” she said. Its owner, GateHouse Media, merged with Gannett Co. in 2019.

Vogelsong was an early freelance contributor to the Virginia Mercury, founded in 2018 by three former Richmond Times-Dispatch reporters to fill the gap in coverage of Virginia’s statehouse.

She was hired full-time as its energy and environmental reporter in 2019 and promoted to her current job in July 2022.

The Mercury has three full-time reporters, a deputy/commentary editor, an intern and the editor-in-chief. It also has a raft of regular columnists who delve into policy issues and disputes.

The Mercury’s parent is States Newsroom, a national nonprofit network of online news organizations covering state politics and policy in 31 states. Vogelsong is heartened that a small but growing number of Virginia papers run Mercury stories. “We see that list growing all the time,” she said. “That’s one of our goals, to provide high-quality, Virginia-specific content to local newspapers that are stretched thin.”

In Virginia and elsewhere, coverage on certain national issues “can almost be oversaturated sometimes, while lots of local stories go uncovered,” she said. “Hugely consequential decisions get made at the local and state levels and you might have one or zero people covering them.” 

She believes there’s been too little coverage of the impact of changes to policing, sentencing reforms and other criminal justice matters made after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. “There are all sorts of issues that require that kind of deeper reporting that you just don’t get when newsrooms are shrinking,” she said.

When Vogelsong began contributing to the Mercury and called people for interviews, “I would get a lot of questions about, ‘Oh, what is nonprofit news?’ There just wasn’t a huge amount of awareness. We almost never get asked that now.”

While philanthropy is the major source of support, “we also get a lot of donations and emails from readers who basically say, ‘We’re really happy that you’re around and we want to make sure that you stay around,’” she said. “They still want news and they see nonprofits as a way we can help keep news, which is so essential to our democracy, going.”

Creating a ‘worthy’ community newspaper

When Tom Lappas graduated from the University of Richmond with a journalism degree in 1998, his dream job was to become a sportswriter at a daily. But he also wanted to stay in Richmond and wound up at a community paper in nearby Henrico County, Virginia’s sixth largest county by population (333,000). Something clicked, and three years later he left to launch his own twice-a-month paper, the Henrico Citizen, and convinced three fellow reporters to join him.

“I’m the last person who ever thought I’d own a business or certainly start one,” he said. “I didn’t have that typical confident business owner mindset. I just knew how to do journalism. But I thought, ‘Hey, I know how to publish a worthy community newspaper.’”

For almost two decades twice a month, he distributed up to 20,000 free newspapers on 120 racks in grocery stores, libraries, restaurants and businesses. He made a decent living. But the print Citizen was an early casualty of COVID in March 2020 when his three biggest advertisers – a funeral home, a home improvement store and a senior living community – pulled out. He could no longer cover printing costs.

The Citizen survived online, where it has 10,300 followers on Twitter and 6,500 on Facebook. Readers are also reached through other digital platforms, including daily updates by email. All told, the Citizen’s stories attract 65,000 readers each month. Lappas broadcasts – or podcasts – an “Henrico News Minute” on weekdays, which actually runs five minutes.

Keeping the enterprise afloat is a challenge. There’s no paywall. “We believe access to fair, trustworthy local news is or should be a fundamental human right,” the website says. So ads are crucial to survival.

“News costs money,” he said. “We’ve got 25,000 businesses in our county. I still think advertising will pay a large percentage of our bills if we do it right. But if we can raise another 20 or 30 grand a year from readers, that makes a tremendous difference for us.”

Lately Lappas has been buoyed by organizations dedicated to shoring up local news operations, including ostensibly for-profit ones like his. 

He has a single full-time reporter covering education, a novice from Report for America, a nonprofit that taps philanthropic dollars to help fill depleted local newsrooms. A pair of part-timers help with editing and online duties. The education writer is his second hire from Report for America, which models itself after Teach for America and covers half the reporter’s salary for a year.

Henrico Citizen also belongs to LION Publishers, an association of 400-plus local independent online news organizations that has garnered grants from the John S. and James L Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund, Google News Initiative and the Meta (formerly Facebook) Journalism Project.

Lappas recently participated with 18 other publications in a six-month Local Media Alliance lab “learning how to fund journalism through philanthropy.” Borrowing a staple of public radio fund-raising, he kicked off a membership drive last year with the aim of getting 500 readers to contribute $75 or $150 a year, which would allow him to hire an additional reporter. He’s a third of the way there.

He is hoping to convince local civic organizations, charities and foundations to help him hire more reporters to cover health, transportation, the shortage of affordable housing and other problems. “How can a community advance itself if most of the people aren’t aware of what the critical issues are?” he asked.

Lappas uses some stories produced by University of Richmond student journalists and Virginia Commonwealth University’s Capital News Service. Twice he has taught classes at his alma mater, but otherwise has no outside income. He and his wife have 9- and 4-year-old sons. 

“My bank account would probably tell you I’d be better off working at Walmart greeting people, but this is my baby,” the 46-year-old said. “I want this to continue. I want it to be there 20 years from now if my son wants to take it over one day.”

Still keeping watch

The biggest story Brian Carlton has tracked since becoming editor of the Farmville Herald is one that might come as a surprise to most Virginians: the possibility that mining companies might resume digging for gold as was once commonplace in the 1800s and even into the 1940s.

The Herald is a twice-a-week newspaper based in Farmville, home to Longwood University and Hampden-Sydney College. It covers Cumberland and Prince Edward counties and the town of Buckingham. It was in Buckingham where a Canadian mining company, Aston Bay, announced in April 2019 that its exploratory drilling had uncovered four veins of gold in forestland owned by the Weyerhaeuser lumber company.

Gold actually can still be found along Virginia’s “gold-pyrite belt,” a narrow, 140-mile stretch that runs from Fairfax County to the bottom of Buckingham near Appomattox. Alarmed state lawmakers considered a temporary ban but instead arranged for a study by top scientists.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine panel concluded that gold mining would raise “a host of environmental and public health issues” that Virginia’s mining regulations were ill-equipped to handle.

Carlton – who also is an editor for two other Boone Newspapers, the Kenbridge-Victoria Dispatch and the Charlotte Gazette – has interviewed the Canadian company’s CEO and written more than a half-dozen in-depth articles on the controversy since arriving in August.

The 42-year-old has been a reporter and editor for more than a half-dozen small papers in a two-decade career, including stints as editor of two Virginia dailies, the Martinsville Bulletin and the News-Virginian in Waynesboro.

In addition to himself, the Herald now has one reporter, a vacancy it is trying to fill and six freelancers. “We pretty much cover everything, the school board, county supervisors’ meetings, different features throughout the area. If people email us questions, we try to get those questions answered.”

While Buckingham is among the six Virginia counties described as a news desert in a Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism State of Local News report, Carlton said it is not. Even with so few reporters, “we really haven’t had to not cover anything.”

The Herald covers community events and high school sports, but “our bread and butter is asking questions and looking into things,” he said.

A weekly thrives at the bottom of the Middle Peninsula

Family ties run deep at the Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal. When nonagenarian John Warren Cooke died in 2009 after 55 years as president and publisher,  the former speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates was succeeded by his daughter, Elsa Cooke Verbyla, who had been the editor and a reporter at the weekly since 1976. Its main office and printing plant have sat on Gloucester Courthouse’s Main Street for 75 years and its roots go back more than a century.

Its circulation, which peaked at almost 12,000 in 1990, is still a robust 9,000. “We seem to have stopped the loss, which is good,” said Verbyla, especially after weathering financial difficulties from the deep 2008 recession, rising competition from the Internet for ads and more recently COVID. There are 35 people on payroll, 15 full-time.

A one-yearprintsubscription is $24 and digital is $18. “We try to hold it down because you know every time you put the rates up, people drop out,” said Verbyla, who started reporting for the paper in college. “I don’t know why. They buy their food or cigarettes or whatever they want. Inflation is part of our lives.

“I’ve sort of been in the thick of it all my life. I can talk to people without getting yelled at very much,” she said drily. “We are not as big as we were, which is a source of pain to me, but we are always pushing to get back and we’re doing pretty well right now.”

Local advertising remains the paper’s lifeblood, but “all your reliable local advertisers from 30 years ago are greatly diminished. The big banks are just gone.”

“I’m happy to say we’re still an independent newspaper and that gives us the latitude to absorb problems a little bit better, I think,” the publisher said.

The biggest story in Mathews recently was a prolonged battle over a Confederate monument on the county’s historic courthouse green. In a November 2021 referendum, 80% of voters in the county expressed disapproval of calls to move the Johnny Reb statue to a cemetery. 

That did not settle matters and in August 2022 the Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to deed over to a Confederate heritage organization the portion of the green on which the monument stands to keep it there in perpetuity. The no vote was from the board’s sole Black member.

The local NAACP chapter threatened a lawsuit and gathered 2,300 signatures on a petition to torpedo the plan. Defenders gathered 800 signatures in support. After a raucous public hearing, the supervisors in December put off a final decision. The dispute drew attention from the Washington Post, which referred to the newspaper in its story as the Post-Gazette. “I’m glad they came,” said Verbyla, but “if they got the name of our newspaper right, it would have been better.”

The paper has editorialized against giving away the land, although the publisher said, “I’m not sure people even read editorials.

“I have no problem with the statue,” she added, but “I don’t want to see the court green subdivided.” 

While the two counties the Gazette-Journal covers are 87% white and voted 2-to-1 for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, “a lot of people are still in the middle,” Verbyla said.

She remembers heated battles decades back over zoning and whether to build a commercial landfill. “Neither county had zoning when I started here but now that zoning’s in place, no one complains about it. It’s just not an issue anymore,” she said. It was the same with the landfill built in Gloucester. “Nobody talks about that now.”

She looks forward to the day when that happens with the Confederate statue controversy, too.

Christopher Connell is an independent journalist and former assistant bureau chief for The Associated Press in Washington. He writes primarily for foundations and nonprofit organizations about higher education and other public policy issues, including reports for the Carnegie Corporation on efforts to improve the education of tomorrow’s journalists.

Foothills Forum is an independent, community-supported nonprofit tackling the need for in-depth research and reporting on Rappahannock County issues.

The group has an agreement with Rappahannock Media, owner of the Rappahannock News, to present this series and other award-winning reporting projects. More at foothillsforum.org.

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