Nonprofit news organizations step in where some Virginia papers pulled back

There’s a ray of light shining in the otherwise bleak landscape of local news: a profusion of new, colorful websites where readers can find out what’s happening now instead of waiting until morning or midweek. These include the homepages of legacy newspapers themselves, but also nonprofit start-ups such the Virginia Mercury and Cardinal News, as well as an older news organization, Charlottesville Tomorrow, which has reoriented itself to ensure coverage of diverse communities in Albemarle County.

Unlike many newspaper websites, these nonprofits don’t put up paywalls but instead raise funds the way public radio and television stations do – from individuals, foundations and philanthropies, and, in Cardinal’s case, from supportive businesses. In addition, two of the Commonwealth’s largest public broadcasters have ramped up their relatively young news-gathering operations in Central Virginia and the Hampton Roads areas.

Here is a closer look at these innovators, new and old, as well as two modest-sized nonprofits, Foothills Forum and the Piedmont Journalism Foundation, that have stepped up to ensure that vital, often complex issues don’t go unexplored in Rappahannock, Fauquier and Prince William counties.

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Cardinal News: covering what matters to readers

Refugees from the depleted newsroom of the Roanoke Times – one of Lee Enterprises’ 13 newspapers across the Old Dominion – launched Cardinal News in September 2021, setting out to fill gaping holes in news coverage of rural Southwest and Southside Virginia from the Appalachians across the Piedmont.

Their mission, as expressed by executive editor Dwayne Yancey, is not to cover courts or crime or boards of supervisors but “the political, economic and cultural matters that our communities care about.” Former Roanoke Times health reporter Luanne Rife and former Times publisher Debbie Meade were among the founders, and Rife remains its executive director and chief fundraiser.

Cardinal News deploys 10-plus editors and reporters and operates with an annual budget of $1.3 million, buoyed by six-figure donations from a half-dozen foundations and businesses, including Dominion Energy. Its website discloses every donor, including the 1,842 individuals who have given from $1 to $99 as well as the $50,000 and $100,000 contributors.

Cardinal News quickly made a name for itself with gripping coverage of the aftermath of the flash flooding and mudslide in the mountain town of Hurley and other parts of Buchanan County on the border with West Virginia and Kentucky. The flood struck a month before Cardinal News began publishing, but it caught up with saturation follow-up coverage. Grateful lawmakers later credited the fledgling news outfit’s stories with helping them secure more than $11 million in state flood relief.

Cardinal News garnered national attention when Margaret Sullivan, the former Washington Post media columnist and public editor of The New York Times, wrote a glowing story about it in February 2022.

Cardinal News has no physical newsroom. The staff works remotely, including Yancey, a political news junkie and playwright who spent almost four decades at the Roanoke Times, the last seven as editorial page editor. He bangs out up to five 2,000-word columns a week, mixing savvy analysis of state politics with shoe-leather reporting, including an absorbing account of the day the president of Botswana came to visit Virginia Tech in Harrisonburg. He interviewed the president but also the sole Hokie freshman from the landlocked South African country.

Rife spent 16 years at the Roanoke Times before taking a buyout and early retirement in 2021. The year before, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, she was among those furloughed for two weeks after Lee Enterprises acquired the paper and others from Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway.

She said the worried head of a nonprofit called and asked, “‘What kind of a newspaper would put their health reporter on furlough during a pandemic?’ and I said, ‘Well, it’s not just this newspaper. Look around. It’s happening all across the country.’”

A year later that nonprofit, the Secular Society, pledged a $100,000-a-year matching grant for three years to get Cardinal News off the ground. “We’re based on the public broadcasting mode,” Rife told the Virginia Local News Summit in April. “We ask those who can afford to step up and donate … but is that enough to sustain and grow our organization? No, probably not.”  Being nonprofit “is not a business model – it’s a tax status. You still have to develop revenue streams to keep it going.” 

Cardinal News started publishing one fresh news story a day and now routinely runs more. The stories are highlighted in daily and weekly emailed newsletters. The website gets 300,000 to 350,000 hits a month.

“We did not set out to compete with existing daily newspapers,” said Yancey.  “We set out to do the stories they are no longer able to do. This is a part of the state that has seen its traditional economy decline or sometimes die altogether – coal, textiles, tobacco, furniture, railroads, you name it.

“That story is well known. But what’s not well known is that many of these communities are reinventing themselves. The quarterly earnings for the Bank of the James is not really a story for us, but the rise of solar energy across Southside is very much a story for us.”

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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. It is owned by 21 school divisions, an unusual arrangement reflected in the wide range of educational programming, online courses and other media services it provides them. Its stations carried National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting System newscasts, and announcers read some local and state news off the wires, but until 2020 it had no newsroom of its own.

Starting a newsroom had long been a goal of Bert Schmidt, president and CEO since 2007, and leasing some of its educational broadband spectrum to Sprint for 5G purposes suddenly put WHRO in position to make that happen. It hired a news director and a trio of reporters. Now it has a 10-person news staff to fill gaps in the region’s local and state news coverage, exacerbated in 2021 when the hedge fund Alden Global Capital purchased the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk and the Daily Press in Newport News and immediately slashed their staffs.

“We could see we were at great risk of becoming a news desert,” Schmidt told Current last year when WHRO acquired the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism (VCIJ).

WHRO is making rapid headway on Schmidt’s ambitious plan to ultimately build a $20 million endowment, separate from the broadcaster’s own  endowment, to put the growing news operation on a sound financial footing. He has $3 million in hand and expects to add at least $6 million more shortly, with an eventual goal of raising $15 million in Virginia and $5 million elsewhere. Using the customary 5% draw on endowments, that would yield a $1 million annual budget for news gathering.

WHRO provides a mix of hard and soft news. On a recent morning, the Local News page on its website featured a story on an effort to make Black visitors feel welcome in the resort town of  Virginia Beach, as well as stories on a hospital’s plan to deliver medicines by drones on Tangier Island and a celebration of independent bookstores in Hampton Roads.

Schmidt, speaking at the Local News Summit, believes that news organizations need to convince foundations and other donors to support journalism, not seek government assistance.

“I am not a journalist. I’m a business person,” said the longtime public broadcasting executive. But “don’t rely on elected officials. Rely on yourselves. Be smart business people and reach out to those who believe in democracy and journalism ….Educate people about why nonprofit journalism matters.”

Last fall the invigorated WHRO brought under its news umbrella VCIJ, which two former Virginian-Pilot journalists, Chris Tyree and Louis Hansen, launched as a nonprofit in 2019 to pursue investigative and long-form journalism on topics of concern to all Virginians, including the housing crisis, COVID, mental health and toxic chemicals. At the time, both had day jobs elsewhere – Tyree, a photojournalist, as a content creator for the University of Virginia, and Hansen as an enterprise and investigative reporter for the San Jose Mercury News. They originally took no salary but raised funds to pay freelancers and employ a fellow from ProPublica, a nationally known journalism nonprofit, to pursue investigative stories.

“We typically publish three to four stories a month, and our goal is for one of those pieces to be an in-depth investigation every other month,” said Hansen. “We expect to ramp up publishing as we build our newsroom and network of freelancers.” Both he and Tyree are now salaried employees of WHRO.

The stories are published on VCIJ.org and WHRO.org, broadcast on parent WHRO and other public media stations, including VPM in Richmond and Blue Ridge PBS in Roanoke, and shared with print weeklies and other newsrooms.

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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.”

That was five to seven years ago, he said, and it’s dramatically different today with 18 reporters, editors, videographers and anchors reporting the news, including a half-hour “VPM News Focal Point”  telecast on Thursday nights. The show explores politics, business, the environment, science, race, health, education and the arts, focused on Central Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley.

The transformation has happened on the watch of Jayme Swain, formerly a PBS senior vice president, who was hired as VPM’s president and CEO in 2019, the same year it jettisoned its old monikers of Central Virginia Educational Television Corp. and Commonwealth Public Broadcasting Corp.  The 2017 sale of some of its broadcast spectrum generated $182 million and gave it the wherewithal to form the Virginia Foundation for Public Media, VPM’s parent, with a renewed emphasis on filling news gaps in the region.

Robinson, who came to VPM after three years as news editor of Charlottesville Tomorrow and worked at dailies as well, said VPM has reporters covering Richmond and surrounding counties and environment, education, housing, transportation, government accountability and other beats. They track issues and major developments rather than “sitting in hours and hours of [board] meetings to get one sound bite or try to cobble a story out of the meeting,” he said. “We try to find things that no one else is actively working on or to look at them in a different way.” 

When Robinson’s predecessor, Craig Carper, took the news director job in 2015, he had one full-time reporter, two part-time reporters and two hosts. When Carper left in 2021, after the infusion of funds from the spectrum sale, there were more than a dozen, including a full-time General Assembly reporter. “Every minute I was there, I was aware how fortunate we were,” said Carper, now a spokesman for Dominion Energy. 

VPM even resurrected Style Weekly, Richmond’s alternative arts and culture print weekly, which Alden Global Capital shut down abruptly weeks after buying the Tribune Publishing chain including the Virginian-Pilot. The weekly rose from the grave two months later as an online-only publication.

VPM produces news in a variety of formats, including audio for its radio stations, video for television, and web versions, both stories and sometimes transcripts.

In a city that was once the capital of the Confederacy, it is making a push to produce more content that represents diverse people, places and perspectives, and to broaden the racial, age and gender demographics of its governing boards and advisory councils.

Starting this summer, VPM and WMRA in Harrisonburg will share a reporter from Report for America, the national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms, and Robinson hopes to forge more news partnerships with other public stations.

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Virginia Mercury: Scrutinizing Richmond’s impact 

The online Virginia Mercury – the name itself has the ring of an old-school newspaper – began in 2018, based in Richmond and staffed by three former Richmond Times-Dispatch reporters and a fourth from the Virginian Pilot. Today it has a news staff of five and is looking to hire more reporters at salaries that start at $60,000 – enough to attract experienced journalists. 

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. States Newsroom funds the salaries of four of the Mercury’s five staffers.

Close coverage of the governor’s office, General Assembly and state politics is its calling card, but it also tracks energy and environment, education, gambling and other issues. 

Sarah Vogelsong reported for several small Virginia and regional publications after graduating from the College of William and Mary, and she was one of the first freelancers to whom the brand-new Mercury turned. She became a full-time staffer covering energy and the environment in 2019, then was promoted to editor-in-chief in June 2022. Today, with a second editor, three full-time reporters and several regular columnists, the Mercury aims to publish three original stories a day.

It’s punching above its weight. “People say, ‘We had no idea your newsroom is so small!’” Vogelsong told the Local News Summit, convened by Virginia Humanities and the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia.

One Mercury reporter is assigned to her old beat, energy and environment, while another covers education, technology and transportation, and the third covers elections, politics, campaign finance, gambling and other issues. “Our next focus is to raise the money to get a full-time health reporter,” said Vogelsong. The Mercury’s annual budget is roughly $500,000.

Virginia newspapers post eye-catching links to Mercury stories on their own websites as many as 40 times a week, said the editor.  “That’s always a great feeling.”

And she knows from audience data that visitors typically spend four to six minutes on the websites, meaning “they are reading most of the way through our stories.” That’s an eternity compared with the under-two-minute average visit to major newspaper websites, according to the Pew Research Center.

Jill Palermo, managing editor of the Prince William Times, makes ample use of the Virginia Mercury’s reporting, both on its website and sometimes in the print edition of the weekly, which is owned along with sister publication the Fauquier Times by the Piedmont Journalism Foundation. 

“They are a great source of state news, particularly about the Virginia General Assembly,” said Palermo. She singled out its coverage of COVID, mental health and nursing-home staffing as  exemplary and essential since the Times cannot afford an Associated Press membership.

“I’m happy to run their work on our website on a daily basis,” she said. “If I have room in the print version of the paper, I will sometimes run their stories in the paper, but that’s unusual given that space is a premium.”

Ideally Vogelsong would like to double the reporting staff to do more reporting on housing, criminal justice and other issues, “and get  more into the weeds on stuff than a traditional newsroom might be willing to let its reporters do.”

Vogelsong worked for academic journals and textbook publishers after college before she “stumbled into” news reporting. A part-time job at the Caroline Progress – which no longer exists – paid $11 an hour. Now she’s sold.

Vogelsong is bullish on the future of nonprofit, online news gathering. “When I was freelancing for the Mercury, I’d get a lot of questions from people about ‘Oh, what is nonprofit news?’ We almost never get asked that now,” she said.

“We get donations from foundations, but we also get a lot of donations just from readers. They’re much smaller – maybe a monthly $10 donation or $100 – and we also get a lot of emails from people who basically say, ‘We’re really happy that you’re around and we want to make sure that you stay around.’”

“I do think that the move away from print is going to be a lasting one. The world changes. I know that everybody likes the feel and smell of newsprint, but it’s just not really the way that most people are consuming news right now.”

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Charlottesville Tomorrow seeks to unite community

Charlottesville Tomorrow, by its own description, is “a community-driven, socially conscious news organization” that posts stories online and in newsletters with the aim of connecting Charlottesville-area residents to the issues that most concern them. 

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.”

It co-founded the Charlottesville Inclusive Media project with two Black companies, In My Humble Opinion radio talk show and digital production company, and Vinegar Hill magazine, named for a Black neighborhood in segregated Charlottesville that was demolished in the name of urban renewal in the 1950s 

Especially since the deadly protest by white supremacists over dismantling the statue of Robert E. Lee that shook Charlottesville in 2017, Charlottesville Tomorrow has increased its emphasis on racial justice and telling the stories of communities of color long ignored by legacy, mainstream news organizations.

The mission of the Fourth Estate should not be “about helping [real estate] developers and planners refine their games” before zoning boards or catering to the interests of the rich, former Charlottesville Tomorrow executive director Giles Morris said at the Local News Summit. “It’s about whether Black people have ever been represented by their local paper …. It’s all of the people who never got in the newspaper.”

That’s who Charlottesville Tomorrow has sought to reach, he said. “We nailed our values to the mast: truth, equity and community” and gained traction “when we committed to the smallness of our audience and our values.” It has five reporters of its own and over the years has trained dozens of news interns.

“We’re attracting new talent into this space,” said Morris. As for the larger goal of shoring up the news business and stemming the erosion of local news coverage, the aim is not to restore “the white, male newsrooms” of old, he said. “We have to do this from new clay, not gluing it together from broken vessels.” 

Editor-in-Chief Angilee Shah succeeded Morris as CEO and executive director in April.

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Nonprofits’ sole mission: helping local papers survive

The arrangements are unusual, but the situation is not: 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. 

While community foundations across Virginia may contribute to sustaining local reporting, that is the singular purpose of Foothills Forum in Rappahannock County and the Piedmont Journalism Foundation in Fauquier County.

Both have marshaled support not only from longtime residents with a civic bent, but also more recent arrivals whose careers took them to the heights of journalism, the foundation world, public affairs and business in Washington and elsewhere.

Not every community with a newspaper in trouble can count on such a pool of talent and financial support in its backyard, but those behind Foothills and Piedmont believe others can learn from their success.

The first to enter the scene was Foothills Forum, which grew out of a “Fourth Estate Friday,” a once-a-month coffee and discussion convened by the Rappahannock News, almost a decade ago. The participants included Bill Dietel, former president of the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, and Larry “Bud” Meyer, former Miami Herald journalist and executive of the Knight Foundation. Meyer took the reins as Foothills’ chair for nine years. 

The first thing Foothills did was canvas fellow residents on what issues concerned them most. It enlisted the University of Virginia’s respected Center for Survey Research to poll all 3,200 households and remarkably got a 42 percent response rate.

What that showed was that the issues of most concern were poor Internet and cell service – still a vexing problem – and maintaining the beauty of a largely unspoiled place, one of Virginia’s smallest counties. Limiting taxes, a burning issue elsewhere, was seventh down the list.

Foothills began commissioning seasoned freelance reporters to write in-depth articles about these and other issues. “The Foothills Forum was hard to sell and hard to explain at first,” Meyer later recalled.

“It’s been important for us to constantly stress that we’re nonpartisan,” said Andy Alexander, a former Washington bureau chief for Cox Newspapers and ombudsman of the Washington Post who recently succeeded Meyer as chair.Foothills had to overcome suspicions that it was a stalking horse for outsiders who wanted to speed development of the county.

It is a completely separate legal entity from the newspaper, which Dennis Brack, president and an owner of Rappahannock Media, purchased in 2012. Brack, a former Washington Post editor, makes his own decisions about what to run. But with one editor-reporter and a novice from Report for America, a nonprofit that seeks to plug newsroom gaps, he welcomes all the help he can get. Foothills even pays 40 percent of that novice’s salary and her rent.

That’s not all. Foothills’ 2021 tax return showed it raised $219,000 in contributions from individuals and foundations and spent $159,000. It puts on events to raise funds and educate the public about local journalism. It has a paid, part-time executive director, keeps two of the freelance reporters on retainer and pays for a freelance photographer and graphic designer, as well as a part-time web manager.

“We have a wonderful partnership with the Rappahannock News, but we are independent from them,” Alexander said.

Foothills inspired a similar group of concerned citizens in Fauquier, the county next door, to found the Piedmont Journalism Foundation in 2018 to furnish supplemental in-depth news coverage to the Fauquier Times and its sister weekly, the Prince William Times. Those papers, too, are operated for profit, except there wasn’t any.

The Fauquier Times, first published in 1905, and its sister publication were sold in 2016 to 47 local investors determined to strengthen and improve the paper. In late 2019, the investment group, called Piedmont Media, transferred ownership of both papers to Piedmont Journalism Foundation, with a nominal payment of $1,000 changing hands.

Boisfeuillet “Bo” Jones Jr., former publisher of the Washington Post and chief executive officer of MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, became president of Piedmont Journalism Foundation, with Jessica Tuchman Mathews, longtime head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Georgia Herbert, former Fauquier County supervisor, as officers. (Mathews now chairs the board.) Dana Priest, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for the Post and a Knight professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, also sits on the board and helps guide its journalism. 

Jones, a lawyer and former president of the Harvard Crimson, said a journalism nonprofit that owns a newspaper needs “a community that is capable of funding it.” Small donors “are great to have, but large donors are the ones who carry the weight.”

It’s also vital that the newspaper be run soundly as a business “and not just think that the Lord is going to provide  and expect your philanthropic backers to keep putting money into it an uncontrolled losing operation. If it looks like a black hole, they’ll stop donating to you.”

Jones said Piedmont Journalism Foundation now expends about $90,000 a year hiring freelancers and provides other support for its papers, when needed.

Both Alexander and Priest believe other places with struggling papers could benefit from establishing nonprofits like theirs.

“You need people in the community who understand the importance of preserving local journalism and have an appreciation of how journalists work and how a local newspaper comes together,” said Alexander. “Most people don’t understand that. They have a difficult time differentiating local, independent, nonpartisan news from what they hear on TV or on the many ideological websites that call themselves news but aren’t.”

If public trust in the fairness and accuracy of journalism is to be restored, Priest believes that it will be won not by big, national news organizations but by capable local journalists. She began her own career in the 1980s covering county government for the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times at a time “when journalism was more trusted and you felt like you were writing for a community that listened. That doesn’t happen in Washington anymore, but it happens here.”

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.

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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.