During most of Brick Weekly and Brick Reloaded's life, I had to hold my tongue because my son was pulling down a weekly check from the publication for shooting one or two events each weekend. The photos were usually used on the cover and in a two-page photo spread. You can see many of those photos still on Brick's long-neglected website.
Getting his photo assignment was always a last-minute thing. After the editor was sent packing and never replaced with anyone who knew the difference between a newspaper and a shopper, the photo assignments came from whoever was last in the office on Friday afternoon, and not much thought went into it. Several times I found myself scanning event calendars on Saturday afternoon trying to find something worth a two-page spread for him to shoot, since whoever was running Brick had just said, whatever you want to shoot is fine with us. I would think, this is a Media General product and they don't seem to care if it's good or not. Why are they doing this?
Then last spring, they started using him less. There was still money, so the last person in the office on Friday started throwing the assignment to his friends and their camera phones. Because who cared at that point about quality?
Brick folds next week. I'm surprised it lasted this long. I could count the ads each issue on one hand. It started out as Punchline brought back as a zombie. The format of snarky, hostile replies to letter writers, inside jokes in the small type, and a mix of boring, dense articles from third rate syndicates was all too reflective of the editor's personal tastes and interests. That format had already failed once. You would think someone would say, okay, let's try something that might actually have a broader appeal.
But, no. Eventually they let the editor go, but didn't change the format except to gradually phase out every single local writer except Chris Bopst, whose columns are just not enough to support a wide reader base. And Bopst was not even exclusive to Brick. He also wrote for the RVANews website.
People don't pick up newspapers to read syndicated material. You will not last long doing that. And people don't go to newspapers to read reviews of movies, books or music. The national stuff is all available everywhere on the Internet. You really need big local coverage from local writers who can infuriate and delight readers, sometimes at the same time.
The embarrassments were legion: using dirty language in a misguided effort to appeal to hipsters; the made-up letters to the editor, which destroy a paper's credibility; restaurants writing their own reviews; cheesy strip club ads on the back page. Who exactly was the market here?
The only amazing thing about the paper were the classifieds, which appeared to have more genuine help wanted ads than even the Sunday Times-Dispatch. And I knew one person who enjoyed doing the puzzles.
Why did Media General never put a real editor in charge of the paper and package some reporting and opinion writing that would appeal to a target audience? It is not that hard. I could go to the RVAblogs website, pick a few bloggers that are particularly talented and knowledgeable in a variety of topics, offer them a modest payment for a weekly contribution, and have plenty of material to edit into a lively, creative and interesting paper that these writers could then cross promote on their blogs and Twitter feeds.
Most street papers have to struggle to fill the ad sales positions, but Brick had a built-in room full of newspaper ad salesmen. All they had to do was give them a great product to sell the hell out of. And the one thing that every real journalist knows is you never, ever let the ad salesmen be in charge of the paper's content.
Nothing about putting together a paper that reflected this moment in time in the history of Richmond's up and coming youth culture should have been a problem...except working with Media General, I guess. How could they have failed so miserably at their own profession?
