RVANews Goes Away

The editor of RVA News, that closes up shop this week after 10 years, hinted the main reason was their one and only ad salesperson was leaving for another job and they had never found anyone adequate to assist her, and now there was no time to get someone to learn the job from the ground up fast enough, even if they could find one.

Having done ad sales before for my own monthly newspaper, I know it’s difficult. Not only do you have to locate clients and convince them, you have to design the ad, put up with their fussiness about how the ad looks, then try to collect their money.

 I had a small advantage that my newspaper was a very niche topic, so the client pool was a particular business type. Some of them had camera ready ads. Some were really difficult to work with, and I had to do their text and artwork from scratch, like I was a built-in agency. And then it was collection time. A one-eighth page ad was only $7.50, but many a time I had to go down to the bar and stand there for an hour trying to collect that little amount. The strip club was the easiest. They would never mail in their $25 or respond to an invoice, but if I walked in, the owner immediately peeled off $25 from a roll of cash in his wallet and handed it to me.

A lot of it was cash…and cash I would only get if I showed up and asked for it, so there was a lot of driving around...driving around and waiting for the person who had the money to show up.

During its 11 year life, the paper only on a couple of rare summers paid the rent, thanks to many full page ads from big venues like the Classic Ampitheatre at the Fairgrounds or what was the Landmark Theater and the bigger music stores. But most of the time, the paper just paid for itself. The company that printed it made all the money. I paid the writers $5 an article, which is sad, even for the 1990s, and I paid myself nothing.To keep expenses low, I never rented office space. It was a dining room table business from 1993 to 2004. I always had to work another job, too.

I was always mindful that I could not grow too big or too fast. I could not expand beyond the theme of the paper. I could not hire even a part-time sales person or writer. I could not rent even the tiniest office. I could survive 11 years only if I stayed small. (Look at Punchline, which folded with debt.) RVANews got kind of big -- covering a variety of beats. There were a lot of tabs to open on that home page. Other people were brought in to help.

Having written a few times for RVANews, I know they paid $35 per article, which for 2016 is still low. I suspect they had about five people on staff, maybe not even all full-time. I worked for a company that was advertising with them and we paid somewhere in the $575-$600 a month range for our little box of an ad to appear on a page at random, so even to pay an employee a very small salary, you’d need at least three faithfully paying yearly clients per person, and maybe another four to six to cover bare office expenses. And that’s for a barely livable salary. When I count the ads currently on the site, it seems to be falling short. It also had a niche readership, a sort of urban pioneer, community-activist, young family type demographic, almost an island within the island that makes up Style Weekly's readership. So it’s understandable if a key employee leaves and no one capable steps up, the already waterlogged ship starts to sink. 

So often these journalism enterprises are things you just do for love, from a corner of your never used dining room. That RVANews survived this long is pretty amazing.