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.

Everybody is Their Own News Outlet - the Trump Rally 10-14-15

The media was at the Trump rally, but what's the point? Every group at the fairgrounds exhibit hall had someone with a cell phone or tablet camera and was recording Donald Trump making a speech. They took photos of themselves with Trump at the podium in the background. They held up selfie sticks to get shots above the crowd. After Trump left, they took photos of themselves at the podium.

The media tried to play up one racial incident that lasted barely a minute and was quickly swept away by the police, so they only know what angle will sell ads. (I say racial because I think it was a Black Lives Matter shoutathon that quickly got crushed by angry white people. That's what the photos looked like, anyway.) The real story is told by the crowd. It was all about them being there. Even so, I was fascinated to watch the last remnants of the old school campaign trail press corps at work, although none of the big names from TV news were there...yet. Depends on how far Trump goes.

I took all my photos on my phone, too, and live-tweeted the event.

Three buttons for $10. T-shirts went to half price after the event ended.

Jeff Shapiro of the Times-Dispatch, the last of the bow-tied, owl-eyed political commentators in the South.

The media platform is the best place to be although it seems like you're in leg-breaking danger of falling off at any moment.

Behind the platform are several TVs. Who pays for all this.

They will never look at the candidate throughout the event. They are glued to their laptops or phones.

Radio show broadcasting. I don't know if it was live or on tape. They pulled people out of the crowd to be a guest. 

He's on the left.

Either writing notes for a column or sending a text that he'll be home late for dinner.

The media was reporting that fire marshals turned people away after 5,000, but there was still room in the back of the hall. You just wouldn't have seen much. It was at this point that I got paranoid about a creepy looking teen boy with a ski hat on and a coat draped over his arms, hiding his hands, who was there alone and just kept drifting from side to side, not really paying attention to the candidate. A shooter? Why are you here? You don't look like you ever vote. There was no weapons check to get in...of course. This is a Republican rally in Virginia.

After Trump left, you could stand where he stood.

In fact, a line formed to stand where he stood and get a photo.

These girls hung back to interview each other.

Shut Up, Millennials

Last night I attended a "One Party" after work event at the Urban Farmhouse. Urban Farmhouse in Scott's Addition seems to serve craft oatmeal and craft beer, an interesting menu. Oh you millennials, with your craft everything. True, it was mostly a happy hour, but they -- for some unknown reason -- had three people who were operating successful local businesses to each give a ten minute speech on how they got started and how they market.

The event was co-sponsored by the Richmond Ad Club, American Marketing Association Richmond, Legal Marketing Association, and the Richmond Chapter of PRSA.

Interesting, right? Especially for me since according to the published agenda, the speakers were supposed to go first at 5:30, followed by nearly two hours of networking (code for drinking and talking), ending at 8 p.m., instead of the other way around, which I hate because I just want the program, and maybe some free food.

Silly girl. When does anything ever start on time? The program started closer to 6:15 when the host introduced the first business partnership and was roundly ignored, as were the first business partnership, two young women who make a living renting out unique looking chairs and tables for weddings, parties, commercials, and movies. (How did they get started doing that? Where do they find the furniture?)

Okay, you amazing millennials, life must be grand for you. You all have these great marketing jobs, and you got them even though you have visible tattoos, Manic Panic (am I dating myself?) hair in shades of bright red, blue and purple, and you don't remotely wear "office appropriate attire." Here are the guys with the messenger bags; here are the women with the Lady Gaga shoes. Here are gluten-free choices on the buffet table for all of you. This event was certainly billed as a "party" in the title, and two hours and 15 minutes of "networking" time was programmed in so you could talk to each other. Your one job was to shut up for 30 minutes so three of your peers could each speak for 10 minutes about how they started their amazing businesses.

And yet, you could not do that.

You could not do that when the third speaker jumped up to the mic after the first speaker and called you all rude and reprimanded you for your bad manners and pleaded with you to hush up just long enough to show some respect to the people who had agreed to come there and share their stories, ever so briefly.

And you could not do that when the third speaker started her ten minutes by shouting into the mic, "Shut up, shut up, shut up." Standing in the back doesn't mean we all still can't hear the deadly continuous drone of your voices, you amazing millennials. Your lives are so fascinating, you cannot stop talking about yourselves for 30 minutes.

Instead of a Newspaper, I Get a Shopper

I had so much hope after the Henrico and Chesterfield TDs were announced. I thought we were going to get real weekly newspapers that would help me connect with my community and get involved in the political and social life of my county.

Instead, I get another lousy shopper, as if the richmond.com "newspaper," and the pathetic Sunday Direct were anything more than vehicles to deliver boatloads of shopping inserts and advertisements with the softest of soft news, like recipes or some light entertainment press release.

For mysterious reasons that probably have something to do with ad sizes, I get a narrow broadsheet Henrico TD dated Oct. 30 in the same bundle as a perfect square tabloid Henrico TD. Why two? The lead story in the broadsheet is the Harvest Festival at Meadow Farm and the Highland Games at RIR, told in photos. Inside, more Harvest Time photos, a crossword puzzle, a word search, and horoscopes. The ads are all house ads except for a furniture store and Kroger's, so I assume this paper was designed to deliver the same Kroger's full page ad that is in the daily.

Not to mention there are also ad inserts for Kroger's, Martin's and Food Lion. Does anyone really shop by weekly sales anymore?

Okay, maybe the news is in the tabloid. On the cover is the Pumpkin Rush, also part of the Harvest Festival.

There's an editorial promising future stories about "citizens and events...festivals and games...memorials and parades...volunteer organizations...agents of change...triumphs and movements of the schools...perspectives on trends and developments." What, no politics, no government, no economic development?

There's a story about a musical at the Cultural Arts Center, flu shots, Henrico Christmas mother, a concert at a church, a community calendar, a press release from Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens, the valor awards,  a high school football game, and the journalism I hate most in the world -- the one question posed to a group of people, which is entirely their answers and headshots. In this issue, five children tell what they are going to dress up as for Halloween. Oh good gosh.

The same day I picked up this crap in a plastic bag on my lawn, I found the Oct. 13 Sunday Direct, getting soggy on another part of my lawn. The cover story is a black bean soup recipe and a woman celebrating her 100th birthday by hang gliding. No photo. Here's the weekly calendar of light entertainment events and then...what? WHAT? Five broadsheet pages of classified ads for cars!! Followed by two pages of miscellaneous ads. That's the Sunday Direct.

Finally, It Is Admitted

I periodically take "media relations" classes just to see what the reporters are saying their lives are like these days. I have been on both sides of the communications fence, pitching stories as a public relations practitioner and fending them off as an editor.

In last week's class, a television reporter actually said That Which Is Never Said. The general manager sends down "must cover" and "must cover favorably" edicts that usually are associated with an advertiser. It's "an ethical dilemma," he shrugged. This has been the standing procedure everywhere for decades, but no one ever, ever admits it. In this era of dying old-school media, I was startled that at last we had come to that level of desperation where the obvious cannot be denied anymore.

The following week we had a newspaper reporter who was so low energy, I was dying to ask him how in the world he had gotten his job. He had majored in something unrelated -- like psychology -- and then as is often the case, didn't know what to do with the major and needed a job. So he went to a small paper and was hired.

These stories amaze me. I made the apparently bad mistake of actually majoring in journalism, only to hear from the managing editor of the Richmond News Leader back in the 1970s that editors didn't like journalism majors. "They have preconceived ideas," or something like that. They preferred to hire any other major but journalism and then mold that person to their liking. At 22, I was still pretty moldable, but it didn't matter. I was tainted. At least it was better than what Alf Goodykoontz, now deceased in a car accident, told me the following year, that he wouldn't have a single mother in his newsroom because we were "emotionally unstable."

Emotions of Another Kind at the War Memorial

It was sobering to be in a room surrounded by photos of young men and women who were recently killed because they picked the military or CIA for their careers. The Social Media Club of Richmond VA (SMCRVA) held their August meeting on cyber bullying in one of the meeting rooms at the Virginia War Memorial on Belvidere. It's a great facility, but the holiness of the place is kind of inhibiting.

I have not been there since they built the addition and was blown away by the museum part (wow, those mannequins in the wars exhibit look like real men! It freaked me out) and the little outdoor amphitheater. This is a beautiful spot with a commanding view of the downtown skyline, two bridges, the river, and the Ethyl Corp building, often confused with the state capitol. (As for the catering, no. Also, $2 for a Coke? No.)

TMI facilitated the meeting with their nifty poll-taking clickers, which I had used at my workplace when TMI facilitated our employee restlessness. We learned the evening's attendees were mostly white women under 34 who lived in Richmond and liked Facebook and Twitter, and used Twitter at work. It was a relatively small group since the polling kept closing between 59-64 votes.

We heard touching and emotional stories about racial discrimination, homophobia, sexism toward female gamers, Kindness Girl urging less ass-holism and more kindness, and one guy confessing to pretending to be someone named Regina George on social media and getting his comeuppance after posting a party photo of a tasteless Sept. 11 party cake (toy planes crashing into cake towers). He swore to never be a cyber bully again, but I heard the next day from some people in my Twitter feed that they didn't go because of him and were not ready to forgive him because of things he had tweeted in his bad old days. He carefully went over all the steps necessary to be an online troll and why trolls troll, and maybe they need 12-step programs now, but whatever. (Also, I had to look up Regina George because I didn't get that at all, and learned it's because I have never seen "Mean Girls." I keep thinking I have, but what I saw was "Clueless." Not the same. Is "Heathers" the same?)

The groups that would have benefited the most from this really nice presentation were not there -- which is middle and high school students who live in the heart of inflicted cruelties and the people who post comments on the TV news' Facebook pages. I know Kindness Girl wants us to love everybody, but anyone who spends any time reading comments on the Internet must come away with the sure knowledge that most of us are astoundingly ignorant, biased, mean, sometimes viciously mean, sexist, cruel, and unable to spell worth a damn. And we all have computers and Internet access. I really have a hard time loving everybody.

When You Have to March, March

I was born too late for the romance of the old newsrooms...and also the wrong gender, probably...when characters were not only tolerated, they were celebrated. I have always loved to read those stories, so I was pleased when Roger Ebert moved on from memories of his childhood and got to the good stuff in his biography, his days as a reporter on the Chicago Sun-Times.

Here's his introduction to his editor, Bob Zonka.

"...Zonka taught me his newspaper code, which he liked to express as, 'When you have to march, march.' This included writing a story you lacked all enthusiasm for, meeting a deadline no matter what hours were necessary, getting an interview after you'd been decisively turned down, not falling in love with your deathless prose, remembering you were there to write a story and not have a good time. These were not rules he enforced. They were standards he exuded."

Life Itself by Roger Ebert, Grand Central Publishing, 2011