What to do about marketing and branding? An experiment in recursion

Original Facebook post. I am going to be away for a few days and this is one of my last productive work days of the period before the holiday. I produced a newsletter earlier, and now I'm combing through my subscribers to make sure that everyone's getting their perks!

I spend about 95 percent of my time reporting, and not dealing with the administration I need to do to make sure the business is functioning.

Longtime friends may know there was a point where I wanted to buy a particular establishment and run it. But, the reality is I've always wanted to launch my own information outlet. I seem to have done that.

It's hard work. But this is what I've always wanted to do. I took a day off from all of this yesterday and played Stardew Valley and watched superhero television. At around 4 a.m. this morning I was aware I was in an important dream. There was work to be done.

I wake up every morning and feel there's something I need to do. People need to know things. This is the work I've always wanted to do.

But now it's a business. It's just me doing the work. I hope to hire people one day to help me cover the community, so I can begin to spend more time on making sure this is sustainable for the future.

Anyway. Just noting that what I'm doing now is not unlike working at Court Square Tavern. Except something changed. I can't seem to do that kind of work anymore. There are people who have expressed concern about my burn out. I already did from food service but I take that same energy and devote it right to the work I want to do for the community.

Okay, back to work.

What work?

I need to figure out a way to streamline the many things I'm doing and to think of a better way people come to the products I create. Right now, I mostly just tell them to "Google Charlottesville Community Engagement" is direct, but it's not classy. Or very efficient.

What is Charlottesville Community Engagement? Good question. In one manner of speaking it's just a name I came up with one day when I decided to create a newsletter on Substack as the primary mechanism in which I get information out to people. Someone had been recommending it as a platform. I had been wanting to take a leap of faith and begin providing information in a form that was not a Tweet.

So, I launched Charlottesville Community Engagement on July 13, 2020. I gave a free ad to Rapture just to have a placeholder. At this time, I was mostly reporting on the pandemic, because I felt and still feel it's important to keep people up to date on what's going on.

Today I published the 296th edition of the newsletter and the podcast version. This is my full-time job and I created a company called Town Crier Productions. I've got an audience number I can work with, and I know my stories have an impact just by letting people know what's happening.

I really should count up the numbers of all the Week Ahead newsletters I've done. I began writing that when I was at the Piedmont Environmental Council and realizing that I was much happier documenting what happens then trying to shape opinion. I left amicably and they now sponsor the Week Ahead, which is a weekly look at what's coming up. I treasure the time I get to do the basic research into finding out what's happening, and letting everyone else know. I also use this research to condense a version for reddit/Charlottesville and to serve as the basis for any discussions I might do in the week. I've just begun appearing on WINA's Charlottesville Right Now with Courteney Stuart. I am looking forward to being prepared to tell the community what's going on, no matter the venue. Take a listen to my recent appearance!

Other forms

Soon after leaving my last official position in information gathering, I purchased a new Wordpress platform to serve as a test bed. I've been a communicator all of my life. My first self-published work was a irregular one-page newspaper called The Daily Bean that's all gone now. I have a box of my Preston Journals and Tech Independent's from 1992 to 1994, and a whole print-out of the copy I wrote for WVTF Public Radio. I have notepads somewhere fleshing out radio programs I wanted to wrote, and digital and analog copies of much of what I did produce. There's a ghost of me out there in the world.

So, when I left journalism suddenly in 2018, I purchased a Wordpress site. Years before, I'd given up the Charlottesville Podcasting Network due to a focus on my full-time job. Upon leaving, I wanted to at least have a content management system to play around with.

At first I thought I would call it This is Charlottesville, imagining some sort of title from the 1940's or 1950's. I wanted to provide comprehensive coverage of the entire community. But that title sounded very elitist and arrogant to me. Who I am to say what Charlottesville is? I just provide information.

So I kept it all quiet even though I did secure that URL. And I began to post things to it, mostly to have some sense of cohesion and institutional memory. The way my brain thinks requires me to write down what happens. So there's a lot on there that was never published anywhere.

Has Charlottesville Community Engagement been published anywhere? I just know I'm making a living off of this and seeking to make it all sustainable.

Anyway, at some point last summer, I opted to call the site Information Charlottesville, which may be just as elitist and arrogant. But it's catchy and maybe this what I use to drive traffic? It needs a lot of work, but the content is there. Much of my missing period from journalism is here though at the time most of them were private writings I only published after I got back to the work in the summer of 2020.

But the content is there:

• Albemarle prioritizes strategies, strategizes priorities, September 2018
• Pacc-tech briefed on Fontaine plans, October 2018
• Climate change ranked as top strategic goal for Albemarle supervisors, October 2018
• December 2018 stories

This next link, though, is kind of strange. In January of 2019, I produced a regular podcast for my own entertainment as a proof of concept. There's no soundbites, but on January 1, 2019, I appear to have clearly stated a big resolution - provide information about how government works..

So here I am. Three years on, I've put a lot of what I wanted to do into action, and people are paying for it. I may not have the exact answer yet on streamlining all of the output. I just know I love the work I do and aim to do it for a long period of time. When all was dark, I fell back on what I know how to do.

Somehow that means posting to a blog I barely post to for some reason, just to make some sort of a point to myself.