Here’s a story. Then my comments.
https://www.cvilletomorrow.org/charlottesville-tomorrow-celebrates-20-years-of-local-journalism/
I wasn’t invited. I didn’t expect to be. I don’t fit in with the vision they have for the future. Why did they want to change what they were doing?
I went back to doing the work I was doing and I’ve continued to build a body of work that may be known in the future as a repository for decisions that were made.
I’m not bitter about any of this anymore, though I am still motivated to work hard because I am hungry. I believe in what I do so much that it has blotted out everything else in my life. Though, that might not be true. I have a pretty rich and full life, though there’s stuff missing.
I also know I stay isolated because I need to be in order to do the work. I don’t want to be a cheerleader. I don’t want to do PR. I view myself as milquetoast in that I don’t ask a lot of hard questions, but I view my journalism as more documentary than investigatory. I want people to know what’s going on, and I believe there were members of the Charlottesville Tomorrow board who didn’t want that anymore.
Oh well. I wish them well, but I really want them to acknowledge my contribution in one key way. I want the stories I wrote for eleven years to be in categories, and if not, I want to buy them for my archive or somehow arrange it so I’m part of the story.
I built Charlottesville Tomorrow. Before I showed up, it was Brian Wheeler’s blog. I added a professionalism that came from over a dozen years of experience in journalism as well as real desire to create an online news platform. He gave me direction in the form of editing, but what I wrote was assigned for most of the time. There were conflicts, the same conflicts I had had at With Good Reason. The bosses didn’t want to be upstaged, when I myself was never doing any of this for my ego.
I wanted then and I want now to tell the stories. I want to get the product out. I am who I wanted to be when I was 20, lugging the physical copy of draft newspapers to the print shop in Salem so it could on newsstands. I spliced my first radio stories using actual tape. I adapted to online tools because they allowed my storytelling to be done faster.
And here I am at the end of a week where I’ve written more than Charlottesville Tomorrow will write in a week. That’s a fact. And it makes me wonder what I could do with their budget, and what sort of a force we might actually be.
Oh well. Good for them, and good for me!
Now on to whatever passes for a night for me! (cooking a new dish!)
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| I lived in this house from September 2020 to November 2021. It was demolished to make way for North Pointe, a develop I continue to write out about occasionally. |
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