The Richmond Times-Dispatch, a once-great newspaper, is done. You can put a fork in it.
Just before 5 p.m. Sunday a brief but fierce thunderstorm struck our part of western Henrico County, knocking down trees and power lines and finishing with a rare burst of hail. I watched amazed as the steel lamp post in our front yard swayed widely. The storm didn’t last more than ten minutes or so, but proved fatal for at least one man. About a block from our daughter’s house, on the street parallel to hers, a huge tree landed on a truck and killed the person inside.
The newspaper’s online and print edition did report this fact, but in a very brief story. The data all came from the cops. No reporter or photographer came to the scene. There is no mention of the widespread power outages, which lasted six hours at our townhome and nine hours on our daughter’s street and even longer for some, who were still out of power as of 6 a.m. A reference to the storm itself links to a weather forecast from another part of town. Embarrassing.
The storm cleared soon after 5 p.m. so there were almost three hours of daylight remaining – enough time to photograph the damage. But the online story is illustrated only with a map of the rough location where the man died, pulled from offline and copied.
What this tells this aging newspaperman is that there was no reporter or photographer on duty at all yesterday evening. Forty years ago it was standard practice at the Roanoke Times to have one or two reporters on duty in the evenings, and one photographer, usually until the final edition was put to bed after midnight, to dart out and cover stories like this — fire, accident deaths, storm damage. I did the job (we called it “night cops”) at least a few times per month. I’m not sure if Jim Bacon, officially a business writer, had to do it. But this is what a newspaper is supposed to do.
I don’t know what the RTD is now, but it is not a local newspaper.
— Steve Haner
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