Category Archives: Blogs and blog administration

The Virginia Public Access Project continues to struggle to define what constitutes news reporting worth of inclusion in its popular VaNews news digest — a daily e-letter with thousands of readers who actively follow state and local news. In the most recent iteration of VPAP policy, Bacon’s Rebellion ended up the big loser.

In a world of rapidly morphing publications with different mixes and formats of news and opinion, VPAP doesn’t have an easy job. It started out compiling headlines for Virginia newspapers only. But VaNews compilers have had to contend with the emergence of online publications that do real reporting: Bacon’s Rebellion, The Virginia Mercury, and the more popular partisan blogs. Founder David Poole knows that traditional print newspapers are in decline while online publications are in the ascendancy, and that for the long-run health of VaNews, which is a successful money-raiser for his organization, he needs to embrace online media.

The start-up of the Virginia Mercury precipitated a round of soul searching. Poole’s concern was that the online Richmond-based news outlet had an explicit politically progressive bias, and that it was funded by untraceable foundation money. By contrast, Bacon’s Rebellion has always been 100% up-front about where the money is coming from. Poole was bothered, however, by perception of bias on energy and environmental issues due to our sponsorship by Dominion Energy. So, when our Dominion sponsorship expired, Bacon’s Rebellion chose not to renew it, and we created a channel populated only by news articles for VaNews to draw from. Poole began incorporating pieces from Bacon’s Rebellion.

Then, as debate continued to buffet his board of directors, Poole decided that due to a continued taint by association he wouldn’t accept news reporting on issues associated with now-defunct sponsors, even though news articles written by Steve Haner and me — both knowledgeable, experienced journalists — met all the traditional criteria of a news story.

Now the wheel has turned again. This time dark-money Virginia Mercury makes the cut but transparent Bacon’s Rebellion — which has no source of outside funding whatsoever, other than some modest reader contributions — does not.

“Our goal, as it has been from the start, is to give readers a comprehensive look of reporting about Virginia government and politics,” said Nicole Riley, chair of the VPAP Board of Directors, in a press release Friday. “As providers come and go, we want to keep the focus on original news reporting.”

The latest changes to the VaNews criteria add specificity to the definition of “original news reporting” to include a requirement that an article present both sides of a debate and writers should be a commentator or a reporter – but not both.

“It’s confusing when someone expresses their opinion about an issue and the next day shows up to cover the same issue as a reporter,” Riley said.

VPAP also dropped its prohibition against “advocacy” publications, a term that had been added in 2016 and proved difficult to define.

“The Board debated this and determined that ‘advocacy’ is often in the eye of the beholder,” Riley said. “Take the Washington Post. There are people who believe the Post is part of a liberal media conspiracy while others think the Post is the savior of democracy.”

So…. Virginia Mercury may be an advocacy publication, but because its editor and staff writers stick to “news” and do not engage in overt commentary, they make the cut. Because Haner and I write commentary in separate posts, we don’t. Nothing against Virginia Mercury — the editorial team is good at what it does and I read the publication every day — but this new criteria seems totally arbitrary.

I get it — VaNews has to draw a line somewhere. I’m just skeptical that it’s possible to draw bright lines and stick to them. For example, Jeff Schapiro, the dean of the Capitol press corps, is known mainly for writing commentary but he also reports news from time to time. Are readers “confused”? Will VaNews exclude him from its clippings? That would be absurd.

Well, the world isn’t fair. The onus is on us at Bacon’s Rebellion to create such compelling content that VaNews has no choice but to treat us as an equal — or maybe grow to a point where we don’t care what it does. Let me take this occasion to thank our loyal readers who contribute to the quality dialogue on this blog. Thankfully, you don’t seem confused by what we do.

When David Poole launched the Virginia Public Access Project’s VaNews digest of news articles about Virginia politics and policy, he had no way of imagining that things would get so complicated. As other news aggregators do, VaNews rounded up the top stories from Virginia’s newspapers, television stations, and selected online publications, excerpting headlines and lead paragraphs, and blasting out an early-morning email to thousands of readers — a highly influential audience of elected officials, government administrators, lobbyists, lawyers, reporters, trade association executives, and others involved in the formulation of public policy in Virginia.

As the free e-newsletter grew in popularity, it became indispensable reading. VaNews now claims 11,700 subscribers. With such an elite audience, it charges $200 daily for one-day sponsorships over and above what it collects in donations. Meanwhile, political and policy blogs clamor to have their content included. VaNews could drive hundreds of page views to their websites — pure gold to smaller publications seeking to expand their readership and influence.

Now Poole, a former state capital correspondent for the Roanoke Times and the Virginian-Pilot, finds himself in the position of being an arbiter of which publications count as a legitimate news source and which do not. Thanks to the popularity of VaNews, his judgment calls matter. A lot. Not everyone is happy with his decisions, and the issue has come to a head with the inauguration of the Virginia Mercury, an online news publication funded by the progressive Hopewell Fund.

Tuesday, Poole felt moved to write a letter to the VPAP board.

You may have noticed that we carried three news articles today published by Virginia Mercury, a new online news operation funded by progressive groups.

Some questions have arisen — Is the Mercury a nonprofit newspaper or is it an advocacy organization? Their editor Robert Zullo wrote this introduction, which takes a very clear anti-establishment position. But a lot of editors have preached, “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted.”

The real question for VaNews is: Who is funding the Mercury? All they’ve said is that they are funded by a large “progressive” foundation. I have asked Zullo for the name of their specific donor. Last week, Zullo said he needed to ask permission to release that information. I have not heard back from him.

Until Zullo comes clean about funding, we are going to avoid running the Mercury’s coverage of energy and environmental issues. We are making an assumption that the Mercury is similar to the Southeast Energy News, which is published by a clean-energy group. It looks and feels like conventional journalism, but it is advocacy in the same way an industry newsletter is.

We are entering a strange time of conversion, where the conventional press is withering away and being replaced with all sorts of experimental organizations. Thanks for your patience and support as we navigate these uncertain waters.

What once might have been a theoretical concern, easily dismissed, has become urgent as the news staffs of traditional news-gathering organizations shrink and the universe of news articles to draw from contracts along with them. The online publications springing up to fill the news void are seemingly infinite in number, and they vary widely in quality in their commitment to traditional journalism. Clearly, Poole cannot include them all in VaNews. But drawing a clear and objective dividing line is difficult.

My dog in this fight. I know from personal experience. I asked Poole several months ago if he would include Bacon’s Rebellion news articles in VaNews. While most of our content is commentary, we do publish articles meeting traditional journalistic standards. Poole said he was uncomfortable using our articles, however, citing the journalism sponsorships from Dominion Energy and Partners 4 Affordable Excellence that supported my reporting on energy and higher education. Even though the sponsorship agreements made it clear that I maintained 100% control over the editorial product and even though I was totally transparent about those sponsorships, Poole was concerned that the relationship with advocacy groups called the objectivity of my journalism into question. Dominion, of course, was a particularly controversial sponsor; Blue Virginia, a left-leaning, anti-Dominion blog, had made a big issue about the arrangement.

I asked Poole, what if I let the sponsorships expire? And what if I drew a clear line between news and commentary? Would he consider the news articles for publication in VaNews? He said he would.

The Partners 4 Affordable Excellence sponsorship expired in March, and the Dominion sponsorship in June. But Dominion had indicated a willingness to renew the sponsorship for another year. I had a big business decision to make. Thinking of the long-term future of Bacon’s Rebellion, I opted in favor of growing the blog’s readership by making it eligible for inclusion in VaNews, even though it meant losing significant sponsorship income. I let the Dominion sponsorship expire in June. (The company and I parted on good terms.) I then paid several hundred dollars to reconfigure the website and create a “news” page, where all news articles would be published — and easily spotted, and scooped up, by VaNews and any other news aggregator that wanted them.

In the meantime, Steve Haner joined Bacon’s Rebellion as a contributing editor. I’d known Haner since we’d worked together at the Roanoke Times more than 30 years ago, and even though he had worked as a GOP operative and a lobbyist in the intervening time, I knew that he knew how to keep his opinions out of his reporting. As he transitions away from lobbying, he has been attending various legislative hearings and public meetings, including most recently the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia meeting, and filing reports for Bacon’s Rebellion.

On the day we launched our news page, we were delighted to see that VaNews had picked up an article Haner had posted about the Virginia Retirement System. But the e-letter had excluded articles he had written about higher education and I had written about the convening of a solar- and wind-power stakeholder group. Whoah! What happened? Why was our straight news reporting being excluded? Continue reading →