Starting today, we have a new newsletter: The Weekend, a weekly roundup of events around Southwest and Southside.
If you’re not already signed up, you can sign up here. We now have five newsletters: Cardinal Daily (Monday-Friday mornings), Cardinal Weekly, a digest of the top stories of the week (Saturday), Cardinal Weather by weather journalist Kevin Myatt (Wednesday) and West of the Capital, a political newsletter by executive editor Dwayne Yancey (Friday). All are free.
The Weekend will go out each Thursday at noon.
This newsletter will draw from the events calendar that we previously launched, which allows readers to search by date, location and type of event within whatever mile radius you choose. If you’re a group sponsoring an event, you can add that for free. We also have sponsorship spaces available. If you’re interested in those, we have details here.
There are a lot more events in the calendar than we can possibly fit into the newsletter, so we’ve asked those who have signed up for the newsletter what they’d like to see featured. Here’s what they told us.
The two most popular answers were festivals/fairs and music — 79.5% wanted to see the former, 76.9% the latter. (People could give multiple answers.)
Next came live theater (65.1%) and outdoor/fitness events (46.2%).
Family events came in fifth at 29.5%.
Nothing else drew more than 1.3%.
We also asked where people are finding out about events now — 67.9% said they learned about them from family and friends, which seems to suggest a need for a calendar and newsletter such as this. Another 56.4% said they learned about events on Facebook. Local print newspapers were third at 38.5%.
We also asked people where they are traveling to see events. The most popular answer was Roanoke at 47.4%, followed by the New River Valley at 23.1%, Lynchburg at 10.3%, Danville at 5.1%, Floyd at 2.6% and a tie between Bristol and Farmville at 1.3% apiece.
We will keep all these answers in mind as we design our weekly newsletter. We also suspect that some of these answers may change over time as we pick up more readers. Want to weigh in on what you’d like to see in the newsletter? Answer our four-question survey.
Enjoy your weekend — and ours.