Something special is happening in Cardinal land: We are expanding and deepening local news coverage of our communities.
Today, we will publish the first edition of Cardinal New River Valley News, our first weekly newsletter curated for specific communities within our larger region. You can sign up here.
This is the first step of many planned for 2026 to build our capacity to engage more with the people of our communities and to dig deeper into issues that are important to them.
We have just come off our end-of-year campaign when we asked you to support our work. Many thanks to our readers who contributed. This support not only directly funds our news team, it also helps us attract philanthropic investments.
We are able to expand into the New River Valley due to an investment through a Google News Initiative Growth Catalyst grant. Cardinal was one a few news organizations out of hundreds that applied to receive this funding.
The one-year grant and the coaching that comes with it will help us identify funding to hire a dedicated reporter and sustain and grow our ability to cover the NRV communities.
The newsletter is intended as a conversation with those who live in or care about the NRV. In addition to NRV stories, we will ask for your help in getting to know you and the people, places and issues that are important to you.
We will plan to meet up with you in the communities through a series of events. We’ll be reaching out with surveys and other ways to hear from you. Let us know if you’d like one of us to come to speak to your group.
We are also building relationships with journalism professors and students at Virginia Tech and Radford University. We want to help students put into practice the skills they are learning, and hopefully build the pipeline of helping to develop talented journalists who will want to live and work in Cardinal land.
We also see this as a way to learn more about the ways young adults consume local news so that we can deliver stories to them in the form and on the platforms of their choosing.
For local news to thrive, it is essential that Cardinal continues to find innovative ways to report and to fund journalism.
We welcome your ideas. We’ve set up a dedicated email, NRV@cardinalnews.org, and look forward to engaging further with you.