The calendar is about to turn, but before it does, let’s take a look back at 2023 and how much Cardinal News has grown thanks to your support.
As you know, we erect no paywall to our website, and we charge no subscription fees for any of our six newsletters. We’re also a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so we have no shareholders to pay, but even nonprofits have bills to pay. We’re able to pay ours thanks to the generosity of our readers, who have said through their donations that they want to see strong news coverage across Southwest and Southside Virginia.
We launched Cardinal in September 2021 with just two reporters. By this time last year, we had doubled to a reporting staff of four. This year, we again doubled our reporting staff — to eight reporters. Our total staff count stands at 15 — 14 full-timers and one part-timer. And that doesn’t count the small army of freelancers whose bylines you often see.
This year we added an education reporter (Lisa Rowan), a technology reporter (Tad Dickens), a health care reporter (Emily Schbacker) and a reporter based in Martinsville (Dean-Paul Stephens). To help manage that growing reporting staff, we created the position of managing editor and promoted business reporter Megan Schnabel into that role — and then hired a new business reporter (Matt Busse). To help with fundraising, we created a two-person development team (Dutchie Mirolli and Sherry Quinley).
You can find bios and contact info for everyone on our staff and board page.
We began the year with three newsletters. Over the course of 2023, we added three more. Joining our daily news report, our weekly digest and our weekly weather newsletter from weather journalist Kevin Myatt, we now have a weekly events newsletter, a weekly political newsletter (which I write) and a monthly newsletter devoted to our new series of historical stories about Virginia’s role in the American Revolution (more on that shortly). You can sign up for any or all of these for free.
Across all six newsletters, we now reach more than 21,000 subscribers. Our subscriber list has grown nearly 72% over the past year. We now offer sponsorships of those newsletters, similar to the “day sponsorships” you might hear on public radio. For more information on those, contact sponsorship sales manager Sherry Quinley at sponsorships@cardinalnews.org.
We’ve also added features that we’ve heard readers ask for. We now offer obituaries as well as an events calendar, both with searchable databases.
We launched two special projects:
- Cardinal 250: The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Thanks to a grant from the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission, Cardinal has embarked on a three-year project called Cardinal 250 where each month we present some little-known aspect of Virginia’s role in those historic events. While our coverage area remains Southwest and Southside, the Cardinal 250 project will deal with historical events across the state. We have a special page and a monthly newsletter where we are collecting that reporting.
- The Cardinal Way: Civility Rules: The American Press Institute selected us to participate in a nationwide project to promote civic discourse. We are partnering with the Roanoke Collaboration Project to give people in our demographically and politically changing communities the tools to engage in constructive dialogue. That’s led to Cardinal Way, a weekly series of essays where people in our community, with differing viewpoints, offer ways to talk through our disagreements.
We’ve continued to engage with our community. In February, we sponsored a talk by “Dopesick” author Beth Macy in Clifton Forge, followed by a discussion with local leaders about the problem of opioid addiction. In October, we hosted conversations with the candidates in two General Assembly races in Roanoke and the New River Valley. I’ve spoken to groups from Abingdon to Virginia Beach about the work that Cardinal is doing.
We also have another event coming up Jan. 3: Because of the unprecedented turnover in the General Assembly, we’ve invited two party leaders to Roanoke to speak about the upcoming session. Sen. Mamie Locke, D-Newport News, and Sen. Mark Obenshain, R-Rockingham County, who both head their respective party caucuses in the Senate, will speak at the Shenandoah Club. Registration for that event is now underway.
We also expanded in other ways. At launch, we thought of ourselves as a website. We’ve come to learn that for many readers, we’re a newsletter. For others, we’re neither of those things — they interact with us in other ways. We’ve always shared links to our stories on Facebook, Twitter/X and LinkedIn. This year we increased our presence on Instagram and added TikTok and YouTube thanks to the lead by our audience engagement editor (Brooke Stephenson). We also started sending text alerts on breaking news; you may have already gotten a prompt to sign up for those. Our philosophy is that we want to bring our stories to readers wherever they are.
This past year, we’ve brought home multiple honors. Two, in particular, stand out: The Institute for Nonprofit News gave us its StartUp of the Year award for achieving our five-year plan in 18 months. LION Publishers, which represents local, independent online news sites, gave us its first place award for financial health in the medium/large revenue tier. Both of those are a testament to the support we’ve received from you. We also brought home 21 awards from the Virginia Press Association, which recognized the journalism of last year’s staffers: Megan Schnabel, Markus Schmidt, Grace Mamon and Susan Cameron.
Looking ahead to 2024, we intend to grow more in our ability to listen more to our readers and to share Cardinal News stories with even more people. Stay tuned to hear more about an app that will soon launch and about our venture with Google to aid in producing more local content.
I hear every day from readers. Some are from Southwest and Southside, who are appreciative of having a news site devoted to their regions. Some are from other parts of Virginia; when I ask them why they’re reading us, they say it’s because we’re telling them about a part of Virginia they don’t know much about. We’re honored to have all of them reading Cardinal, and are appreciative to you for the support that makes us possible.
We are nearing the end of our year-end campaign that is vital to our sustainability. Please make your tax-deductible gift today.
