Cardinal's Megan Schnabel interviews Supervisor Trey Adkins of Buchanan County, in Southwest Virginia. (Photo by Lakin Keene) |
The publication's ties to the Times don't end there: "Cardinal’s executive director and chief development officer, Luanne Rife, was a longtime health reporter there," Sullivan reports. "Cardinal’s board of directors includes a former Roanoke Times publisher, Debbie Meade. The paper’s former chief financial officer, Tonya Hart, has helped with finance and budget matters."
Frustrated and burned out, Rife accepted a Lee buyout and started the Cardinal after she was told to scale back on in-depth health beat stories. "When a foundation approached her about a reporting project it wanted to fund, it lit a spark of inspiration for her — and she started exploring whether she could start her own project, one that would be more ambitious and permanent," Sullivan writes. "Yancey made the move after watching the Times scale back its staff in recent years, especially after its sale by longtime owner Landmark Communications in 2013."
Cardinal is already making a difference: The Federal Emergency Management Agency had refused to cover flood and mudslide damages in the community of Hurley last summer, but Cardinal's in-depth reporting and photos of the devastation "brought much-needed attention to Hurley’s suffering residents — and may help them get $11 million of state aid," Sullivan reports.
Cardinal is also geographically ambitious. Yancey told Sullivan that its mission is to cover Southwest and Southside Virginia, or what he calls “Cumberland County to the Cumberland Gap.” Cumberland County, which lies east of the state's geographic center, is more often defined as lying in Central Virginia, but the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia puts it and Buckingham (which has the center) in Southside. Yancey is based in Botetourt ("Bot-e-tot") County, just outside Roanoke. It and much of the Cardinal coverage counties are in Appalachia, "an easy part of the state to stereotype," he notes.
University of Virginia map, adapted by The Rural Blog; click on it to enlarge. |
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