Roanoke Times refugees find success with digital news startup that aims to cover a broad swath of rural Virginia

Cardinal's Megan Schnabel interviews Supervisor Trey Adkins of
Buchanan County, in Southwest Virginia. (Photo by Lakin Keene)

Last September, a group of veteran journalists launched a digital news startup aimed at covering the largely rural Southwest and Southside parts of Virginia, broadly defined. Now Cardinal News is thriving, growing, and making a difference, media columnist Margaret Sullivan reports for The Washington Post. The publication has no paywall or ads, and relies entirely on donations.

"Like many similar start-ups around the nation, Cardinal — named for Virginia’s state bird — is helping to fill the gap left by the shrinking of traditional local news organizations, particularly newspapers," Sullivan reports. Most of the staff came from the Roanoke Times, including Cardinal Editor Dwayne Yancey, and one of the two reporters, Megan Schnabel. The other reporter, Markus Schmidt, wrote about state politics for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, also now a Lee Enterprises newspaper.

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.

And, the publication is growing. "A new grant will allow Cardinal to add a reporter soon in Danville, along the North Carolina border; Rife also would like to hire an education reporter and one dedicated to health coverage," 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.