The Richmonder’s landing page at richmonder.org. The news outlet is scheduled to launch next month. (Screenshot)
With three veteran local journalists on board and dozens of donors backing it up, a new player in Richmond’s news scene is set to launch next month.
The Richmonder, a nonprofit online news outlet led by former Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter and editor Michael Phillips, is scheduled to launch Sept. 9 with an initial focus on Richmond City Council and School Board coverage, as well as on the mayoral race and election in November.
Joining Phillips are reporters Graham Moomaw, a fellow RTD alum who’s spent the past five years at the Virginia Mercury, and Sarah Vogelsong, a former Mercury editor and reporter who left the outlet in March after a five-year run.
Like the Mercury, The Richmonder will be based on a nonprofit news model, with free-to-read content supported by community donations and subscriptions. The website and emailed newsletter will focus on Richmond initially with plans to expand coverage to the counties over time.
Phillips, 39, worked 17 years at the RTD as a sports reporter and editor, as well as eight months as interim executive editor, before he was let go in a round of layoffs last summer. He said that was the nudge he needed to pursue The Richmonder, which he said will fill a void in current coverage of City Hall.
“This is one of the biggest cities in America, it’s a top 50 city, and we don’t have a professional reporter in attendance at City Council meetings,” Phillips said.
“We all lose because of that. The people in the room behave differently, the decisions that get made are different, and at the end of the day the decisions that get made are more expensive for taxpayers because nobody was there representing them and keeping an eye out for them.”
The publication will be community-supported by donors and subscribers who can contribute monthly or yearly, though payments will not be required for access. Phillips said they’ve had 54 donors so far contribute toward a first-year budget of $433,000, which the nonprofit’s board recently approved. He said a goal is to have 1,000 paid subscribers by Election Day.
“We want to grow to $600,000 really quickly. That’s where we feel comfortable in terms of doing what we need to do,” he said. “Obviously we have many more growth targets out there, but in terms of feeling good about starting now, we think if people can see what we can do around the election, that will hopefully spur them to say this is worth my support and help us close that gap quicker than we could being over-cautious.”
Michael Phillips is launching The Richmonder a year after he was laid off from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. (Jonathan Spiers photo)
Phillips said he was inspired to start The Richmonder after watching the growth of Cardinal News, a nonprofit news site launched in 2021 that covers Southwest and Southside Virginia.
“I’d been eyeing the success of Cardinal News and (co-founder) Dwayne Yancey in Roanoke for a long time, and when I got laid off, I called Dwayne and said, ‘How do you do it?’ He was incredibly kind with his time and explained to me how you do it,” Phillips said.
“The goals are big. Cardinal News this year is doing $1.2 million in revenue. I don’t see any reason to think we couldn’t get there eventually.”
To help set up The Richmonder as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Phillips enlisted David Poole, formerly of the Virginia Public Access Project, who rounds out The Richmonder’s team as its business manager.
The nonprofit is overseen by a board that Phillips said is representative of Richmond and the community. He declined to identify board members or donors at this time but said board members would be announced closer to the launch.
Phillips said the nonprofit model is preferable in an industry that has overall been struggling to make money amid shrinking ad revenue and a de-centralization of traditional news sources.
“That’s one of the cool things about this as opposed to the newspaper,” he said. “Your ultimate answer was to the shareholders who say, ‘How much money did you make today,’ as they should; that is their job. Our ultimate answer is to the board, who will say, ‘How did you positively impact the city through your work this month?’
“At the end of the day, we could run this as a for-profit; there just wouldn’t be any profit,” he said. “There’s no end of the rainbow there where we’re a $100 million company and the darling of venture capitalist investors. I love the idea of being able to say we’re community-controlled, we’re community-supported, the board is community members looking out for us, and there will never be a day where a hedge fund buys us, because they can’t.”
Graham Moomaw
With Moomaw and Vogelsong, The Richmonder adds two reporters with recent experience at the Mercury covering state government, but with years under each of their belts covering local news as well. Before the Mercury, Vogelsong was a freelance writer and editor in Richmond amid stints at the Progress-Index in Petersburg, Chesapeake Bay Journal and Caroline Progress, while Moomaw spent six years at the RTD covering City Hall and other beats.
Moomaw, whose last day at the Mercury is Friday, said he was motivated to return to local reporting and sees benefits in his overlaps in experience with Vogelsong at the Mercury and Phillips at the RTD.
“After covering state politics for so long, I see local news as where the need is most acute right now. I just think local government can a lot of the time affect people in a more tangible way, but it’s just getting harder and harder for people to find high quality news about local issues,” Moomaw said.
Vogelsong said she left the Mercury in March to try something different and return to writing after about 18 months in the editor’s chair. She said The Richmonder fills a need for more news in the city, where she has lived for over a decade.
Sarah Vogelsong
“While I think that the reporters at the Times-Dispatch do a fantastic job, it’s hard to dispute that the numbers of reporters that the paper has been employing have been dropping, so I think that anything that we can do to add to that pool is generally better for the community,” Vogelsong said.
Familiar with the nonprofit model from her time at the Mercury, Vogelsong added, “Obviously the industry has been undergoing huge amounts of change over the past decades, and I think that the nonprofit model is showing some real promise as a great vehicle for keeping journalism (going).”
In announcing The Richmonder earlier this summer, an Axios Richmond report received some pushback on social media from current RTD reporters who took exception to the claim that they’re no longer covering city meetings regularly. Phillips told BizSense that he was speaking more to the RTD’s practice, not to the reporters’ performance.
“There are very good reporters over there who do great work in this city, and I did not intend that to be a personal shot at them,” Phillips said. “There is an institutional philosophy there that you don’t have to attend a City Council meeting to cover City Council. I will forever and always disagree with that.
“I philosophically believe that you need to be sitting in the room when the decision is made as a professional journalist. I’m not backing down from that stance, and The Richmonder will never change from that stance,” he said.
With an initial focus on Richmond, Phillips said the goal is to garner enough financial support to expand their news coverage throughout the metro area. Acknowledging the challenge, he described the goal as long-term. He said he’s also actively looking for space to establish a newsroom and office.
“It’s going to be hard work. The media landscape has arguably never been worse for a project like this than it is right now,” he said. “We’re coming into some headwinds, so we’re very cognizant of the challenges that are ahead.”
In other local media news, Virginia Business magazine was recently sold by longtime publisher Bernie Niemeier to the North Carolina-based owner of Virginia Lawyers Weekly.
The Richmonder’s landing page at richmonder.org. The news outlet is scheduled to launch next month. (Screenshot)
With three veteran local journalists on board and dozens of donors backing it up, a new player in Richmond’s news scene is set to launch next month.
The Richmonder, a nonprofit online news outlet led by former Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter and editor Michael Phillips, is scheduled to launch Sept. 9 with an initial focus on Richmond City Council and School Board coverage, as well as on the mayoral race and election in November.
Joining Phillips are reporters Graham Moomaw, a fellow RTD alum who’s spent the past five years at the Virginia Mercury, and Sarah Vogelsong, a former Mercury editor and reporter who left the outlet in March after a five-year run.
Like the Mercury, The Richmonder will be based on a nonprofit news model, with free-to-read content supported by community donations and subscriptions. The website and emailed newsletter will focus on Richmond initially with plans to expand coverage to the counties over time.
Phillips, 39, worked 17 years at the RTD as a sports reporter and editor, as well as eight months as interim executive editor, before he was let go in a round of layoffs last summer. He said that was the nudge he needed to pursue The Richmonder, which he said will fill a void in current coverage of City Hall.
“This is one of the biggest cities in America, it’s a top 50 city, and we don’t have a professional reporter in attendance at City Council meetings,” Phillips said.
“We all lose because of that. The people in the room behave differently, the decisions that get made are different, and at the end of the day the decisions that get made are more expensive for taxpayers because nobody was there representing them and keeping an eye out for them.”
The publication will be community-supported by donors and subscribers who can contribute monthly or yearly, though payments will not be required for access. Phillips said they’ve had 54 donors so far contribute toward a first-year budget of $433,000, which the nonprofit’s board recently approved. He said a goal is to have 1,000 paid subscribers by Election Day.
“We want to grow to $600,000 really quickly. That’s where we feel comfortable in terms of doing what we need to do,” he said. “Obviously we have many more growth targets out there, but in terms of feeling good about starting now, we think if people can see what we can do around the election, that will hopefully spur them to say this is worth my support and help us close that gap quicker than we could being over-cautious.”
Michael Phillips is launching The Richmonder a year after he was laid off from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. (Jonathan Spiers photo)
Phillips said he was inspired to start The Richmonder after watching the growth of Cardinal News, a nonprofit news site launched in 2021 that covers Southwest and Southside Virginia.
“I’d been eyeing the success of Cardinal News and (co-founder) Dwayne Yancey in Roanoke for a long time, and when I got laid off, I called Dwayne and said, ‘How do you do it?’ He was incredibly kind with his time and explained to me how you do it,” Phillips said.
“The goals are big. Cardinal News this year is doing $1.2 million in revenue. I don’t see any reason to think we couldn’t get there eventually.”
To help set up The Richmonder as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Phillips enlisted David Poole, formerly of the Virginia Public Access Project, who rounds out The Richmonder’s team as its business manager.
The nonprofit is overseen by a board that Phillips said is representative of Richmond and the community. He declined to identify board members or donors at this time but said board members would be announced closer to the launch.
Phillips said the nonprofit model is preferable in an industry that has overall been struggling to make money amid shrinking ad revenue and a de-centralization of traditional news sources.
“That’s one of the cool things about this as opposed to the newspaper,” he said. “Your ultimate answer was to the shareholders who say, ‘How much money did you make today,’ as they should; that is their job. Our ultimate answer is to the board, who will say, ‘How did you positively impact the city through your work this month?’
“At the end of the day, we could run this as a for-profit; there just wouldn’t be any profit,” he said. “There’s no end of the rainbow there where we’re a $100 million company and the darling of venture capitalist investors. I love the idea of being able to say we’re community-controlled, we’re community-supported, the board is community members looking out for us, and there will never be a day where a hedge fund buys us, because they can’t.”
Graham Moomaw
With Moomaw and Vogelsong, The Richmonder adds two reporters with recent experience at the Mercury covering state government, but with years under each of their belts covering local news as well. Before the Mercury, Vogelsong was a freelance writer and editor in Richmond amid stints at the Progress-Index in Petersburg, Chesapeake Bay Journal and Caroline Progress, while Moomaw spent six years at the RTD covering City Hall and other beats.
Moomaw, whose last day at the Mercury is Friday, said he was motivated to return to local reporting and sees benefits in his overlaps in experience with Vogelsong at the Mercury and Phillips at the RTD.
“After covering state politics for so long, I see local news as where the need is most acute right now. I just think local government can a lot of the time affect people in a more tangible way, but it’s just getting harder and harder for people to find high quality news about local issues,” Moomaw said.
Vogelsong said she left the Mercury in March to try something different and return to writing after about 18 months in the editor’s chair. She said The Richmonder fills a need for more news in the city, where she has lived for over a decade.
Sarah Vogelsong
“While I think that the reporters at the Times-Dispatch do a fantastic job, it’s hard to dispute that the numbers of reporters that the paper has been employing have been dropping, so I think that anything that we can do to add to that pool is generally better for the community,” Vogelsong said.
Familiar with the nonprofit model from her time at the Mercury, Vogelsong added, “Obviously the industry has been undergoing huge amounts of change over the past decades, and I think that the nonprofit model is showing some real promise as a great vehicle for keeping journalism (going).”
In announcing The Richmonder earlier this summer, an Axios Richmond report received some pushback on social media from current RTD reporters who took exception to the claim that they’re no longer covering city meetings regularly. Phillips told BizSense that he was speaking more to the RTD’s practice, not to the reporters’ performance.
“There are very good reporters over there who do great work in this city, and I did not intend that to be a personal shot at them,” Phillips said. “There is an institutional philosophy there that you don’t have to attend a City Council meeting to cover City Council. I will forever and always disagree with that.
“I philosophically believe that you need to be sitting in the room when the decision is made as a professional journalist. I’m not backing down from that stance, and The Richmonder will never change from that stance,” he said.
With an initial focus on Richmond, Phillips said the goal is to garner enough financial support to expand their news coverage throughout the metro area. Acknowledging the challenge, he described the goal as long-term. He said he’s also actively looking for space to establish a newsroom and office.
“It’s going to be hard work. The media landscape has arguably never been worse for a project like this than it is right now,” he said. “We’re coming into some headwinds, so we’re very cognizant of the challenges that are ahead.”
In other local media news, Virginia Business magazine was recently sold by longtime publisher Bernie Niemeier to the North Carolina-based owner of Virginia Lawyers Weekly.
The “The Richmonder” announcement apparently got through to the Times-Dispatch’s corporate ownership as I’ve noticed an uptick in local coverage there. Whatever happens, I hope it means better educated Richmond voters and more accountability at City Hall. Best of luck!
I was going to write the same. Interesting that the RTD is all of a sudden making city hall a priority with multiple front page reports from Samuel B. Parker. Too little, too late. The Richmonder has a dynamite reporting team, and with the Virginia Mercury (And Cardinal News), will bring back real news, investigating reporting. I only ask Michael and the board of directors to add Jon Baliles and his “RVA 5×5” in some capacity providing perhaps editorial insight from an insider perspective.
I couldn’t agree more. Jon Baliles coverage is fantastic.
The Mercury and Cardinal News are both excellent publications and I couldn’t love this news more. Best of luck to all at The Richmonder!
Very excited about this! Hard to find hyper local news anymore by professional journalists. This model has done well in other cities and should do great in Richmond!
Richmond needs Michael Phillips.
Very promising! Jeremy Lazarus would be a great addition
The Times-Dispatch print edition has gotten VERY expensive. I’m sure most others have jumped off ship already and have no idea. I keep subscribing for two reasons. One, I have had a newspaper subscription wherever I’ve lived my whole life (including dorms and apartments). It is a habit. Two, I want to support local journalism. I decided that my subscription fee would be akin to a charitable contribution. If I donate to The Richmonder, then it really will be a charitable contribution.
Competition is a good thing. All the best on this exciting endeavor.