Editor: Twelve days ago we launched RVANews.

Someone let me ramble for a couple hundred words about how we got here and where we’re going. Who did that?

November 12, 2007; 7:00 AM • by Ross Catrow

The whole thing began about a zillion years (three or so) ago when John launched Church Hill People’s News. He continued, merrily, along, building a massive user base, until he decided the rest of the city needed a CHPN. Actually, what he said was “There need to be more very local community oriented blogs.” Twelve days after that we launched West of the Boulevard News, and soon after a deluge (ten-ish) of community blogs covered the Richmond (and not -so Richmond) area.

Before John’s call to action and all the what not that followed we’d been working on RVABlogs.com. Since sometime in November Oh-Five RVABlogs has been aggregating the thoughts of Richmond into a big ol’ bucket. We were cutting our aggregating teeth you might say.

So, like, duh: let’s aggregate the community blogs into something that is awesome.

And so we did. Aggregating these newsy blogs together gives you an excellent overview, bird’s eye view, say, of what is going on in Richmond. Plus it gives it to you with a very local and unique point of view (ideally). As these blogs evolve and more people get involved their voices will solidify and, hopefully, they will rely less on straight linking to the main stream media. There is no reason community blogs should replace these mainstream media types, but they certainly can compliment them slash have way better websites.

So, we’re aggregating all of this content churned out by various communities around Richmond. We handle that content in two ways. First, everything gets dumped into Literally Etc. Because, guys, it is literally etcetera. You can browse that big long list just like you’d browse RVABlogs. Second, we allow the editors of the community blogs to “bubble up” posts to the front page of RVANews. They hand pick, each day, posts that have great fortitude and cultural significance to Richmond.

During your lunch break peep the RVANews front page to see what is hott in town.

Aggregating, we are pretty good at — we’ve got the experience. The original content, which is the other part of RVANews, is something new to us. We are far from figuring this part out. We’ve already learned, like, fifty things in the past twelve days. I’ve learned at least three more in the time it took to write this article. Here is about the only thing we are committed to at this point: paying people for content they allow us to publish. Sure our budget is non-existent, but it sucks to do stuff for free — we know. Luckily we are backed by the local mafia (jay/kay?).

The process of growing will be slow so we can collect your feedback along the way. Ha! Just kidding, we are going to learn pretty quick and unless you are a Rhodes scholar there is a good chance we won’t care what you say.

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