The podcast edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement marks the end of the workweek for the devoted staff at Town Crier Productions and the beginning of the next one. The mission is to write as much as possible and to always strive to capture more. The podcast edition reaches about a tenth of the audience for the written version. From a production standpoint, they’re the same thing - stories about the community that may help you understand some of the shifting dynamics. I’m Sean Tubbs, and I’m glad to be able to bring this information to you.
On this edition:
Inaugural director of Manning Institute of Biotechnology shares vision with UVA Board (learn more)
UVA surpasses $6 billion in major fundraising campaign (learn more)
Charlottesville Planning Commission briefed on forthcoming updates to zoning code (learn more)
UVA provides update on construction projects to Charlottesville Planning Commission (learn more)
City parks and recreation put garden plot term limits on hold (learn more)
Albemarle County Supervisors get briefings on the cost of county services as well as economic development (stories come out on Monday)
Soul-searching Saturday
There are no shout-outs in the print edition but I’ll take this Saturday afternoon to write up the current state of that form of public announcements. I’ve strived to be transparent with how my company makes revenue.
Prior to launching this newsletter on July 13, 2020, I launched a Patreon account for people who wanted to provide seed money for the overall venture. I did not know how I would distribute the work. At the time, my work consisted of a podcast called the Charlottesville Quarantine Report.
That went out through Simplecast, and I still pay $15 a month to host the work until I can figure out a more permanent place for it to live. I think it is a valuable archive of a time in history. If you want to hear one, go back and listen to the June 8, 2020 edition which gave an update on what local government was doing.
Producing that program made me want to move forward with this newsletter, which was a podcast for almost all of the first 700 editions. These were very short in nature at first but expanded over time as I got used to doing the work.
If you look at the print version of the July 13, 2020 edition, there is no shout-out. There are also no pictures. No headlines. It’s literally a radio script. If you take a listen, you’ll hear a shout-out to Rapture. I put that in as a placeholder as I spent some time in public radio and wanted to do something. At the time, the place had reopened under COVID rules and it was where I spent time away from home.
In the July 15, 2020 edition, I noted that Mead Oriental Rugs was supporting the show in both the print and the written versions. I’m friends with the owner. There was no money exchanged.
In the fourth version, College Inn was a shout-out. One of the owners let me do this and I don’t remember if we had any sort of an arrangement or not. They’re now gone.
This continued for those first few weeks with me adding in others here and there, even promoting the Charlottesville Podcasting Network. That’s the site I created in 2005 as an experiment in audio distribution.
By the 14th edition of the newsletter, I began to implement something from the Patreon world. For most of the time of the site, if you paid $25 a month through Patreon, you’d get a certain number of “shout-outs” in the newsletter. I began to track these, as there were many people willing to support the work.
And so on. Now we’re up to 879 editions of the regular newsletter, and over 315 editions of the Week Ahead newsletter. All produced by one person. However, the business has grown incrementally, and there is now much in the shout-out system that needs to be fixed.
I’m hoping to do that over the course of the year. I’m no longer taking any new requests under the old system but I have two paid advertisers who are going to work with me as I begin to put the new system in place. This will be a mixture of message here in Substack, banner ads on Information Charlottesville, as well as mentions in the podcast.
The shout-out will continue and the new policy will contain some way of getting public service announcements. There are thousands of you reading this newsletter and I suspect that number will grow as more people learn.
Now I need to get going because the next set of stories beckon. Thank you for reading to this point if you did. If you didn’t read to this point, please know I’m waving at you and saying hello anyway.
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