Left of Center: Is Charlottesville Media Doomed?

News media across the country are collapsing. After recent staff cuts, furloughs and the shutdown of local printing for the Daily Progress, will Media General be doing more downsizing? Can we support four TV stations? Two weeklies? Will blogs replace all of them? What about the partnership between the non-profit Charlottesville Tomorrow and the Daily Progress, being watched nationally as a possible future model for local news?

That topic was the subject of a Left of Center forum jointly sponsored with cvillenews.com. The event is moderated by site founder Waldo Jaquith.

University of Virginia media studies professor Bruce Williams began with a historical overview of how changing “media regimes” in the U.S. have impacted political communication and civil society, and how the recent ‘broadcast era’ may have been an anomaly in the larger sweep of American history.

Then the event continues with a panel discussion with Charlottesville Tomorrow’s Sean Tubbs, Daily Progress assistant city editor Josh Barney, and Hook editor Hawes Spencer, with moderator Waldo Jaquith, editor of cvillenews.com and Left of Center steering committee member.

Piedmont Council of the Arts holds Creative Conversation on “Marketing Charlottesville as a Creative Community”

Maggie Guggenheimer (standing) leads the PCA's second Creative Conversation
Source: Piedmont Council of the Arts

Is Charlottesville doing enough to market itself as a regional destination for patrons of the arts? What else can be done to ensure that the visual, performing and literary arts not only survive, but thrive? Those are just a couple of the questions explored during the second Creative Conversation organized by the Piedmont Council of the Arts.

Representatives of various groups were invited to Charlottesville’s CitySpace meeting room on the Downtown Mall to discuss the topic “Marketing Charlottesville as a Creative Community.” The event was held on January 13, 2009 in the City Space Meeting Room at the Charlottesville Community Design Center. We’ve condensed the two hour discussion into a 45 minute podcast.

The participants were: