Former Editor Mourns the Rebirth of Richmond.com

Mike Ward creates all sorts of news dissonance today. The former editor of Richmond.com who is now a columnist for Media General (new owner of Richmond.com) pens a Back Page column for Style Weekly -- about Richmond.com. It's a bit dizzying.

Ward lays out a bit of the transitional pain, and tells his version of the Richmond.com story. It's a good one, though disappointingly lacking in skeletons.

The day the digital ink declared that Media General had purchased Richmond.com, it felt like my vintage-T-shirt-wearing, Emo girlfriend had dumped me for the Wrangler-clad high-school quarterback. Well, maybe the back-up quarterback. OK, the long snapper.

She was wearing his varsity jacket. Holding his hand. And he was about to turn her pithy, effervescent prose into a sterling inverted pyramid of facts, figures and objectivity.

Richmond.com is not a dead, static-ridden channel yet. Craig T. Nelson isn’t throwing tennis balls at an empty homepage. It is, however, dead as independent media. Gone the way of Punchline, Inside Business and the “Mr. Belvedere” fiction newsletter I used to write and hang in Fan bar bathroom stalls.

I worked at Richmond.com two and a half times. I was an earnest college boy looking for a $20,000-a-year news-writing gig back in 2001. I quit after receiving a coupon book for a Christmas bonus, and came back a few years later to work as an arts and entertainment writer, movie critic and finally, editor.