The good thing about not posting anything about reporter Chris Dovi's departure from Style Weekly until now is that other, smarter people have commented, opined, editorialized and reported on the situation. And more facts have emerged, though most of them are put forward by individuals whose own perspectives on what happened are undoubtedly clouded by emotion and self-interest.
The background is as complex as the story. Chris Dovi has been reporting news around Richmond for years, and has been widely praised and cursed for his dogged – and often stinging – reporting during his tenure at Style Weekly. Jon Newman of the local PR firm The Hodges Partnership provides a succinct snapshot of why Dovi is no longer at Style:
Style Weekly reporter Chris Dovi, who has history of being a champion of the disabled was fired, by his employer for in an email calling a blind motivational speaker “a blind fucker.” A Norfolk-based PR firm was pitching Dovi on an upcoming Richmond event featuring the speaker. Dovi, who felt the PR firm was being over zealous in the pitching, wrote an email that he thought he was sending to his editor expressing frustration with being hounded by the PR firm. He included the unfortunate language about the client in the email. He then mistakenly sent the email to the PR firm instead of his editor.
But the new first broke yesterday with a brief piece in the Times-Dispatch and an in-depth video report by Mark Holmberg, a friend and former colleague of Dovi's who now reports for WTVR-TV6.
The most humorous piece of commentary? A single photo at Tobacco Avenue captioned, "Style Weekly Rolls Out New Redesign." A thousand words, shown above.
But it was the Norfolk-based PR firm that took the cake – first, by putting out the press release about Dovi's email that triggered the minor avalanche of news stories (and possibly Dovi's termination from Style), and then by blogging about it on their own website. As a commenter in the TD story notes, the Goldman and Associates' blog included their perspective on the situation, a portion of Dovi's email and a slew of comments, including one from Dovi himself. One benefit of being a PR firm, apparently, is that you can pull posts from your weblog without worrying about the consequences. Especially when the consequences of having the post up in the first place resulted in some harsh feedback. (Here's the now-dead link to the now-nonexistent blog post.)
The good news is that even the best PR gambit apparently can't outgun Google. Someone at the new Rehire Chris Dovi Facebook page directed readers to three links of the cached conversation – the original Goldman and Associates' blog post with the first 10 comments, comments 11-13 (including Dovi's) and the last comments before it was pulled.
In the end, it's a bit of a tragedy for everyone. Dovi is a classic, shoe-leather reporter who wears his heart on his sleeve, and he's out of work in a town filled with unemployed and underemployed former reporters. Style has lost one of their hands-down most dependable work horses. Goldman and Associates' have given themselves a black eye by trying to play this situation for the benefit of their client. And the blind motivational speaker's going to get coverage because of the Dovi angle, not because of anything inspirational he has to say.
Those of us interested in good reporting, interesting stories and journalism that pushes accountability in a town with a tendency to ignore the word when the chips are down... well, we've just lost a voice.
(Quick update: Richmond Good Life has links to all of the above, plus plenty of other news and blogger coverage of this story – including Style's brief response and the string of comments it elicited.)
