- July 3rd, 2013, 5:37 pm
#433216
Appreciate the kind words from all. The Tech beat wasn't necessarily a dream job ... it's not an easy thing to cover from 90 miles away when you have competition that lives right in town. Very difficult to break any news and be an authority on anything. Of course, we're all colleagues now and not competitors, so it's just kind of the way everything has evolved.
Who knows what will happen in the coming months? There are still a lot of pieces to move around as our company tries to figure out the best way to use all of our resources. When you have a small staff, like we do in Lynchburg, it's tough to have one of those people spending a third of his work week on the road driving to and from Blacksburg, especially when two other people within the company are doing the same job. Roanoke rightly devotes a ton of resources to Tech, since they're closer than anyone in the chain to campus. Seemed weird to have two people in town covering Tech (Bitter and Barber), then to have me jetting in and out of town, and to have Berman and McFarling coming to campus on a regular basis as well.
I'll say this, Liberty will no longer be a second-class citizen on our website. Plenty of things to work out still, but expect the InsideVTSports page to be rebranded as an InsideLUSports page. It's our Division I team in town, and we need to own it. People will go to Roanoke for its Tech coverage. People will come to us for our LU coverage. That's the way it should be. We'll still have plenty of Tech and UVa in our paper. We have to, considering the amount of alumni in the area. But we need to throw our reporting resources at the things in our backyard, so expect more and more LU coverage. The school is evolving. Our coverage should too.
I am still covering the Tech-Bama game in Atlanta, which should make for a great first weekend of football, covering LU's opener on Thursday and Tech's on Saturday. Can't beat that for a work assignment.
- By Dalegarz1