First Drafts & Revisions: Remarks to the Princess Anne County-Virginia Beach Historical Society on its 60th anniversary

Ed. — This won’t run in the print edition, but, for those interested in such things, here is a version of my remarks to the Princess Anne County-Virginia Beach Historical Society delivered last night during a celebration of the society’s 60th anniversary. I was honored and humbled to be invited to speak during the banquet at Westminster Canterbury on Wednesday, Nov. 3. This is a written version of my speech, though I wandered a bit while speaking, as happens, so it is a bit different than what I said in the room. Please learn more about the society and its work at this link.

BY JOHN-HENRY DOUCETTE

VIRGINIA BEACH — I am a journalist, and I operate a small community newspaper called The Princess Anne Independent News, which mainly covers the southern part of Virginia Beach. We tend to specialize in agriculture and government news. As newspapers go, The Independent News is very small and unusually young. Our circulation is just over 4,000 copies every other week. We have an online presence, but our focus is the print product.

In 2015, during the passing fad of our digital age, I started a newspaper because I’d previously been working with the Navy in a training role and spending an awful lot of time at sea. I missed what I had done for most of my life, which is newspaper reporting, and I realized starting a paper still would allow me to use work to neglect my family while keeping dry.

I also saw The Virginian-Pilot, the newspaper where I used to work, falling short and gutting its staff. I figured if I wrote stories other people weren’t doing to some reasonable standard, my paper might have legs. The Princess Anne Independent News is, in a way, counterprogramming.

It turns out 2021 is not a lucrative time to be a newspaperman. That’s why I quickly agreed to speak tonight when Dr. Stephen Mansfield, historian of the society, said you would feed two members of my family. I appreciate that. I am just glad one of them is me. By the way, if any of you do not want your dessert, just raise your hand up. I will bring you some aluminum foil.

Traditional media is all but dead. Many of you understand this decline because you are news consumers and you care about local matters more than most.

I am grateful this year’s Hampton Roads State of the Region report by Old Dominion University called the lack of local journalism the crisis it is. Also, I believe I am the first person to have a marijuana joke quoted in the actual State of the Region report. That is true. I won’t repeat the joke, but it’s very funny. I urge you to seek it out. By that, I mean please seek out the report, not marijuana.

Tonight is a celebration of your collective efforts, and we are here to reinforce the notion that local historic preservation, informative programming and careful documentation is valuable. It’s fair to say I was ignorant, especially when I first started the paper, about the history of the community I try to serve as a journalist.

For generations, newspapers were the way citizens learned about local happenings. I like making a newspaper. I like ink on my hands. But journalism isn’t about paper. It’s about the capability to gather news and get it to people. That’s what we’re losing with a gutted Virginian-Pilot and the rise of essentially unchecked and chaotic disinformation online.

You have to learn a place to serve it. Now The Pilot, in the hands of a hedge fund, is buying out its reporters after a few years, before they get their feet under them and know the place.

In my role covering the city, I can try to learn. What I did not anticipate when I started the paper was the depth of our history and the many efforts of individuals and groups to document our city’s past. There are storytellers like Todd Barnes and Al Henley and the late Pastor Walt Whitehurst of Pungo, who produced largely first-person recollections, often showing change through remembrance and comparison.

There are local writers such as City Councilmember Barbara Henley, president of this society, and Edna Hawkins-Hendrix, who have recorded stories and important primary documents that speak to individuals, places and institutions in all their glory and all their failings. The act of recording how we build and evolve and, when this evolution fails, force needed change is of lasting value when we face the pressures of our unresolved issues.

And there is the work of organizations such as the Virginia African American Cultural Center and this organization, the Princess Anne County-Virginia Beach Historical Society. The genealogical work by some individuals in our communities and how that is being expanded upon today is nothing I would have known about until I lived here for a meaningful time and worked covering the community.

I also need to mention what we might call more formal works of history, including texts about our city by Dr. Mansfield and the efforts of the volume published by the city library. Histories need to meet a standard and have a discipline to them. As a writer, I know the reader does not and perhaps should not see the work behind our words. But we in this room can understand the effort behind telling a truthful story accurately and well.

Great work is your legacy as a society. It is underappreciated work, but I appreciate what you do, and I appreciate you for doing it.

I think of history as what gives us a sense of our place in time. Often, it is comparative. People are comparative by nature. As Emerson tells us, we read the books of our parents, then write our own volumes. I’m paraphrasing and amplifying his words, applying them to our moment, but that is Emerson’s point. To build a house higher, you find where it is sturdiest.

Historians help do this. They seek context and purpose and, at their best, leave our past excuses behind. Journalists, at their best, aim for this, too. We learn the points that continue to reverberate to all Americans, from the Revolution to the Civil War to segregation to civil rights to class issues to land use or land access matters to environmental stewardship to the decline of agrarian society and cultural changes to willful whitewashing of the American reality, the backsliding encouraged by powerful opportunists. This my list. We’ve all got our own lists, but these are all mile markers found along the roads we travel every day. Even the roads that should be widened because they are clogged with tourists from Pennsylvania.

I started my newspaper in the southern city because it has its own rural identity and a dominant industry, agriculture. I did not know much about Pungo beyond a kind of stereotype uptown people have of the place. I’ve worked here as a reporter and sometimes helped on a family farm in ways that probably wouldn’t hurt a city kid too bad. But my understanding was superficial. I tried to learn the place.

One of the moments I remember was at the passing a few years ago of Mr. Bud Coppedge of Pungo, who was someone I knew through family. I knew he carved and collected antique decoys because I had seen him selling them down in Currituck with his son, but I didn’t realize until his death that he had co-authored an important history of this artform as it was practiced in and around Currituck and Back Bay. Today, his son is one of the people who hosts an annual show about the vast artistry related to outdoor life right here in our community. My job is to pass this word along. To show you the people and their story. Something that is carried from one generation to the next is a story. That’s the counterprogramming journalism offers. Historians do this, too. We tell our stories.

We know our stories should be told, but there are fewer tellers. When I worked at The Virginian-Pilot, we covered the Southside with a newsroom staff numbering in the hundreds. Now, the combined Pilot and Daily Press team has a headcount in the low dozens. They cover all of Hampton Roads now. They are under corporate, not local, ownership, and over the past two years this has devastated our ability to have a baseline of informed, independent information available to citizens.

Like the decoy carvers some of us celebrate, journalists are keepers of an old craft that will be lost without experienced practitioners. There are sometimes more decoy carvers doing demonstrations at the Atlantic Wildfowl Heritage Museum at the Oceanfront than there are Virginian-Pilot reporters covering our commonwealth’s most populous city.

There is a connection between journalism and history, one you probably have heard before. Bums like me, the journalists, write the first draft of history and you guys punch it up until it’s sexy enough to confuse a school board candidate trying to appeal to suburban voters. I may be shaky on the wording. Now first drafts of history are never perfect. But they are needed.

Because The Pilot is diminished, I have felt pressure to cover stories a larger newspaper would traditionally write. Over the past year, as our local voting system was challenged in federal court and changed in Richmond, major media outlets ran few stories with little context about these processes which will radically alter how Virginia Beach citizens are represented. This year, I made a decision to direct my limited resources to providing coverage of this issue. We are in a historic moment for Virginia Beach, and the people have little understanding of this because the press is failing.

Also, the flood mitigation bond referendum passed yesterday. It’s a big deal. In the run up to that vote, my newspaper provided more in-depth coverage of what the referendum specifically would do, especially in the southern city, than did our regional daily newspaper and, I believe, TV news. This is not bragging. This is not a good thing. We need more.

Mrs. Henley and I had a conversation not long ago about the major media coverage of referendums in the 1990s, primarily by The Pilot. There were two votes about the council election system, two different but connected referendums, and a lot of related activity in Richmond. News coverage was robust, practically wall to wall, about what the city did, what activists wanted and what the state legislature cooked up.

Whether you agree with those outcomes is a side matter. What I’m talking about is there was real public discourse, and journalists played a role in that. We have to compare that to the minimal news reporting on what is happening right now with the Virginia Beach voting system. However you feel about the court case, however you feel about the state Del. Kelly Fowler, D-21st District, bill that ended at-large voting in Virginia Beach, this is a historic time that is directly informed by how we established this city and who got what opportunities and civil rights and so forth.

The next year will change us as a city even more. History is being made. It’s 60 years in coming. But we don’t have a fully functioning local press.

Social media is not reading court records and interviewing the players. Facebook or Fox News or CNN do not give a hoot about a planning application in Kempsville, short-term rental fees or whether we vote in wards rather than districts. The lack of local news coverage is shocking if you believe the baseline of an informed society is improved by a press that covers our public affairs. We don’t have the journalism to cover the political and governmental implications of this change, let alone the valid issues of race that inform this very moment. That’s because we don’t employ enough local journalists.

What we will see over the next year is perhaps the greatest governmental change to our city and its representation since the merger that formed Virginia Beach. Who will tell that story?

The Pilot will not improve. I’m too small to scale up and replace The Pilot. My educated assessment is that a nonprofit local newsroom is the most likely, most viable vehicle for a journalism that serves our communities to some standard. But I think I’ve said enough about that. I’ll gladly linger in the parking lot if you want to follow up about anything or hand me leftover dessert.

This society and its members have a role in informing the public about the events that have led us to this point. You help preserve tangible evidence of who we were for future generations. You can maintain the legislative bills, the maps, the court records, the transcripts of testimony and personal stories. You can preserve documents and provide analysis for future generations to unpack. You can find digital means to disseminate this information in an accurate and reasonable way. I think that’s something we can all work on — improving how we use digital means to spread this information.

We can provide the counterprogramming that gives some people an educated view of community life. We can engage matters of race and sex and class openly and honestly and with clear-eyed compassion. There is a powerful force in our culture that does not value this. They have the biggest megaphone, and not everyone will find the quality information we save and share. We know that. We do it anyway because some people will find it, and they may use it to find the strongest point to build upon.

This society has for 60 years done this sort of work and supported people who are trying to do it. God willing, there are decades of work to follow. It’s a daunting and wonderful responsibility to seek truths and share them. As a scribbler whose work is subject to your eventual revision, I’m grateful to be here to remind you of how awesome you are for doing what you do.

Thank you for your time and any leftovers.

© 2021 Pungo Publishing Co., LLC