Ed. — Archived from the Sunday, Dec. 1, print edition.
BACK BAY — Jane Bloodworth Rowe, an experienced journalist and native of our city who for years has contributed stories and columns on these pages, has been the cornerstone of what I’ve tried to do with our little newspaper.
She cares about the local community and has a passion for gardening, local history and the work and craft of writing itself. You can’t fake roots. She grew up in Sigma and has contributed to a number of publications here, including The Virginia Beach Sun and The Virginian-Pilot’s sadly defunct Beacon tabloid.
Not long after The Independent News came about, she became the glue for me – dependably and accurately writing about farming, businesses and any other topic I sent her way. Importantly, she’s part of the community, and she brought story after story to this newspaper.
Many were stories that would not have been told otherwise.
“I’ve absolutely enjoyed it,” Rowe told me recently about her time writing for The Independent News. “It felt like I was part of the community, and it was a contribution I could make to the community.”
This past year, The Virginian-Pilot shuttered The Beacon, a community-focused tabloid specific to Virginia Beach. There was a time when The Pilot published tabloids for each city in South Hampton Roads, and Rowe and I discussed the days when The Beacon covered a mix of features and news stories about the city.
We’ve lost a lot of that capacity for local newsgathering. The trick of the digital age is how to replace some of the capacity while legacy publications decline. Whether that journalism runs in print is a secondary concern.
But I’ll talk more about that in the next edition, which, as many readers already know, will be our last.
For now, I want to thank the many people who have written for The Independent News over the years, from community members with no previous writing experience, college students beginning their paths in journalism, city and elected leaders to the experienced local journalists who have been kind enough to help cover the news.
Notably, Dennis Hartig, retired from a senior leadership role at The Virginian-Pilot, contributed in-depth reporting about concerns over potential development at West Neck. We would not have had that coverage in The Independent News otherwise.
Michael Kennedy picked up his pen after retiring — and quietly supporting this newspaper for years. He has contributed columns about family and daily life — even after moving from Virginia Beach.
Dr. Karen Beardslee Kwasny, formerly a member of the Planning Commission, is one of our core columnists, recently earning the newspaper’s first statewide journalism award for opinion writing. She’s written about family life, rural life and land use, among many other topics.
Glen Mason, writing feature stories and columns, brought his curiosity, journalism knowledge and enthusiasm to everything he has covered — perhaps especially when writing about food, sports and history.
Jim Roberts, a versatile writer, very kindly added to our news and feature reporting, covering local institutions and community news despite a very busy career.
J.D. “Farmer John” Wilson, who wrote about sustainable farming for many years on these pages, added perspective to our coverage of agriculture, and his work was collected two years ago into our very first — and, to date, only — book.
Even after suffering a stroke, Wilson returned to column writing. He’s my friend, and we shoot the bull from time to time, but I’m not sure I’ve ever questioned why he did that.
Of course he did, is all. Just of course. It made perfect sense.
Writing is hard, but worth doing, especially when it’s about the lives we live — our lives alone or as a community.
Rowe and I talked about the rewarding aspect of writing and reporting.
And the journalist’s struggle to take what you have gathered and craft it into a tale that is accurate and speaks to others.
“You have to actually take something and create something,” she said.
We’ve done our best to tell as many stories as we could about our city — about us — for as long as we could do it.
Next time, I’ll include some of my favorite moments from our decade covering Virginia Beach, focusing mainly on the feature stories and columns we’ve published over the years by the contributors named in this column and a few others who have graced these pages along the way.
For now, this is just one more paper about Virginia Beach, the place we have in common.
Because our stories matter.
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