When I was introduced as the executive director of Charlottesville Tomorrow in 2018, my bio noted that I was a fifth-generation newsman, a reference to the fact that my grandfather’s grandfather covered the Scopes trial for a Mississippi newspaper and that each of the men in following generations spent time working in the news publishing business.
As poetic as that may sound as an introduction, the more important legacy to me was the fact that I had grown up in Washington D.C. where both of my parents worked for newspapers, my father at the Washington Post and my mother at the Washington Star and, later, for the Times of London as D.C. correspondent.
The first step to creating our shared future is imagining it.
For Charlottesville Tomorrow’s 20th anniversary, we are inviting central Virginians to share their visions for the next 20 years.
All that family history had, in a sense, led me to journalism later in life for my own Gen X reasons. Small town newspapers were a way to make a living while I searched for the soul of America. I felt like news was a calling for me, something in my blood, honest work for a seeker. News, in that sense, was spiritual rather than professional for me, and it provided a throughline to the past, both my family’s and the country’s, that could help me make sense of it all.
Things have changed so much so fast that now that it is Charlottesville Tomorrow’s 20th anniversary, when I think about where I hope local news will be in the next 20 years, it is hard to know where to start.
Back at the beginning, I guess. News in the United States of America, the Fourth Estate, was written into the life of the country in its constitution as a legacy of revolution, a means of moving the masses to action, occupying an archetypal role in the new republic as the voice of the people.
My family newspaper history in the South afforded me an understanding that newspapers have also played an important role in racial oppression and that their businesses bend them toward money and power — even if their purpose tilts them towards truth. Like so many of our institutions, the news business has been both a poison and an antidote.
I guess that was part of the draw for me: Fixing something broken, holding the line. I believed it required moral people driven by collective values to make sure news tilted in the right direction. I still believe that and I’m grateful for the Charlottesville Tomorrow team for holding that line.
One thing I shared with my parents was the basic fact that the news business was still built on newspapers when I started. News was the content, ostensibly verified facts supporting a verifiable narrative reinforced by verified sources. Paper was the medium.
In my first job as a full-time reporter, I worked at a daily newspaper in Wisconsin with its own printing press in a town with a paper mill across the river. I could walk into the back at the end of a shift and watch the next day’s stories roll off. When I arrived in Charlottesville in 2011 to take over as editor of the C-VILLE Weekly, the paper consisted of 72 pages, two-thirds of them filled with local printed ads.
If there is anything I can say in retrospect to make sense of the way it all went away, it’s not that no one could have been prepared for the digital revolution — though that may have been true. It’s that newspapers and the news business had been so intricately connected to local and regional economies of information and finance for a century that the erosion of local and regional power in my lifetime meant they would die anyway. That, in essence, is why Charlottesville Tomorrow was founded in 2005, an acorn planted with future generations in mind.
What do I hope Charlottesville Tomorrow will look like in 20 years? The same tree, mature, its canopy providing shade and witness for many more people, its roots deep in the ground.
—Giles Morris, who served as executive director of Charlottesville Tomorrow from 2018 to 2023.
These days, content is the news and the medium is a screen. Economies, identities, even local politics are global. We gather the information nutrients required to navigate the modern world from the revolving buffet the algorithms serve, editing truth from our own realities, and assembling a composite that situates us in the context we choose. At a time in which it makes sense to question everything and in which there is nothing solid and definable in the term news business, where do we go?
We created Charlottesville Inclusive Media in 2020 because we had a belief that to build a community news organization in a segregated news landscape was to build on sand. In a sense, we transplanted our little tree into better soil. The forces we were up against were so big that the only plan was to get together and start working, to listen to each other, and to make something we had never seen before. We hoped the tree would one day grow big, provide shade and witness for decades to come.
Today, Charlottesville Tomorrow still occupies the eternal space of argument between the people and power, like speakers in the Roman Forum. It’s a crowded and noisy space and, as in Cicero’s time, the lawyers and the senators and the families of wealth have the most power. The people only have power if they move together. Time has proven that the people move in coalitions, and the building blocks of coalitions are communities of trust.
What can we do? What we have been doing: invest in shared truth, local power, collective values. Believe that the antidote to misinformation is trust. Understand that, even in a global world in which we don’t know our neighbors, the fabric of our lives is always the people we know and the place we live.
We are living in a time of tremendous change, of polarization and fragmentation, of crisis. It’s an opportunity to build something strong that will survive and continue to grow. What do I hope Charlottesville Tomorrow will look like in 20 years? The same tree, mature, its canopy providing shade and witness for many more people, its roots deep in the ground.
