Change Agents

Richmond came out with the “Richmond Real” [branding campaign], spent a lot of money on a name. We’re Greater Richmond. We’re not Richmond Real, or anything like that, and we need to be promoting ourselves more as Greater Richmond, not as three [localities].

I think we need to go back to a city manager form of government.

We’ve tried the mayoral form of government, but we need experts running our city, not politicians. I think that we need to have our city council members pick the school board members so that they don’t have so much political stuff going on with the school board. It’s about policy, not about politics.

purpose of finding those interns, art students who could come in. We were doing hot type, pasting it up, running proofs around town …

The first few years, Throttle and Commonwealth Times were merciless – and funny. One time, they wrote how “we walked softly and carried a big calendar,” which I thought was appropriate and funny. They took our free papers and made a trash pile out of it by a dumpster. We got the point. We didn’t care that much, because those papers weren’t read much outside of campus. [They probably didn’t like us] because we were doing mother/daughter issues and a lot of fashion stories, which was part of why we were successful … It wasn’t all that different from how Instagram is now.

Maybe the best decision I made was to hire Garrett Epps, one of the founders of the Virginia Mercury, to write my back pages every other week; the other week would be Hal Crowther, who was writing for Newsweek and married to [author] Lee Smith. This was the beginning of us trying to establish a voice and a point of view. Eventually we started inviting other people and the back page was a forum for ideas that weren’t being covered anywhere else. The voice was more liberal, but it was also hip and fearless. We were willing to talk about gay issues, AIDS, [we ran] gay personals, we accepted different sexualities in the world. We were interested in diversity in a way that nobody had been in Richmond.

One of our very first cover stories was on Mike Morchower, the infamous bad boy defense attorney who hung out with Harry Thalhimer. They were making moves and Carol [A.O. Wolf] did a wonderful, real cover story feature. It took off and changed everything – the next cover we did was Pam Reynolds. We were the first publication in town to begin doing the Best Of issues; we started Richmonder of the Year – and we invented You’re Very Richmond If – which started out as a joke while we were having a drink somewhere or something [laughs] …

Landmark would end up buying the Weather Channel, then all of the sudden they didn’t care much about us at all. They left Style alone until the last two years, when I had five bosses … [Pretty soon] I didn’t want to participate any longer. I had daughters and a family and a big life and wanted to pay attention to that … When I left, we were at almost $3 million dollars gross revenue and around 25-30 regular employees. We had six or seven ad reps, a bunch of designers. It was the most exciting, thrilling enterprise because for some reason, everyone who came to work there seemed to get it.

Sue Robinson Sain

FREELANCE REPORTER, ARTS EDITOR, MANAGING EDITOR: 1987-1991

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: 1992-1995

Lorna met with me and I came on staff part-time. We were in the red building at the corner of Harrison and Franklin, 100 West Franklin St. It was a crazy building, a ridiculous layout. The newsroom was in one basement that you went down a tiny spiral staircase to get to, and the composing room was in the total opposite end of the building in the basement. It was like a garage band in a way … We had IBM Selectric typewriters and freelancers brought in hard copies. We had a typesetter who typed it all in. So it was a proofing nightmare. It was really like the wild wild west ….

I edited the arts and at that time the paper was growing like topsy. We had issues that were typically over 80 pages and we had a lot of special sections. It was a heyday period for alternative weeklies nationally. Just about every town had one in the late ‘80s. It was a very successful time for these kinds of weeklies, so that was exciting …

One thing that Style used to do very well back then was profiles. These were sometimes nauseatingly long profiles, 2,500-5,000 words. But they gave you a picture of the person behind the headlines. We didn’t cover city council like the Times-Dispatch did, but you could read a profile of someone like Chuck Richardson and have a sense of who these lawmakers were, what kind of a difference they wanted to have in the community.

I think Style was also a bit of a gadfly. The main newspaper was very traditional, very conservative editorially, there wasn’t a lot of creativity in writing or packaging