We're all in for Floyd Times

When I retired from a 40-year newspaper career, I began planning my return to these hills of my boyhood. Stuart was my hometown, and like Floyd it had a local weekly newspaper that had published for generations. I learned early to rely on my local paper to learn about our community – sometimes essential facts, often just pleasant reading about our neighbors' farms, fishing catch, or basketball teams.

As Liz and I settled into Floyd, we found a newspaper in decline, surviving under new and distant corporate owners but carrying less and less news that was actually about the county.  Now I'm working with other Floyd folks to fill the information gap with a startup, Floyd Times.  We're online so far and hope to go to print weekly.

Won't you help me make it succeed?

With your help, Floyd Times aims to be the friend you count on to find out what's happening in and around our piece of the Blue Ridge hills. Editor Abby Whitt writes most of the news, and gets help from independent writers and the announcements sent in by local organizations.  There's so much more to cover, if only we had the resources.

We are nonprofit and nonpartisan, aiming to serve everybody who lives, works, or visits in this unique and beautiful county.  

We do have advertisers (Thank you kindly!) and paying subscribers (We love you!), but if we are to keep working for you, and bringing a complete and timely report every week, we need donations as well. 

If you give between now and noon on June 25, your gift puts us in the running for challenge grants from the Community Foundation for the New River Valley, which sponsors Give Local NRV.  You can use this link to donate through Give Local, or you can mail a check to Floyd Times, P.O. Box 9, Floyd VA 24091.  

A good newspaper is an essential community asset.  It helps us know and understand our neighbors, and stay current on things that may affect our lives.  For most Americans, it's the only way to keep an eye on how the local government works for us – or lets us down..

For a century or more, American newspapers thrived because they had little competition as either an advertising space or a source of information.  That's not so anymore.  The computer age offers advertisers unbounded platforms to hawk their goods or services. Ad rates have fallen until it's harder to pay for gathering and distributing the news.  The industry is turning to a nonprofit business model, especially in small communities like ours.  

Floyd Times was launched last August and very soon was granted 501(c)(3) status as a not-for-profit operation.  That means that if you deduct charitable giving when you file income taxes, you can include your gift to Floyd Times.    Won't you help us with a donation, the best you can manage, during this month's Give Local NRV campaign?  We'd sure appreciate it!