“That means we don’t have to go on the dole to get the news,” claimed co-founder Buford, who passed away in 1995, in a 1982 interview.
Somewhat irreverent and politically leftist, the Mercury editors called their process “outsider journalism,” meaning they were willing to offend if necessary to get the story.
MERCURY RISING FREE
They conducted a marketing survey that showed the environment was conducive to a news tabloid and presented (what they believed to be) a solid business plan, with salaried employees, and a projected weekly press run of 10,000 to 20,000 free copies. founders Sydney and Frances Lewis, with a prototype issue that, according to Epps, they put together at the Harvard Crimson offices. Slipek had been editor-in-chief of The Commonwealth Times at Virginia Commonwealth University he would later become a senior contributing writer at Style Weekly.īefore its September launch, the Mercury lured investors, including Best Products Co. “The newsroom was always abuzz with the energy of a collection of independent, smart, confident, young and passionate journalists with a take-no-prisoners focus,” remembers Edwin Slipek, a contributing writer, as well as art and architecture critic for The Mercury from 1973 to 1975. was a contributing writer and art and architecture critic for The Richmond Mercury from 1973 to 1975. Mencken’s 1920s-era humor and commentary magazine, The American Mercury. The Mercury, in marked contrast, was founded by Ivy League journalism graduates looking not to reject or even replace the mainstream media, but to fearlessly augment it with a “more adventuresome kind of writing, real in-depth, investigative reporting,” according to co-founder Epps, now the legal affairs editor at The Washington Monthly.Įpps explains that their publishing models were the Boston Phoenix and the Cambridge-based, The Real Paper, two wildly successful alternative weeklies. The two differed in that the Chronicle, with its volunteer army of offbeat amateur writers and artists, espoused the underground ethos through rejection of the establishment.
The Mercury initially suffered an image problem as Richmonders perceived it as just another ‘underground’ paper when it arrived less than a year after the folding of the more radical Richmond Chronicle, which was published from 1969 to 1971. Richmond in the early 1970s – like the rest of America – still faces a struggle for social and economic justice … The split between the races needs to be healed and Richmond’s large black population must be given the opportunities in education, business and society that have been denied to them for so long.” In an early issue, a letter from the editors noted: “After our collegiate years, we were left with a shared belief that Richmond was a good place to live and the common hope that we might keep it that way, perhaps make it a little better. “We had a great town to work in, with larger-than-life personalities and a facade of gentility and political etiquette covering an underworld of cut-throat, back-room politics and race hatred.” “We had strong goals, a clear target, and a wonderful antagonist in the complacent Richmond dailies,” recalled Glenn Frankel, who worked as a writer from 1973-1975, and would later win a Pulitzer for international reporting with The Washington Post. So in September of that year, Garrett Epps, Frank Rich, Rob Buford IV, Lynn Darling, Charles Hite, Harry Stein, photographer Joyce Heard, production manager Peter Galassi, and staff artist Bill Nelson partnered with publisher Edmund Rennolds III to launch the weekly tabloid, The Richmond Mercury, as a counterpoint to the two assertive daily papers. In 1972, the radically conservative Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Richmond News Leader, and the virulent segregationist reputation they had championed on their editorial pages dominated Central Virginia’s print media landscape.Īware of this dominance, a group of Harvard and University of Virginia-educated Richmond natives became convinced the city could benefit from another voice.
0 kommentar(er)
