Good morning, RVA: Bad news for news, flex posts, and a book festival

I need more local reporters in my life, not fewer.

Good morning, RVA! It's 49 °F, and it rained! I haven’t been outside yet this morning, but I’m just going to confidently assume that the gritty yellow coating layered atop every outdoor surface has been washed clean. The willow oaks on my street have almost dropped all of their pollen, so I think we might be close to the end of the The Pollening and ready to move on to Actual Spring! For me, that means spending an infinite amount of time on my screen porch. I’m stoked. As for this weekend, the weather looks decidedly springlike with highs in the 60s and a bit of a chance of rain at some point on Saturday. Enjoy!

Water cooler

Bad news at the Richmond Times-Dispatch: The Richmond Newspapers Professional Association (the labor union representing RTD reporters), says Lee Enterprises laid off three “top editors” yesterday. According to former RTD reporter Kenya Hunter, one of those was Lisa Vernon Sparks, one of two Black opinion writers at the paper and the only Black opinion editor. Another former employee, Katy Evans, posted this ominous tweet: “@RTDNEWS staff seeking answers today after more layoffs...[they] were told @LeeEntNews ordered cuts last week, w/no biz justification. ‘I can't defend this,’ one leader said.” The RTD has lost reporters covering food, education, and housing all within the last couple of months. The current “above-the-fold” section of the front page features three stories about sports, two about weather, a story out of Hanover, and a story covering a CNBC story about the governor. In reading the paper every single day, to me, an outside observer, the last couple of months have seen a dramatic and bleak shift away from the really stellar work done over the course of 2020. It’s not just me, either. Current reporter Sabrina Moreno sums it up with this: “I’m really mourning how we had a brief moment where so many of us got a glimpse of what this paper could be, and then it collapsed within months.” You can feel whatever way you want about the RTD, but we’re undeniably a way worse town without lots of committed, supported, full-time local reporters—real reporters, not people with online newsletters having opinions!

Related, in as much as it doesn’t take a skilled editor to throw together pictures from the archive, the Richmond Times-Dispatch put together a bunch of photos of Mayo Island over the years. First, check out the header image which gives you a great view into Manchester before the last decade’s flood of apartments—looks like a totally different place. Second, I still think the City should buy the island and turn it into public space. Maybe some rich, urbanist benefactor could pay for half? Just spitballing here!

@MzFtz on Twitter has pictures of the brand new flex posts that now protect the recently revamped Brookland Parkway bike lane! With the new posts, hashed buffer, and simple signage, I think we finally have a bike lane that makes it super clear that you shouldn’t drive your car through it. We’ll see, though. Drivers: Am I right?!

Via /r/rva, a peacock wandering around the Near West End? Do we have a feral peacock population? Seems beautiful but suboptimal.

Karen Newton at Style Weekly has the details on Richmond’s first African American Book festival, which takes place this Saturday from 11:00 AM – 4:00 PM at Richmond’s Main Library (101 E. Franklin). This seems rad: “Over forty authors will be on hand selling their work, along with Books and Crannies, a Black-owned bookstore out of Martinsville, and several publishers.” Stop by, check it out, and grab a couple books for your own personal library.

This morning's longread
Is There Really Such a Thing as Low-Carbon Beef?

A clear example of Betteridge’s law of headlines: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word _no_.” However, I picked this story as today’s longread to both remind folks to quit eating beef and to be wary of any “low-carbon” marketing that may start to show up on our grocery store shelves.

Shoppers staring at a “low-carbon” sticker on a steak probably won’t know how to answer the crucial question: Compared to what? Such a label “implies that it’s lower-carbon than something else that they could pick up right there,” says Matthew Hayek, an environmental scientist at New York University. Yet a steak labeled “low-carbon” has probably sent many times more emissions into the atmosphere than just about any other protein a shopper might choose. Beef has perhaps the heaviest carbon footprint of any food. Per gram of protein, it produces about two times more emissions than lamb, six and a half times more than pork, nine times more than poultry, and 25 times more than soybeans, according to a 2018 analysis.

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