Cardinal Just Flew Past the Newspaper

This past weekend, with a loud THUD! Cardinal News, the Roanoke-based online news publication,  announced that the NEW in NEWS has changed for good. Cardinal swept almost every major award in its category at the Virginia Press Association's annual Pat-on-the-Back-Athon and, in doing so, embarrassed the bejabbers out of traditional media. 

The publication earned 50 awards, many of them first-place citations, including, for the second straight year, the Young Journalist of the Year. That means a bench is being built to go with the veterans who also turn out fascinating copy.

Cardinal is still in the process of inventing itself, even though it is a relative baby in an industry that simply had to change because people's reading habits have changed and advertisers have kept up with that change better than print journalism has. Daily newspapers are like coal, fading fast and barely alive.

Of course, it is important--vital--that this upcoming news source is so strong, but Cardinal also showed that a superior advertising executive, working virtually alone, can make all the difference in the world if she is smart, creative, affecting, energetic and ambitious. Sherry Quinley is all of that and considerably more.

Cardinal is even showing how partnerships work with its link to Public Radio. They trade notices and a Public Radio reporter interviews on a frequent basis. a Cardinal reporter about an in-depth story that reporter has written. That's not new, but it has never been done so well with notable Fred Echols asking good questions of the Cardinal reporters.

It is all working against the dailies and for the public. Congratulations, Cardinal. And let me also congratulate my good friend Dan Casey for his daily newspaper column-writing award (he is the best in Virginia), and Laurence Hammack, a superb, veteran Roanoke Times reporter.