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Virginia Business 20th
Anniversary
Reaching a milestone
Virginia Business marks 20 years as an observer of
people and trends
by Paula
Squires
Managing Editor, Virginia Business
March 2006 What do port director Bobby Bray, Gov. Tim Kaine and
billionaire Sheila C. Johnson have in common? They
all appeared on the cover of Virginia Business magazine.
During its 20 years of publication, the covers of this
statewide magazine have borne witness to the personalities
and profound changes in Virginia’s business community.
In this special issue, the magazine looks at the people
and events that have changed Virginia from a state
known primarily for growing tobacco and making cigarettes
to a place where innovative businesses thrive amid
a growing emphasis on technology. Across 15 pages,
Virginia Business celebrates a two-decade milestone
with a retrospective on the trends, politics and leaders
that have transformed the business landscape. In addition,
a four-page foldout section provides a timeline of
selected covers and headlines for a quick primer on
the evolution of events.
In looking back, one can’t help but notice how
some things change and others stay the same. When the
magazine began in 1986, Jerry Baliles was governor,
and his top priority was doing something about Virginia’s
clogged highways. He didn’t want congestion to
scare away economic development. For Kaine, there’s
no escaping a strong sense of déjà vu
as his administration takes on the same problem.
In the mid-1980s, regional business
publications were taking off. Virginia Business got
its start after two
vice presidents at Richmond-based Media General brainstormed
on ways they might broaden the company’s reach. “I
said to Jim Linen, ‘Why don’t we find some
way to extend the imprimatur of Media General on something
statewide?” recalls J. Stewart Bryan III, Media
General’s chairman of the board.
In 1985, Bryan was Media General’s vice chairman
and publisher of the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the
Richmond News Leader; Linen (now deceased) served as
an executive vice president. “We looked at having
a lifestyles magazine, but a competitor already had
one,” says Bryan. Then Vice President James L.
Dillon proposed a statewide business-to-business magazine
that would target a selected niche of readers, namely
CEOs and top corporate officers. Several magazines
with similar business models already were in print,
including Florida Trend, Business North Carolina and,
closer to home, Regardie’s, a fat publication
whose profiles on Washington, D.C.’s rich and
powerful business leaders were eagerly devoured by
the Beltway crowd.
With Dillon on board as publisher,
Media General moved ahead. Virginia Business’ first editor, Jim Bacon,
remembers sleepless nights and a contagious camaraderie
among a mostly young staff. “I would dream about
it almost every night,” he recalls. “It
was so intense … putting together a staff, putting
out the issue.”
In the early days, says Bacon, “Dillon pretty
much had an open check book.” The magazine hired
a staff of writers and advertising sales reps. “We
threw big launch parties, and we made a big splash,” says
Bacon. The first issue debuted in March 1986. The four-color,
glossy book offered 84 pages of what Dillon described
in his publisher’s column as “balanced
coverage on the issues, personalities and trends that
affect business in the state. . . . We will give special
emphasis to banking and finance, the industry which
above all others ties the state together. . .” While the magazine’s mission remains the same — to
be Virginia’s premier business publication — the
state’s large banks are gone, taken over mainly
by larger North Carolina financial institutions. Unlike
the banks, Virginia Business survived. This is no small
feat. Recessions and the dot-com crash wiped out advertising
revenue and brought an end to many publications.
Traditionally, Virginia has been
home to tobacco farms, coalfields, textile mills, railroads,
military bases,
peanuts and Smithfield ham. While some of these mainstay
industries withered during the last 20 years, other
longstanding Virginia companies changed and flourished.
Smithfield Foods, for instance, is now the world’s
largest pork processor and hog producer with subsidiaries
as far away as Poland and Romania and sales revenue
last year of $11 billion.
It seems ironic that Virginia Business’ first
cover featured Bob Claytor, chairman of Norfolk Southern
Corp. Just last month, Forbes magazine profiled Norfolk
Southern’s new chairman and CEO, Charles W. “Wick” Moorman,
the former president of the company’s telecommunications
and IT groups. These areas are critical in today’s
Internet age, and Moorman’s rise is credited
in part to streamlining the railroad’s transit
systems.
Over the years, Virginia Business
has documented business trends, company struggles (“America Online: You’ve
got trouble!” — from the April 2002 cover)
and the rise of innovative companies such as AOL, Capital
One Financial Corp. and CarMax Inc..
Just as these companies have adapted
to the times, Virginia Business has changed as well.
Today, the magazine
relies heavily on outsourcing. Freelancers write
most of the stories and take most of the photographs.
The
magazine’s operations also are largely computer-based,
from the exchange of information and images by e-mail
to the electronic layout of its pages.
In addition to appearing in print,
Virginia Business has an interactive Web site, which
invites readers
to vote in polls or respond to blogs. To grow, Virginia
Business is producing new products, including this
month’s first issue of Options, a supplement
that focuses on the lifestyles of Virginia executives.
From 1986 to 2006, three publishers
and four editors have shaped the magazine’s coverage.
They are, in chronological order, publishers Dillon
(who died
in 1995), Jim Bacon and Doug Forshey and editors
Bacon, Karl Rhodes, Peter Galuszka and Robert Powell.
As traditional media evolve to compete
against such “new
media” companies as Google Inc., the battle cry
at Media General is “convergence.” It refers
to the combining of several media platforms — print,
Web and television — to deliver news and information
to a wider audience. Media General today owns 25 daily
newspapers and 26 network-affiliated television stations
mostly in the Southeast. Some of the stations are linked
with newspapers serving surrounding markets. “I’d
rather put my money on the Old Media companies,” says
Bryan. “Our relationship with customers at the
local level is not something Google or Monster or Yahoo
can take away from us unless we fall down on the job.”
Virginia Business, adds Bryan, “served as our
first experiment in regionalization beyond a city.” The
experiment continues. Paula Squires is managing editor of Virginia Business.
She was one of the
magazine’s earliest freelance writers.
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