We all know my home town of Richmond is a pretty conservative place — perhaps even a stodgy one. It’s an old story how we lost our status as the leading city of the South to Atlanta, Charlotte and Raleigh. But things are changing. The economy continues to reinvent itself at a furious pace — a phenomenon that I’m able to observe at close quarters now that I’m publishing R’Biz, the Richmond.com business channel.
As a sign of the times, the Richmond business community has given rise to two Initial Public Offerings in the past week. The first, Colfax Corp., is a $500 million-a-year company launched about a decade ago that is rolling up the global pipes and valves industry. Not sexy, but very, very profitable. On the sexy side, the second company, SouthPeak Interactive, is a global distributor and publisher of video games.
It wasn’t long ago, that the greatest claim to fame Richmond could boast of as a center of cultural influence was festival flags. The practice of hanging those colorful festival flags over your front door originated right here in River City. Yeah, I know…. big whoop.
Here’s something a little more cutting edge. It appears that the Richmond region is a hotbed of community blogging. Stephanie Brummell at Richmond.com quotes Jeff South, associate Professor in the School of Mass Communication at Virginia Commonwealth University as an authority:
South was in the midst of listening to a presentation on participatory media during “Media Re:Public” a conference convened by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society when he learned that Richmond “by far and away … ranked No. 1 for citizen journalism Web sites.”
Sixteen citizen journalism Web sites exist in Richmond, including Rea’s Fan District Hub, Richmond community blog pioneer John Murden’s Church Hill People’s News, Hills & Heights¸ RiverCityRapids¸ Petersburg People’s News, River District News and that of the Richmond community site aggregator, RVANews, headed up by Ross
Catrow.
Richmond a center of community blogging? How did that happen? It’s a combination of two phenomenon, I would argue. First, the region is more tech-savvy than people commonly realize. We may not be creating new technology on a large scale, but successful Richmond businesses have gained competitive advantage by applying technology to traditional industries. (Capital One, which originated in Richmond before moving its H.Q. to NoVa, used technology to introduce disruptive change to the credit card industry.) Secondly, Richmonders truly are passionate about their community. They care what’s happening.
Combine technology and community passion, and you get blogs.