The Lookout looks ahead

Hello and happy new year, Lookouts! It’s your neighbor and editor Dave Infante, checking in from East Broad Street as this newsletter’s holiday hiatus comes to an end.

The Lookout will resume regular weekly publication next week. In the meantime, I figured I ought to reintroduce myself, highlight this publication’s progress thus far, and lay out a little bit of my vision for in 2025.

👋 Meet your editor

You already know my name (unless you skipped the paragraph above, in which case: Dave Infante.) I’m a longtime journalist who covers the beverage-alcohol industry nationally for a publication called VinePair, as well as my independent newsletter about drinking in America, Fingers. I moved to Church Hill with my wife in 2022. We live near Chimborazo Playground.

My email is [email protected]. Get in touch whenever you want. I’d love to hear from you!

If you’re on Bluesky (a popular alternative to the platform formerly known as Twitter), feel free to follow me at @dinfontay.bsky.social. I post a lot about the booze business (obviously), but also about Richmond, and everything in between.

📈 Chart The Lookout’s growth

Since sending the first edition of The Lookout on November 15, 2024, some 230 readers have signed up to read news and views from Richmond’s East End. I didn’t know whether there would be any appetite for this project, so that growth was nice to see—particularly since the only real promotion I’ve done is staple some flyers up around the neighborhood. Welcome to all the newcomers who have joined up, I’m glad to have you. If you want to help The Lookout grow, please tell your friends and neighbors to subscribe, it’s free:

Big thanks to the folks that have posted links to The Lookout on social media, and to the good folks at The Richmonder—the city’s new nonprofit newsroom, which I heartily endorse—for highlighting my coverage on Flock Safety and the Teamsters’ Amazon strike in their newsletter in late December. I’m a paying supporter of The Richmonder, and I encourage you to consider becoming one, too. Local news is a tough business. At the risk of coming off too self-serving, I firmly believe the more journalists we can keep on the local beat in Richmond, the better Richmond can be.

One more thanks: to Riverbend Roastery and The Hill Cafe, for letting me post flyers for The Lookout within their premises. If you’re a business owner who’d let me do likewise at your place of business, respond to this email, wouldja? I’ll run one over, along with a big “thank you.”

👀 Dig the vision for 2025

Of all the feedback I’ve gotten from our neighbors about The Lookout in its brief time in publication, the most consistent response has been something along the lines of: “I love/miss Church Hill People’s News, this neighborhood needs something to take its place.” This is high praise, at least from what I can tell. The publication predated my time in Richmond, but it seems to have filled a real niche in the local news landscape during its decade and a half run. (It appears to have stopped publishing in 2021, for reasons I do not know.)

I can’t promise that The Lookout will be “the new CHPN.” To the credit of its editor(s?), it had its own editorial voice and vision that I doubt I’d be able to replicate even if I wanted to. But some of the tenets that CHPN seems to have stood for—approachable, accessible community news that helps readers understand their neighborhood and their neighbors—certainly inform The Lookout as well. I hope to live up to its legacy.

That’s a nice sentiment, Dave, you might be thinking, but how about some specifics? Sure, yes, right. In 2025, my goals for The Lookout are as follows:

• Maintain a weekly publishing schedule. I’ve been publishing on Fridays, and while I may experiment with publishing on other days, I’ll be in your inbox every calendar week unless otherwise stated. There’s so much happening in Church Hill that I could probably publish more frequently, and I may if the situation calls for it. But the baseline is and will be weekly.

• Stay focused on the neighborhood. I don’t have the resources or time to compete with the Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Richmonder, etc. on stories that are shaping the city as a whole, and frankly, I’m not keen to try. I may occasionally stray outside the boundaries of Church Hill proper if there’s a story unfolding (like the Amazon strike, which took me out to Henrico) that I feel strongly about covering, but for the most part, The Lookout will—and considering I’m a one-man band, must—stick pretty close to home.

• Introduce more recurring features. I’m having a blast publishing Possum Poetry and A Very CHill photo each week, and have ambitions for other regular items in 2025. At least one will focus on eating and drinking in Church Hill, because I do a whole lotta that, but I’m toying with some other community-oriented concepts too, and I’m excited to develop them for your reading pleasure.

• Grow a neighborhood readership that wants to read. With respect to my colleagues in radio and TV journalism (both of which I’ve dabbled in and enjoyed in the past!), The Lookout is committed to the written word. I don’t anticipate creating a TikTok account for this project; maybe not even an Instagram, either. I use those platforms in other aspects of my work, and they have their own editorial benefits (and detriments, I should add.) But I like writing, I believe in it as a journalistic medium, and—crucially—it’s about as low-overhead as it gets. I hope you feel likewise.

• Do more original reporting. Writing commentary is fairly easy. (This took me 20 minutes, for example, and I had a lot of fun writing it!) Producing reportage is not as easy, which is why fewer and fewer publications seem to do it. I consider reporting—the act of calling people up and writing down wha they say, basically—to be of vital importance to both the function of a community, and to the practice of writing commentary, too. (Irony!) If there’s stuff going on in Church Hill that you think a reporter ought to look into, or if you know about some documents relevant to the neighborhood that you think I should FOIA for, I hope you’ll get in touch: [email protected]. I can’t promise I’ll file a story based on your tip, but I can promise I’ll take it seriously.

Here’s something I hope you’ll take seriously. Publishing anything worth reading requires time and money. Right now, I’m writing The Lookout on nights and weekends, and covering associated costs out of my own pocket. I won’t be able to do that forever, due to the unfortunate realities of having to pay for housing and food and stuff. This year, if things go according to plan, I’ll ask you to kick in some cash to help me fund my work. If The Lookout can generate modest revenue, I can spend more time on it, and you will get more out of it: more original neighborhood reporting, more FOIAs, maybe even paid contributors here and there… who knows! But money makes the world go ‘round, and Church Hill is part of the world, so eventually, I’m gonna need some.

The good news is I’m not asking you for money today. In fact, I’m not asking you for anything, besides sharing The Lookout with your friends and neighbors and encouraging them to sign up:

That’s all for now. Regular publishing resumes next week. See you then!