Located in the southwest region of Virginia known as the New River Valley, the Blacksburg-Christiansburg-Radford metro area is one of the fastest-growing sections in the state. Unemployment peaked in 2009 at 9.6 percent and has since fallen by a third to 6.3 percent. Virtually all of the metro's growth last year came from services: 2,000 new jobs in the private sector and 1,600 in the public sector (mostly state government positions). That's not surprising given the presence of Virginia Tech, the region's biggest employer, which dominates the community of Blacksburg. Radford, too, is something of a college town with Radford University. Christiansburg, which lies between the two larger communities, is a tourist destination with a vibrant shopping scene and historic downtown.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
