www.roanoke.com

Megan Schnabel, editor

Michele Crim, designer

Annie Johnson, reporter

Michelle Skeen, editorial assistant

We have more changes to announce at The Blue Ridge Business Journal, our bi-weekly business publication.
In the recent past, we’ve relied on freelance writers, and an editor who doubles as a reporter.
Now, all that’s changing.
A few weeks ago, we announced a new editor: Megan Schnabel, a veteran metro editor for The Roanoke Times and a former business reporter here, has taken over as the journal’s full-time editor.
She joined our long-time designer, Michele Crim, as we moved the journal’s operations into The Roanoke Times newsroom to work alongside the staff of the daily newspaper.
Now, we have more staff additions to announce:
* Annie Johnson is the journal’s reporter. She most recently has been a reporter for Congressional Quarterly in Washington, covering Capitol Hill. She knows her business stuff, too. Annie has a degree in economics from the former Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg (now just Randolph College.). She also previously worked as an intern on our business team for The Roanoke Times, and later worked here as an editorial assistant before going off to D.C. We’re thrilled to have her back.
* Michelle Skeen is the journal’s editorial assistant. She’s a graduate of Virginia Tech, and has interned for the daily newspaper in Waynesboro, the News-Virginian. Michelle will be spending a lot of her time working on the Business Journal’s website, which is presently undergoing a major renovation.
We’ll have more details on that coming soon. But if you’d like to follow business developments on Twitter, you can do that now. The Business Journal has its own Twitter following at “BRBusinessJ” and on Facebook, where can you find us simply as “Blue Ridge Business Journal.”

-- Dwayne Yancey, senior editor

Attention Virginia Tech fans: There's $2,500 in a Kroger gift cards on the line in our first-ever video contest. In 60 seconds or less, tell us why you are the primo Hokie fan. Break out that camera and send us a haiku, a rhyme, a tail-gating chant, whatever. We'll post it and then invite roanoke.com readers to vote on the best. Plus the editors will pick a wild card favorite, just to mix it up. Deadline is Sept. 30. Look for the details here.

Did you see the Patrick Henry/Hidden Valley high school football opener Friday night? If you missed PH's 44-14 win, check out the video highlights on our new VarsityCast page. Look for it to be updated Friday nights with live new content.

In addition to the weekly game highlights (shot by by multimedia producer Chris Zaluski), you'll find a real-time Twitter feed with Timesland scores and a chance to predict which teams will come out on top in the 2009 season. Look for the "Varsity Forecasters" box on the lower right of the page and see how your picks compare with those of Robert

Robert Anderson, Roanoke Times preps editor

Anderson, our prep sports editor. You have until 4 p.m. Friday to enter your picks.

Have any suggestions for how we cover high school football, in print or online? Leave them here or contact Robert at robert.anderson@roanoke.com

While you're browsing that VarsityCast page, also look for video of Robert's season preview and profiles of new coaches and top players to follow.

It took us a while, but we've finally sorted through all the votes (7,800+) we got for the comics poll and we're ready to announce the results!

Check out Sunday's Extra section for the details. But what I said weeks earlier (when we had just 3,000+ votes) apparently held true -- "Gil" has lost his charm. Not so for the Patterson family, though!

We do plan on making some changes to our line up in June based on the poll results. I know we won't please all folks, but that would pretty impossible, wouldn't it?

In the meantime, check out our new online comics offering. You can read your favorite comics daily, find past strips, and build a page of your favorites to follow. And you can read "Zits" as a "motion strip," with voiceover. Though not all of our strips are offered (but perhaps that can be changed if there is a clamoring), it also features strips that we don't publish, such as "Beetle Bailey" and "Hagar the Horrible" -- both of which I know have fans in the area.

Let us know what you think of our online comics offering at comics@roanoke.com.

Rep. Tom Periello

Reporter Janelle Rucker and photographer Sam Dean spent several days last week in Washington with Rep. Tom Perriello. With the country in economic crisis, the region's freshman congressman has been busy. Read the full story -- and watch the video -- on Sunday.

There are at least two ways to look at all the lay-offs that have been announced at companies around Western Virginia lately. One is to add up the numbers and see the sobering result. The other is, well, to look at them -- plot the lay-offs on a map and see where they are and what patterns or trends emerge that way about which communities are the hardest hit.

That's what our data delivery editor, Matt Chittum, has done on The Datasphere, our online center for all kinds of data about Western Virginia. Here's his map and a blog post explaining it.

Matt also was invited to talk about it on WVTF-FM last week. Here's his interview with the Roanoke public radio station, if you'd like to take a listen:

Whenever I walk past music writer Tad Dickens' desk, the odds are he's got a set of headphones clamped to his ears. He's not always jamming out to tunes, either. More likely, he's working on a podcast -- an audio interview that you can download onto your ipod.

In the past few weeks, you've seen a series of interviews in the Extra section he's done with musicians who have been coming through the Roanoke and New River valleys -- today, it's country star Vince Gill. Last week, it was country star Jason Aldean and New Orleans piano stylist Allen Toussaint. Before that, it was bluesman Derek Trucks, country singer Crystal Gayle, Dave Matthews collaborator Tim Reynolds and, well, you get the idea.

With each of those, Tad produced not only a print story, but also a podcast.

Want to take a listen? You can find Tad's most recent podcasts here -- and the older ones cataloged here.

It's a tradition in every newsroom I've worked in that election night means one important thing -- free pizza. We've placed our large order for delivery to this newsroom tomorrow night. We expect it could be a long one, so we're taking the unusual step of bringing in extra food to feed the staffers who'll be here well after midnight producing our election coverage online and in Wednesday's jam-packed paper.

I hope you'll be following the developments during the day on roanoke.com, which has produced this handy voters guide. We have assembled a small army of reporters to report their observations all day on roanoke.com. You'll also hear their reports if you're listening to WVTF Public Radio.

Want to check in on what's happening while you're away from office or home? Pop our URL in your smart phone and you'll get the latest results wherever you are tomorrow night.

Most important of all, we want to hear from you. What was your voting experience like? E-mail news@roanoke.com or call our newsroom at (540) 981-3423.

Political buttons seem to be a thing of the past. Stickers in, actually get stuck is out.

But if I were to wear one this political season, it would be in the shape of that little blue ringed planet thingy you see right there. That's the logo for the DataSphere, our online storehouse of searchable data, which is just a fancy way of saying it's a place we have where you can look stuff up yourself.

As Tuesday's election approaches, here are eight questions you might have -- and for which we have answers right here online.

* Where do I vote? You can look it up in this database. Just type in your address, and you should get the precinct you're in. (Keep in mind -- that doesn't show you're registered to vote, just which precinct you vote in if you are registered.)

* Which congressional district do I live in? We have a map. We also have contested races in two of the three congressional districts in our coverage area.

Note that Roanoke County and Alleghany County are split between the 6th District (which sees a contest between Republican incumbent Bob Goodlatte, Democratic challenger Sam Rasoul and independent Janice Lee Allen) and the 9th District (where Democratic incumbent Rick Boucher is unopposed).

Also, Bedford County is split between the 6th District and the 5th District (where Republican incumbent Virgil Goode faces Democratic challenger Tom Perriello), so sometimes voters in those counties may be surprised to find out which side of the line they're on.

* How does my locality usually vote? If you're curious about voting trends, we have a nifty map that shows how each county and city in Virginia has voted in every presidential election back to 1980. Note that it's part of a bigger package we did on Appalachian voters, so when you get there, click "explore" to get the map.

* When was the last time Virginia got so much attention in a presidential race? Our data delivery editor -- that's the awkward title we have for Matt Chittum, who keeps our Datasphere spinning -- dug into the historical data in this post on his data blog. (Check out the old photos of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan in Roanoke.)

* What about all these new voters we keep hearing about? Where, exactly, are they? You can find out on this interactive map.

* How should I vote? Whoa, not going there. But Matt did find a neat website that undecided voters might find useful -- and the already decideds might find fun, as well. You can check off how you feel on certain issues and the website will calculate which candidate comes closest to your views.

Finally, there's nothing like hearing from the candidates directly. Maybe you shivvered out in the cold with Sarah Palin in Salem on Monday, or maybe you skipped worked (or school) to hear Barack Obama at the Roanoke Civic Center. Or maybe you didn't. But you can still catch highlights of what they had to say.

* What did Barack Obama say in Roanoke? We have video.

* What did Sarah Palin say in Salem? We have video from there, as well.

Is there other info you're looking for? Let us know.

And check back this weekend, when I'll have column identifying five places in Virginia we'll be watching on Election Night to get an early sense of how the Old Dominion is going.

-- Dwayne Yancey, Senior Editor for New Channels

Our experiment with a live blog at Monday's Sarah Palin rally in Salem was a hit. Online editor Meg Martin tells me that more than 1,200 users were reading the posts during the rally.

And it was a good learning experience for us too. Reporter Rob Johnson, one of a handful of reporters and editors who posted to the blog, said he felt like he was reporting for radio.

You can check out the rest of our Palin coverage here.