Last week The Virginian-Pilot‘s Culture Writer Malcolm Venable announced that he will be leaving the paper and moving back to his hometown of Richmond.

Photo: The one and only David A. Beloff (http://www.dabphotos.com/)

“I have accepted a position in the strategic planning department in the Martin Agency,” he wrote to colleagues in an email, “where my role will be to harness trends and culture to influence existing brands and clients, which include Geico, Wal-Mart and Pizza Hut.”

Venable has left an indelible mark on the landscape of local culture having covered pop music, style and arts for The Pilot for the past 5 years and contributing to it a young, tuned-in perspective that it would have never found otherwise. He brought a talent finely honed at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and enriched with an acute awareness of his own generation.

He spoke with me today, amidst a flurry of planning and moving, about his thoughts on Hampton Roads’ culture, the direction of journalism and The Pilot, and the realities of getting older.

So how did your new position come about?

Well, I had been eying that agency for a while. And I started having conversations with a senior VP there earlier this summer; went to lunch and started talking to him about some of the ideas I had. They really liked me and were excited about me but weren’t entirely sure at first where I would fit in the company. But the last SVP I met was like, “We’ll create this role for you where you can merge journalism with your entertainment contacts.”

Did you feel any pressure from the countless number of layoffs at Landmark to have a backup plan?

Honestly, not really, because…you know…not to sound like a completely inflated-sense-of-self asshole, but I really felt like what I was doing at The Pilot made me, not bullet-proof, but you know, indispensable. I really felt like I was very much supported and very much secure in my position there. I’d been given some commitment that I knew I was going to be OK. It wasn’t so much that, but it was still this lingering feeling that the industry overall was in trouble.

Frankly, I’m getting to that age when I have to start thinking about my financial future. And I was like, wow, what am I going to do to make, like money money. I don’t really have the patience to be an editor. And I’m not really that great at being a copy editor. So that trajectory didn’t really make a lot of sense for me. So I had to do some soul searching about how am I going to make bank and remain in a creative industry? And to be honest, I wanted to stay in media in some capacity, so I started thinking about either television or marketing/public relations.

Another reason I got interested into marketing in the first place was because our paper laid off the whole marketing staff earlier this year–that’s no secret–and I was trying to think of how marketing could help our company, and newspapers in general, to convey a sense of importance. And I just felt like there were a lot of ways that we could inform the community of how important newspapers are. And I didn’t feel like that was being done, which led me to start thinking about marketing ideas, which started me down this path in the first place.

So it seems like in a lot of ways the direction of The Pilot has influenced your reason to leave?

Actually, no, I think The Pilot‘s a great place to work. I have a lot of respect for all the editors there. And honestly, I think everybody’s just trying to make the best of a fucked up situation. I think the problems that they’re facing there are representative of the problems that a lot of newspapers are facing. There are papers that are doing a lot worse than The Pilot. And at the end of the day, it’s a business, you know? They have to cut costs, and a lot of times that means people. I think The Pilot is a great organization, it’s just, I’m thinking about my own financial future and I was fearful where journalism itself is going.

Coming down here from New York, after writing for these bigger magazines [including GQ, Vibe, Interview, Washington Post Magazine], and you’re really stylish, what did you first make of the area?

Well, thank you for the compliment. You know, I came to The Pilot to make them, in layman’s terms, a little more young, a little more hip, a little more cool. When they offered me the position, I was kinda like, Yeah right, like I’m going to leave New York and come to Virginia. But I was, at the time, in my late 20s and I was struggling in the rat race of New York. So when they offered it to me again, it was one of those days where it was like, You know what yeah, fuck it, I’m coming.

I guess I was afraid I was coming to this cultural wasteland. But when I got down here I was surprised to find that there is a significant amount of culture and art and really cool people and nice restaurants. Nothing is like New York; nowhere else in the country is like New York. You can never replicate that. So I wasn’t one of those people who’s like, well, Norfolk isn’t like Baltimore, or Norfolk isn’t like D.C. I don’t do that. I kind of took it for what it was and what I found. And you know, it had its own style and sense of cool, so I just had to go out and find it.

Why do you think there’s such a chasm between culture in Richmond and culture in Hampton Roads?

Well, one, because the grass is always greener. And two, I think Richmond is more centralized, so in the downtown urban part, you have blocks and big buildings and it’s more compact. And VCU is such a big art school, and as you know, when artists stick around, that leads to galleries, which leads to boutiques and restaurants and cafes.

But I think our culture in Tidewater is more diverse than Richmond’s is. Because the Richmond scene is cute, but it’s mostly tattooed hipsters, Pabst Blue Ribbon kids and art kids, and the whole bohemian dreadlocked scene. But they don’t really have the Filipinos, they don’t have the surfers that we have, they don’t have the skaters. So ours is pretty diverse as well.

Do you feel there’s enough culture in this area to have sustained a lifelong career here as a culture writer?

Yeah. I think the trick is to get out. Every opportunity you have to get out, you should take, because when you come back home, you realize how great it is. There’s nothing like flying into Norfolk International, or flying into Newport News and driving across that bridge and seeing that water, and feeling like, I’m home.