"Almost a year ago, I was assigned to write a feature story on the Defense Department's connections to Charlottesville, a broad request that eventually took me all around Charlottesville, and to companies like Avir and its creator Gabriel Laufer, a UVA professor who developed infra-red sensory technology the federal government decided they could use. The Pentagon had awarded them more than $1 million for 2004 and 2005. A feature story ensued.

Still, the Defense connections beckoned, thanks to an agreement the Board of Supervisors had entered into with Wendell Wood the previous year. The owner of United Land Corporation, Wood had sold the 29 acres the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) currently resides on. In 2005, a Base Realignment and Closure Order had recommended that the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center relocate certain of its functions next to NGIC in northern Albemarle. The Army approached Wood about more land, some 47 acres, which he was more than eager to sell, except for a snare. Congress had only allocated $7 million for land Wood claimed was worth more than double that. In response, the landowner refused to sell, a position that eventually led to the county Board of Supervisors making a promise to change the land-use designation of another parcel of his along Route 29.

Two months after learning of this resolution, my feature on the circumstances surrounding the deal struck by the county and Wood came out, somewhat unceremoniously. On the cover of C-VILLE was a monster truck from a recent rally at the JPJ Arena. Inside was my 4,000-word piece that told the tale of one of the county's largest—if not the largest—individual landowners receiving what appeared to be special consideration from the county government. The citizen reaction, while concentrated, was vociferous and left certain involved parties on their heels, most notably Supervisor Ken Boyd, who as chair of the Board was instrumental in orchestrating the resolution at the center of the story.

"Boyd panicked," I had written of the Supervisor when he had first learned that NGIC might move if Wood were not accommodated. When I called him for a follow-up piece, he contended with my characterization. "I don't ever panic," he said.

"You got a number of things wrong," he had told me, and so a week later I offered him the chance to tell me on the record just what my errors were. We would run it in C-VILLE. I wanted to know, and I thought readers would as well. The truth would set us free.

Unfortunately, Boyd hedged, choosing to forego any further discussion of the subject, but repeated his charge when The Hook, in its November election coverage, asked him about this paper's, and thus my, reporting of the circumstances.

"They're trying to make a mountain out of a molehill," Boyd said. Most disconcertingly, he was quoted as decrying "fabrication" in the original story. A week later I got a call from a local blogger who had just posted an entry on Cvillenews.com regarding NGIC and repeated a claim I had made that Boyd had been tipped off by a phone call from someone at NGIC when it looked as if the deal might fall through. With the election only a week away, Boyd's campaign manager, Paul Wright, had contacted the blogger demanding a retraction, once again accusing me of fabrication, a charge that was then incorporated into the post.

Afterwards, Wright added a comment below the original post. "I want to thank Waldo [the blogger] for making the correction and need to add a bit of clarity and context for why the correction was requested," he wrote. "A phone call occurred but it did not come from anyone working for NGIC. It was our concern that folks might think that this information was leaked by a current employee, which was not the case. Considering the nature of the work done there I hope everyone will understand. If you simply remove the word[s] 'at NGIC' from the line about the phone call the quote would be correct. The C-VILLE Weekly did not fabricate the quote, it just got this fact wrong."

Nearly a year after beginning work on the original story, I have learned that I did make a couple factual mistakes. However, the statement that Boyd received a call from someone at NGIC was only disputed to the extent of whether the person who tipped off the Supervisor worked at NGIC at the time. That he had worked at NGIC at one time was not.

More importantly, I learned quite a bit about what it is to be a reporter, especially in the follow-up coverage. For weeks, even months, after the original piece, I focused on smaller elements of the story, stoking the fires of citizen outrage, but at what cost? Now, Wendell Wood will no longer speak with me. "I'm disappointed in you," he said.

What I didn't learn may be just as crucial. While working on the original story I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the amount of the appraisal the Army commissioned on Wood's land, the supposedly low-ball appraisal that set off the whole compensatory land-use designation to begin with. They wouldn't tell, and still haven't. At press time, we await an answer despite repeated attempts by our attorney at The Rutherford Institute. A lawsuit may be necessary." (Jayson Whitehead, C-Ville Weekly, January 1, 2008)