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EDEN — Call him a citizen journalist. 

Whether he’s rushing to the scene of a car wreck with a video camera or strolling through a festival taking photographs, Roy Sawyers has taken it on himself to show the people of  Rockingham County what’s happening in their communities.

He presents it all on his Web site, www.rceno.com.

Sawyers started his work two years ago, thinking then that his job as a shift supervisor at Frontier Mills in Mayodan could go the way of many other textile jobs, and he’d be out of work.

So Sawyers, who is 41, bought a digital video camera and a digital camera and brushed up on his skills. He learned the ins and outs of Web design and then set out snapping photos, filming high school football games and sorting through all the faxes and e-mails sent out by area law enforcement agencies, putting it all on his Web site.

For now, it’s a sideline, but  Sawyers  hopes to make  it his full-time job.

He had a similar dream in the mid-1980s when he was a student at Reidsville High School. His “adopted parents,” Myra and Bob Tudor, owned a small television station on Main Street in Reidsville.

Sawyers would head to the station after high school, soaking up everything he could about the news-gathering business. He learned to put graphics on the screen, ready tapes and make sure commercials played on time.

It was on-the-job-training, and after graduating from high school in 1986, he went right to work at the station. He started filming city council meetings, and he worked with advertisers in putting together commercials. 

“My favorite job was covering the football games,” he says. Each week, the station would cover a local high school game.

 “I’d run the sidelines cameras,” says Sawyers. Then he would edit the footage down to about 14 minutes and run the highlights on the air. People loved watching the replay of the games on TV.

In 1993, the Tudors decided to sell the station. That’s when Sawyers took the job at Frontier Spinning and put his other  ambitions aside.

Fifteen years later, he got the idea for RCENO. It stands for Rockingham County Events and News Online.

He bought Web hosting space and started roaming the county for news.

“I’d like this to be my full-time gig,” says Sawyers, who still works at Frontier. “This is my way of giving back to the community.”

 Since the economy has lagged, Sawyers says he has put more time in developing the site.

“Ideally, I’d like to get up in the morning, drink my coffee then head to Eden, then Reidsville and on to Western Rockingham, make the rounds of the county, then come back and put what I find online,” he says.

In April 2009, he had a little more than 2,000 page views. In June, he created a Facebook page that links with the Web site. It doubled his exposure the first month.

But July was a blockbuster. He covered several events that created a lot of interest in the site. First was the Fourth of July Parade in an Eden neighborhood, which he captured on video, followed by the fireworks display that evening.  Then he snapped photos at the Tour de Reidsville bicycle criterium in late July.

It garnered him a walloping 19,220 hits in July.

This month, he’s filmed the Mud Bog, sponsored by the Williamsburg Volunteer Fire Department. It quickly became his most-watched video, drawing about 1,000 hits a day.

In the coming months, Sawyers will be making the rounds of the festivals, and he’ll feature a different, local high school football game each week, just as he did in his former television broadcasting days.

He also partners with the Rockingham County Animal Shelter to showcase animals available for adoption. His wife, Robin, reviews movies. And he’s started covering city council and county commissioner meetings.

Other than from the Facebook page, Sawyers says the traffic to his site has been driven by word of mouth. 

“It’s about being visible,” he says. “It’s giving people what they want to see.”

And what do they want to see?

Sawyers has figured that out, too.

“They want to see themselves,” he says.

Contact Myla Barnhardt at 627-4881, Ext. 116, or myla.barnhardt@news-record.com