As Newspapers Struggle, Local News is Harder to Find in Virginia
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7 responses to “As Newspapers Struggle, Local News is Harder to Find in Virginia”
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Good, if familiar, analysis. I disagree with this statement, however:
“Virginia’s newspapers, the single biggest source of local news, face
unprecedented challenges, with their readers, revenues, and staffs
steadily dwindling.”Local TV has long been the largest source of local news. More people turn to them than print. It has been this way for years.
Virginia’s newspapers, the single biggest source of local news, face
unprecedented challenges, with their readers, revenues, and staffs
steadily dwindling.
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It seems to me that we are heading toward a single source of news, in print, on line, TV, and radio, similar to Pravda.
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We are enormously fortunate in Arlington with one daily-update website (Arlington NOW) and a weekly print paper which also has a website (Gazette Leader) as well as pretty much half time from a reporter for the Washington Post (his other half time is Alexandria). There are factional websites which are kept up by volunteers and which reside on Facebook. The daily-update website and the weekly paper paper seem to get the largest fraction of their income from real estate ads.
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TV doesn’t cover what you are looking at (council, BoS, planning commission, etc.). So it is left to people like me and a couple others on the fringe to supplement that. Sadly it won’t work on Nextdoor (you only get a partial # of folks). FB will only work but so far.
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In Manassas, in the late 80s/early 90s, there were two weekly free papers. Manassas Weekly Gazette and a weekly edition of Potomac News. The Manassas Weekly Gazette was owned by DCI Publishing which folded in the early 90s.
It is from reading the Manassas Weekly Gazette I learned about the guy named “High Test” who had a gasoline huffing addiction.
Perhaps the lack of newspapers is in some ways a good thing (for some people)–people remain in blissful ignorance about how screwed up things really are.
Else they might demand change.
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And I disagree with this: “people aren’t really aware of the extent to which traditional journalism, with a set of values and proper procedures, has wilted away,” said Clark Hoyt.
I surely am.
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Well, if it’s anything like Charlottesville local news all they do is report on the weather and heart warming stories of the local black community’s “struggle” while completely ignoring the insane amount of black crime being committed daily. This week they discussed the new “black pathway” on 4th street next to the subsidized black cultural center (Jefferson school). My favorite news story about this “black pathway” was when a group of underage blacks got into a massive brawl that spilled into the street. An elderly (white) motorist accidentally struck a girl and pulled over to help. They dragged him from his car and beat him so bad he was hospitalized. Our local “news” reported this as two separate events. One event was a fight, and then in a completely unrelated event the news posted a day later, an unnamed person had been dragged from their car and beaten. Fortunately our enterprising black youth posted the full video of the incident on social media, which of course confirmed my suspicions that the two events were related. There was never an ounce of follow-up by our local “news”. That’s what a “black pathway” is to me, a place of violence.
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