So long to an old friend

In New Orleans, there is no longer a daily paper. Soon, Syracuse and Harrisburg will also face that reality. But in all three cases, the framework of the daily is still there, reporters will still post stories to the web those days that the newspaper is not printed, and longtime readers can take comfort in knowing their source of information is still available, although in a different format.

That’s one thing readers of The News & Messenger don’t have in Prince William County. When the Manassas-based paper closes shop in seven weeks, the InsideNOVA website will go with it, and residents of Virginia’s second-largest county will lose their most reliable source of news.

I’m particularly interested in The News & Messenger’s fate for several reasons. I was a stringer for the two papers that were merged to create it, the Journal-Messenger of Manassas and the Potomac News of Woodbridge. I actually applied for the assistant sports editor slot at the Potomac News twice in the 1990s. And the J-M was a worthy adversary when I first got to The Northern Virginia Daily in 2000, proving to be the last paper to beat us in the Virginia Press Association sweepstakes, although that win essentially took place before Bob Wooten arrived at the Daily at the end of 1999.

Some six years before that, I got a call from the Potomac News asking if I would write a story from a Brentsville-Page County football game I was already covering in Shenandoah that Friday. Sure, I said. Around that time the News had launched a Sunday edition (and put its Saturday paper on hiatus), so doing a story and stats for them still involved filing Friday night, but not on the deadlines I would face with the J-M in 1995-96 or Orange County Register.

While the story was well-received, the Potomac News did not have anything else for me, so when J-M sports editor Josh Barr got in touch with me the next fall, I started covering Manassas Park and Brentsville when they would play at Page or Luray. In two years, I probably wrote seven or eight stories, covering football, basketball and even the Region B volleyball tournament. Those $25 checks came in handy at the time.

As I moved on to the Daily News-Record and The Northern Virginia Daily, I always kept an eye on what they were doing in Manassas and Woodbridge. I have always been a proponent of newspapers being local, doing what they can do the best. Sure, The Washington Post and Washington television stations cover Prince William County, if you consider showing up whenever something explodes as coverage. There was plenty of stuff that you’d never hear about if not for the truly local paper: City councils, boards of supervisors, education coverage. All of the “unsexy” stuff that does not translate to television but affects people’s lives every day.

When were the television stations and the Post interested in the Shenandoah Valley? When a hurricane was on the way, when a mobile home blew up and when the Salahis instigated some sort of hijinks. Similarly, they concentrate their efforts on Fairfax and kind of let Prince William twist in the wind. So the Potomac News and the J-M had their niche.

Until they were merged. Until Media General decided to close down the presses in 2009 and start printing the paper 75 miles away in Hanover County, squeezing in the run between editions of the Times-Dispatch. Factor in the time it would take to get the papers back to Prince William County and the deadlines created their own issues. I am not sure what time the News & Messenger goes to press these days, but when the change was made in 2009 it was too early to get much (if any) live prep coverage in the paper. And just like those local governmental stories, something local newspapers do better than anyone else is high school sports. That is, until your ability to do so is compromised.

Oh sure, that coverage can be found on the website so if it doesn’t make the paper, just look there. Except for the people who don’t want to look there, who have found it in their newspaper all these years and do not understand why that is being taken away from them.

I was shocked to see that The Journal & Messenger’s circulation had fallen to 10,000 (from 22,132 as separate papers in 2005) until I starting thinking of what it had become. I hear it has about 26,000 likes on Facebook and the InsideNOVA website is quite popular. But the center of the operation was marginalized, and the prospects of making it profitable again were slim.

Interestingly, however, the plug is being pulled on the website too, probably because without print income it is impossible to keep it operating. That leaves readers in Prince William County several weeklies and websites such as Patch to keep them informed.

Because of the special circumstances – proximity to Washington, printing on early deadlines, and the recent purchase along with most of Media General’s other papers among them – the loss of the News & Messenger is not a canary in a mineshaft. But it is disappointing to me, both in seeing good journalists lose their jobs and readers lose a reliable source of information.