If you’ve gotten used to the current design of the ARLnow website over the past 5+ years, get ready for an adjustment.
A new version of the site will be rolling out soon, perhaps as soon as early Monday morning. Developed by news publisher-focused WordPress agency The Code Company, the site represents a complete rebuild of our current codebase, which dates back to the early 2010s.
In a bid to preserve its paper-and-ink legacy, the Falls Church News-Press plans to introduce a few changes to its business model — chief among them a website paywall.
“If my deference to a print newspaper simply doesn’t afford us the ability to continue in that mode, we’ll try something else, at least on a temporary basis,” Nick Benton, founder and editor of the more than three-decade-old publication, told ARLnow. “I’ll do whatever it takes to keep the paper going.”
In some very limited circumstances, ARLnow has been using AI-generated images to illustrate stories.
The typical use case are stories around a concept for which specific imagery might cause problems or is simply unavailable. For instance, file photos we have on hand for real estate stories show for-sale signs with a specific agent’s name and phone number, as well as a specific house — which someone presumably now lives in and might not love being shown over and over.
Virginia has become the first state in the nation to approve the publication of legal notices in online-only local news sites.
Twin bills passed in February with overwhelming bipartisan majorities in the Virginia General Assembly, HB 264 and SB 157, were signed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin on Tuesday, April 2. The legislation will become law on July 1, 2024.
When Jay Westcott joined ARLnow in September 2019, he said one of his main focuses was covering the arrival of Amazon’s HQ2 and its impact on the local community.
He could not have foreseen that within just seven months, he would be documenting some of the most consequential years not only for Arlington but for the entire world.
This weekend, the Arlington County Board adopted a new agreement governing how Arlington’s public access station, Arlington Independent Media, can request funding.
AIM has a claim on Public, Educational and Government (PEG) funds that Arlington County receives as part of its franchise agreements with Comcast and Verizon. It competes with Arlington Public Schools and county government initiatives for this pot of money, which is dwindling as people end their cable subscriptions.
(Updated at 2:25 p.m.) ARLnow’s staff photographer, Jay Westcott, is stepping away from the news industry — but he isn’t putting his camera aside just yet.
At 51, Westcott is shifting his focus from the fast-paced world of daily news photography to focus on the sides of photography that align with his other passions, including portraiture, storytelling and music.
August is generally a slow month for news, but ARLnow saw the highest readership since the height of the pandemic.
The site recorded 1,542,873 pageviews for the month of August, according to Google Analytics. That’s the highest readership in three years, following a massive readership spike in the first half of 2020. Our all-time record remains 2.5 million monthly views at the beginning of the pandemic.
Two bills that would have given online-only local news publications like ARLnow some of the same privileges afforded legacy media outlets failed in Richmond over the past few weeks.
In the House of Delegates, HB 1920 would have included online local news publications that employ at least one full time journalist in an exemption from local Business, Professional, and Occupational License (BPOL) taxes.
The Sun Gazette newspaper has not published new articles on its website since Friday and may have printed its last edition.
Several sources tell ARLnow that the free weekly paper, which has separate editions serving Arlington and parts of Fairfax County, has effectively shuttered, though no notice of a closure was published online.
ARLnow and its sister sites celebrated another year of hard work, journalistic achievements and client service at our holiday party Monday night.
One change: the venue. Rather than eating and drinking at a local restaurant, as usual, we had beer, wine, soda and pizza in the common area of our coworking space in Ballston. It’s one example of the belt tightening underway over the past couple of months, amid a downturn in the economy and among media companies in particular.
