ARLnow’s parent company has acquired the GazetteLeader amid an expansion of local news coverage.
Arlington-based Local News Now acquired the newspaper’s assets, including its archives, from Arizona-based O’Rourke Media Group, which operates 50 local publications in more than three dozen markets across the U.S.
GazetteLeader editor Scott McCaffrey and sports editor Dave Facinoli will join LNN’s editorial team for ARLnow and its Fairfax County sister site, FFXnow. The paper’s final print edition will publish today.
The GazetteLeader launched last year after the shuttering of the Sun Gazette, a long-time free weekly serving Arlington and parts of Fairfax County, with the defunct paper’s entire staff — including McCaffrey and Facinoli — joining the new publication. Prior to the Sun Gazette, Arlington’s primary local news publication was a daily paper, the Northern Virginia Sun, which operated from the 1930s to 1998.
“Selling the GazetteLeader to ARLnow is a strategic move on our end that just made total sense given the 15-year established digital presence of ARLnow. Trying to resuscitate the print publication while establishing a digital audience was just too costly for us to continue,” said Jim O’Rourke, CEO-Owner of O’Rourke Media Group.
“I’m certain that this move will help strengthen ARLnow in both Arlington and Fairfax County,” O’Rourke added.
McCaffrey, a Northern Virginia native, has experience in daily and weekly local journalism in the community dating to the 1980s and also has held editing and reporting positions in Florida, South Carolina and West Virginia.
“This is an exciting new opportunity,” he said. “I’ve watched this company develop from the earliest days of ARLnow and have always been impressed with its ability to expand while so many others were contracting. The combination of entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to solid local journalism is a winning one.”
“Scott McCaffrey is a force of nature in Arlington and has been a formidable competitor for local scoops since ARLnow’s launch in 2010,” said Scott Brodbeck, founder and CEO of Local News Now. “It’s great to now have him and Dave Facinoli on our team while we work to increase the breadth and depth of our local journalism.”
The addition of McCaffrey and Facinoli will increase LNN’s overall newsroom headcount to nine, working across three online-only publications: ARLnow, Alexandria local news site ALXnow, and FFXnow.
The additional staffing will allow:
- Deeper local government and community coverage on ARLnow and FFXnow.
- More comprehensive coverage of the City of Falls Church on ARLnow, expanding on recently launched local business and public safety reporting there.
- Local sports coverage. Some of this coverage will be exclusive to the ARLnow Press Club, the site’s reader membership service.
“It’s a tough time to be in the local news business,” said Brodbeck. “Luckily, here in Arlington and Northern Virginia, we have strong support from advertisers and readers. And we have the other key ingredient to making local news work: talented journalists committed to dogged coverage and deep knowledge of the communities they serve.”
Dan Kennedy, a professor of journalism at Northeastern University who tracks the local news industry, said it is rare for an online-only local outlet to buy a print competitor and discontinue the paper.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of that happening before,” Kennedy said of the acquisition. He noted, though, that it’s the journalistic output — not the medium — that matters most.
“What matters in local news is the journalism, not how it’s delivered,” said Kennedy, who co-hosts a podcast about local news and recently published a book on the topic. “I think it’s pretty interesting that a digital news outlet is doing well enough to acquire a weekly paper and then jettison the costs of printing and distribution. The challenge will be figuring out how to make sure the audience knows their community newspaper still exists, only in a new form.”
