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.
The overall design will be similar, but you might notice some differences. For one, blurbs on the homepage will be shorter. And we’ll start incorporating short looping video into articles, something that’s not feasible on our current site.
We encourage readers to provide feedback on the new site after its release and to point out any possible bugs. You can do so in the comments or by emailing us.
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.”
Benton, a California native, moved to Falls Church in the late 1980s after landing a job as a White House correspondent with Executive Intelligence Review, a weekly magazine founded by American political activist Lyndon LaRouche that was known for its contentious articles and conspiracy theories.
A few years into his career, Benton saw an opportunity for a different career path. Driven by the noticeable lack of dedicated news coverage in his community, he approached the Falls Church Chamber of Commerce with a proposition: Would local businesses be interested in advertising in a nascent local newspaper?
That same year, Benton started the News-Press in March 1991.
“The first night… of the papers rolling off of that [printing] press for the first time — it was like a 16-page paper — the bell rang, things started chugging, and the paper started coming down the conveyor belt and I stood on a soapbox and shouted, ‘Let every tyrant tremble,'” he said. “That’s how we got started.”
Last month marked FCNP’s thirty-third anniversary, a milestone Benton marked by penning an editorial urging readers to pressure the city government to revive its old tradition of purchasing weekly ads.
Readers Asked to Help FCNP Efforts https://t.co/dbl9PvqfvC
— Falls Church News-Press (@fcnp) March 20, 2024
“We must confess that we, too, are skating on thin ice in these times of great trouble for local papers,” Benton wrote. “We are counting on our readers at all levels to pitch in and help. The most efficient way of doing this is through a dedication of a tiny fraction of City tax dollars going to provide a valuable public service that also helps to keep your local newspaper in business.”
A month earlier, he opined about the importance of the paper to the Little City’s ongoing development. Two months earlier, he announced a forthcoming $10month paywall for the website and a pilot program to deliver newspapers by mail, rather than dedicated delivery routes, to address these challenges.
Though he did not delve into the specifics of the financial issues, Benton emphasized they were significant.
“We have to figure out some way to raise revenue,” he told ARLnow. “We’re running mightily low.”
Despite Benton’s affirmation of the newspaper’s enduring readership, he said advertising is declining as a business model. Implementing a paywall isn’t Benton’s preferred option, but he says that without more community support, it’s one of the few remaining avenues he has left.
“I have to do it before we run out of money,” he said. “People aren’t responding to these appeals that I’ve been making about getting the city [to take out ads] — that’s the easiest way to do it because it’s coming out of their taxes, right.”
The city has since agreed to monthly ad placements, Benton says. However, the arrangement falls short of their financial needs, and in the long term, Benton hopes the paywall will allow FCNP to keep distributing a physical paper, which he argues is valuable to readers.
“I love the old phrase that says, ‘You’re never alone if you have a poet in your pocket,’ and I would apply that to newspapers,” he said. “[Newspapers] is a medium of communication. It’s almost like a physical web — a glue — that holds a community together.”
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.
We also sometimes struggle to illustrate Morning Poll posts involving holidays, like New Year’s or Valentine’s Day, with photos on hand. We want to avoid showing specific people or places, but also would prefer not to use generic images from a stock photo library.
Using AI in these circumstances lets us give the image a more local touch, adjust for the current season or weather, better reflect Arlington’s diversity, or customize the design to something that better fits the use case. It also can be done in just a few minutes, and we often publish our articles on tight deadlines.
Ultimately, though, we’ve only needed to do this a few times. Which is why the reaction to the use of an AI image for our recent story about businesses for sale was so surprising. Social media users flamed ARLnow for the image, which showed a group of people walking down a fictional street of shops in the rain somewhere in Arlington.
“This is not Arlington,” one person wrote. “This page has turned into AI trash content. I’ve unsubscribed.”
“Why use AI?” said another. “Lots of talented artists and photographers in Arlington.”
The reaction was more neutral in the article comments, though many commented on the AI image rather than the substance of the post itself.
Given the reaction, we wanted to ask readers what you think. Do you think ARLnow should continue to use AI generated images in limited circumstances or stop using AI imagery altogether?
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.
The bills came about via a collaborative effort between the Virginia Press Association and an ad-hoc group of online-only Virginia local news publishers, including ARLnow’s publisher.
Following unsuccessful efforts to pass similar legislation in Virginia, dating back to 2018, VPA and small Virginia-based online local news publishers last year developed a framework that allows courts to declare local news sites eligible to publish legal notices based on a readership audit, locally based staffing and other factors.
Legal notices are paid advertising placements required by law for certain actions, from restaurants applying for a liquor license to local governments holding hearings on proposed ordinances. In Arlington, legal notices for county government meetings and actions are placed in the Washington Times at a cost of around $35,000 per year, per a 2020 FOIA request shared with ARLnow.
The enactment of HB 264 and SB 157 marks a major milestone in the continued digital transition of the news industry — a painful, decades long process that has resulted in mass layoffs of local journalists and the closure of five local newspapers every two weeks, on average.
Previously, in Virginia and all other states, legal notice requirements could only be fulfilled through publication by print newspapers. (An Oregon law passed last year allows publication in certain digital newspaper replicas with paid subscribers and a just-passed Indiana bill allows print newspapers to publish notices primarily in digital form.)
Print newspaper circulation has been declining since the 1980s and last year fell by 14% last year among the largest U.S. papers. Weekday circulation of local daily papers in 2020 was about 5 million, according to the Pew Research Center.
So far, online-only local outlets are only partially making up for the loss of print papers, with some 550 sites currently in operation across the county. But in places where such sites do operate with robust local readership, the new Virginia legislation will allow residents, businesses and government entities to choose to place notices in any qualifying local publication, regardless of whether people read it on paper or on a screen.
“The Virginia Press Association believes that independent, third-party local news sites (print or online) are the best place to publish government public notices,” said Betsy Edwards, VPA Executive Director. “We supported this legislation because it utilizes local newspapers and news websites to provide the public with maximum transparency.”
Beyond allowing the centuries-long American principle of independent and accessible publication of legal notices to survive in an increasingly digital age, the legislation may also help existing print newspapers eventually make the business model transition to online.
“The average reader won’t recognize it, but this is a tipping point in community journalism that will help sustain small, independent publishers across the state,” said Randy Arrington, publisher of Page Valley News in the Shenandoah Valley. The new law, he said, “truly provides another financial lifeline to small town publishers fighting off news deserts in rural areas.”
Arrington and ARLnow’s owner together led the ad-hoc group of online publishers spearheading support for the bills alongside VPA. Both Page Valley News and ARLnow expect to qualify for legal notice publishing later this year.
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.
“The global pandemic changed the way we do business, shop for groceries, dine out, and live our lives here in Arlington,” he told ARLnow.
After nearly two decades in the field, Westcott is stepping away from news to focus on his other interests, including portraiture, storytelling and music. He leaves behind a vast archive of photos that captured scenes from the pandemic, major storms, Black Lives Matter protests and Arlington’s changing landscape.
The gallery above features 145 of Westcott’s favorite photos, chosen from thousands to represent his four-plus years of capturing life in Arlington.
“I have tried my best to show Arlington in all its forms and show how much I love living here,” he said.
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.
The new agreement establishes rules for requesting funds, a heretofore ad-hoc process. It requires AIM to maintain and present a detailed capital budget and make PEG requests only as part of the annual budget process, though emergency requests will be considered.
AIM has to provide a host of supporting documents for PEG requests as well as receipts demonstrating it is not using the funding on salaries, rent and utilities. The county reserves the right to audit the nonprofit’s records or require a third-party audit as often as necessary and will take back PEG funding if AIM uses it improperly.
The agreement was approved as AIM prepares to move its headquarters from Clarendon to Courthouse and, to stay afloat, has furloughed staff and will be selling equipment and memorabilia.
“AIM staff is currently on furlough throughout the holidays and thus only working on critical assignments,” the organization said in an email to supporters today, recapping its annual meeting earlier this month. “This has been structured to minimize producer impact, however we ask for your grace & patience while we transition to our new spaces.”
Periods of unpaid work are not a new issue, according to one source close to a former staff member, who had been asked to work without pay before.
Meanwhile, AIM’s current lease ends at 2701 Wilson Blvd, next to the Beyond Hello dispensary in Clarendon, is up on Dec. 31. The organization will make a new Green Valley satellite location, in a county-owned building at 3700 S. Four Mile Run, its home base until the Courthouse location is set up.
The new “AIMLive!” radio and TV broadcasting space in Courthouse is part of AIM’s goal to have a number of locations across Arlington, “with an eye on a new HQ sometime in the next 2-3 years,” the email said.
Despite the upheavals, Board President-elect Chris Judson remained upbeat in his remarks to supporters.
“This year presents a new beginning after a long effort to reinvent the organization,” he said in an email. “We owe tremendous gratitude to AIM staff for the extensive planning and execution that saw this plan to completion.”
During the annual meeting earlier this month, nonprofit leaders were frank about the organization’s financial status, detailing the furloughs and saying AIM was in survival mode. Still, they dismissed recent criticism over financial management from some people previously affiliated with AIM as a bad-faith attempt to defund the nonprofit.
They also addressed mixed public opinion about the role and importance of a primarily cable TV and radio-based nonprofit going forward, in an increasingly online world. Outgoing board president Demian Perry said he read the comments on ARLnow’s most recent article about AIM and they stung him but they were “nothing new.”
As for the new agreement governing PEG requests, AIM CEO Whytni Kernodle has told ARLnow in several interviews that she has pushed for this document to improve accountability — both for AIM and the county.
“They weren’t giving money to the ‘P’ or the ‘E’ and the PEG. So when I came on board, I recognized that… I’ve been asking for this memorandum,” Kernodle said. “What I’m saying to the county is, ‘You took us out, and now you’re not giving us money, and then you’re acting as though you don’t have to give us money when you have… an ethical obligation to your own public access center.”
(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.
“I’m looking forward to just concentrating on the things that I’m really good at,” he told ARLnow.
Growing up in Battle Creek, Michigan, roughly two hours west of Detroit, Westcott displayed a passion for photography from a young age, often using his dad’s camera to shoot yearbook pictures in high school. It wasn’t until after high school when he joined the U.S. Navy that Westcott’s passion for the visual medium began to flourish.
Four years after he joined the service when Westcott was aboard the USS Roosevelt, a Navy photographer reignited his interest in camera work.
“He had this really cool camera… and I just loved what he was able to do with that, the pictures he could get from that, and he convinced me to buy a camera,” Westcott said.
He wrote to his mother, asking her to mail his dad’s camera and bought a 35mm Canon autofocus SLR. In the years that followed, he documented life aboard the ship and the countries he visited around the Mediterranean, including Rhodes, Greece, and Venice, Italy.
Westcott, who is also a guitarist, remembers the day he decided he would leave the Navy and pursue photography. While browsing Guitar World magazine in his bunk one day, he came across a photograph by the renowned Seattle-based American photographer Charles Peterson, who was promoting his new book “Touch Me I’m Sick.”
“Instead of being one of the guys in the photos in the magazine, I wanted to be the guy taking the picture,” Westcott said.
In 1996, Westcott was honorably discharged from the Navy and headed to Virginia Beach, where he met his now ex-wife and sold cars for several years before moving to Northern Virginia.
In the summer of 2000, at age 28, Westcott enrolled at Northern Virginia Community College and then transferred a year later to George Mason University to study photography. About a year into his tenure at George Mason, and disillusioned with the program, Westcott applied and was accepted on a scholarship to The Corcoran College of Art and Design (now a part of George Washington University) in D.C.
“I went there for three years and loved every second of it,” he said.
Westcott’s first big break was a paid internship at the Scripps-Howard news service in D.C., which operated for 96 years from 1917 to 2013. What launched his career, however, was a chance sighting of of an armored truck robbery near McPherson Square Park, where he saw a man wielding a shotgun.
“So, I go out, and I take a couple of pictures and then go down to the street and take a few more pictures,” he said. “The guy gets hauled away in an ambulance while he was handcuffed.”
The pictures Westcott took that day got picked up by the Washington Post, which offered Westcott a full-time staff job shortly after.
“I felt I started at the top,” he said.
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.
Our sister sites also had strong months, each near record post-pandemic readership levels. ALXnow saw nearly a half million monthly views in August and FFXnow — along with its subsites in Reston and Tysons — recorded about 625,000 views.
Despite the very real struggles in the local news business — primarily tied to the secular decline of print-based business models — ARLnow and its locally-owned, Arlington-based parent company remains modestly profitable. ARLnow gets most of its revenue through local advertising but is also supported by readers via the ARLnow Press Club.
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.
Current statute exempts radio stations, television stations, newspapers, magazines, newsletters and “other publication[s] issued daily or regularly at average intervals not exceeding three months.” Online publications are not considered an “other publication” in Virginia, in part because the state exemption was originally passed in the late 1980s, before the advent of the modern commercial internet.
ARLnow’s parent company, which is based in Arlington and pays a mid-four-figure BPOL tax annually — nearly 10% of the company’s net income for 2022 — appealed the exclusion from the media outlet BPOL exemption to the Arlington Office of the Commissioner of Revenue in the fall. The office rejected the appeal, citing a 2020 Virginia Tax Commissioner ruling against a food blog that was also seeking the exemption.
Introduced by Del. Patrick Hope (D-Arlington), the bill garnered support from other Virginia online-only local news publishers but Arlington County officials expressed concern about a loss of tax revenue. Several other online publications, including Axios, are also based in Arlington.
HB 1920 was ultimately “laid on the table” by a House finance subcommittee, with committee members expressing both interest in studying the bill’s financial impact and surprise that legacy media outlets are excluded from BPOL.
Also considered this year was SB 1237, proposed by state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R-Harrisonburg), which would have given local governments and businesses the option of placing legal notice ads in qualifying online local news publications. Currently, such notices must be placed in printed newspapers to satisfy legal requirements.
Obenshain argued that numerous online-only local news publications have as many or more readers than their print counterparts, while citing the continued closure of print newspapers across the country, including the Richmond-area Chesterfield Observer earlier this month.
Here in Arlington, residents and County Board members have at times expressed frustration with the county placing its legal notices in the relatively lightly-circulated Washington Times newspaper. Board members, however, said that doing so is the most cost-effective way to meet state notice requirements and placing notices in the Washington Post, for instance, would be considerably more expensive.
Arlington County spent more than $37,000 with the Washington Times, an unabashedly conservative daily paper owned by an offshoot of the Unification Church, between fiscal years 2018 and 2019, according to a Freedom of Information Act response to a resident’s query in 2020.
The owners of ARLnow, Page Valley News and the MadRapp Recorder were among those to testify in favor of the bill last week. It was opposed by the Virginia Press Association and the publisher of InsideNoVa on the grounds that newspapers provide a permanent physical record of such notices and Virginia newspapers publishers already post notices online.
The state Senate’s judiciary committee ultimately voted 6-9 against the bill, after expressing concerns about which publications would qualify under SB 1237 and whether notices would be lost if online publications closed.
The vote was largely along party lines, with six GOP members voting in favor. Among those voting against it were members of the Democratic delegation from Fairfax County: Sen. Jennifer Boysko, Sen. Chap Petersen, Sen. Dick Saslaw and Sen. Scott Surovell. Previous attempts to pass a similar bill on the House side by Del. Hope have also failed in committee.
Online-only local news publishers who supported the bill — there are currently more than a dozen such local sites throughout the Commonwealth — have vowed to try again to gain bipartisan support for a modified version of this year’s bill during next year’s General Assembly session.
Separately, a bill from Del. Alfonso Lopez (D-Arlington) to provide tax credits that would benefit both print and online local news publishers, also failed in a House finance subcommittee. The bill, HB 2061, had the support of the Virginia Press Association.
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.
Sun Gazette staffers, meanwhile, have been hired for a new local newspaper called the Gazette Leader.
Editor Scott McCaffrey, sports editor Dave Facinoli and advertising director Vicky Mashaw are among those hired for the new paper, with Mashaw assuming the title of General Manager.
Jim O’Rourke, CEO of Arizona-based O’Rourke Media Group, confirmed to ARLnow that his company had hired the Sun Gazette vets and would be launching the new local publication later this week. The goal is for the print edition to go out Thursday and a new website to launch then or shortly thereafter. Two-thirds of papers will be mailed to local addresses, the rest distributed by other means, he said.
O’Rourke declined further comment, saying that a formal announcement with more details would be published with the first edition.
An email sent by Mashaw, obtained by ARLnow, suggests that the Gazette Leader will have much of the same local news focus and coverage area as its predecessor.
“We are excited to communicate to you about the launch of the Gazetteleader.com and two new weekly print publications that will serve Arlington, Great Falls, McLean, Tysons, Oakton and Vienna,” the email said. “You can expect hyper-local community news coverage, original reporting, the most advanced local news website in the region, easy to read and access newsletters delivered directly to your inbox, an e-edition replica of the print products and so much more.”
The Sun Gazette was the successor to the daily Northern Virginia Sun, which ceased publishing in 1998. The paper is owned — at last check — by Northern Virginia Media Services, which previously owned but then sold two publications, Leesburg Today and Ashburn Today, in 2015, and sold the website InsideNoVa.com in 2018.
There’s no word yet on what might have led to the staff departure and possible closure.
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.
Round after round of layoffs have been announced at U.S. media companies this fall, including at CNN, Buzzfeed, Tysons-based newspaper chain Gannett, and email newsletter company Morning Brew. The Washington Post is set to undergo more layoffs early next year, its publisher announced today, while Rosslyn-based tech publication Protocol shuttered last month.
ARLnow and our sister sites are no exception to the pain felt among advertising-supported news outlets. After a torrid start to the year, which brought about plans for additional hiring, our company’s revenue is down in the quarter to date.
We started to see the slowdown, as did other media companies, in July. October and November were particularly bad months. The good news is that we’ve seen a pronounced recovery in December.
That does not mean we’re out of the woods by any means, however. Many are predicting a recession in 2023, though projections for how deep and prolonged it will be vary to a significant degree.
Despite the economic challenges, we have committed to our nine full-time employees that no layoffs are planned and we will do whatever is needed to avoid them. Instead, we have cut back on some technology expenses, non-essential spending and our freelance budget.
You can also expect to see ALXnow editor Vernon Miles helping out with ARLnow, to offset some of the freelance cuts.
We are fortunate to be operating in a market that is bolstered economically by federal spending and to have a loyal adverter base and a growing roster of paid members. Other local news outlets are not as lucky.
Still, we can use your support. If we can add 200 new ARLnow Press Club members (less than 0.1% of our monthly readership) between now and the end of the year we should be able to keep ARLnow’s freelance budget at current levels. If you’d like to support our reporting while getting an early look at the next day’s news, please consider subscribing.
The media business is always evolving, but now seems like a particularly volatile time. In the interest of transparency, we wanted to discuss some other factors that are affecting our business now and into the future.
Artificial intelligence and automation
We have spent much of the past year working on no-code automations that allow our editorial and business teams to operate more efficiently. For instance, most social media posts are now automated and we can publish events, announcements and other user-submitted content with a single click.
