Around Town

It’s Local News Day. Here’s what that looks like in Arlington.

Yesterday, Dan Egitto reported on the Virginia Supreme Court hearing arguments over Arlington’s Missing Middle housing policy. Katie Taranto found out which local restaurants are RAMMY Award finalists and profiled the new owner giving a Falls Church pottery studio a fresh start. Dave Facinoli caught up with Yorktown’s undefeated girls soccer team.


News

As debate over Virginia’s redistricting referendum heats up ahead of next month’s vote, a partisan newspaper advancing Democrats’ arguments has begun showing up in Arlington mailboxes.

The latest issue of The Virginia Independent — a product of American Independent Media, which specializes in content that mimics the form of impartial news sources in order to promote progressive causes — devotes a significant amount of space to the upcoming April 21 vote on redistricting.


News

Mass layoffs at The Washington Post yesterday (Wednesday) dealt a punishing blow to the newspaper’s storied history of local journalism after decades of declining emphasis on Arlington and Northern Virginia.

Reminiscent of the demises of the Washington Star in the early 1980s, Journal Newspapers in the early 2000s and Sun Gazettes in 2023, the job cuts entail a dramatic downscaling of reporting on the D.C. area.


News

Mass layoffs at The Washington Post today (Wednesday) have prompted grief and outrage among D.C.-area reporters and a pointed rebuke of the newspaper’s owner from U.S. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.).

The publication eliminated about one-third of its staff today, cutting the jobs of numerous respected journalists on its Metro desk while eliminating its sports section, several foreign bureaus and its books coverage in a widespread purge that represented a brutal blow to journalism and one of its most legendary brands.


News

The owner of the Falls Church News-Press has started a crowdfunding campaign in an attempt to revive the weekly newspaper’s at-home delivery service.

The newspaper, which has been published continuously since 1991, eliminated free at-home delivery in a cost-cutting move earlier this year. Copies can now be picked up via bulk drops at locations across Falls Church and surrounding areas.


News

By MORGAN LEE Associated Press

The Pentagon says it will require credentialed journalists at the military headquarters to sign a pledge to refrain from reporting information that has not been authorized for release — including unclassified information.


News

The term “blogger” didn’t come into the lexicon until the 1990s. But 60 years before, Arlington almost had the equivalent of one.

From 1935 to 1951, Howard Bradley “Brad” Bloomer Jr. was well known as a major player in Arlington civic life — and perhaps the only one to leave behind a large repository of facts and opinions about a crucial period in the county’s development.


Around Town

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.


Around Town

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.


News

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.”


Opinion

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.


News

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.


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