The Washington Post circulates to over 793,000 Northern Virginia readers as of last year. With numbers like these, area residents might not realize that there could be another newspaper in their community.
There are numerous weekly community newspapers throughout the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. Stop by Alexandria and pick up your copy of the Alexandria Gazette Packet or the Alexandria Times. Falls Church has its own newspaper, the News-Press. There is even a newspaper named after George Washington’s home, the Mount Vernon Gazette.
Credit: Times Community Newspapers
The Times Community Newspapers also publishes four different newspapers, serving the towns of Culpeper and Gainesville, as well as Fauquier and Loudoun counties. They previously owned The Fairfax County Times, but this edition was sold to The Gazette, a daily newspaper in Gaithersburg, Md.
Even though there are many alternatives to major-market newspapers in the Old Dominion, these community newspapers are still subject to the decline in revenue and readership that the newspaper industry suffers from as a whole.
The Observer, a newspaper in Herndon, ceased publication after 30 years in June 2010. The Washington Business Journal sources the closure to financial reasons.
Other Washington-area local newspapers have combined separate, community –focused editions in an effort to recoup costs and save money.
Media General owned two daily newspapers in Prince William County and Manassas: the Woodbridge-based Potomac News, and The Manassas Journal Messenger. The company decided to merge both newspapers in 2008, forming the News & Messenger.
This merge was not new for Media General’s newspapers—they were printing combined weekend editions of both newspapers, with dual newspapers names on the front page, for 8 years at the time.
According to the Washington Business Journal, there were no layoffs in the Media General newspaper grouping.
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