Why I Believe The News & Messenger failed

Today was the last day The News & Messenger (Manassas, VA) published a newspaper.  I worked as a staff photographer at the N&M from November 2008 until I left to freelance back in March of 2012.  Before that, I was a part-time photo intern at The Potomac News (which eventually merged with the Manassas Journal-Messenger to create the N&M) from June to December of 2006.  Before that I was a 10 year-old paperboy for The Potomac News, which was then a M-F afternoon paper. 

I can only speak from 7 years experience.  But what I see is this:  the biggest reason The News & Messenger closed is that those in charge were trying to fill the paper with “hyperlocal” news, when the vast majority of the county population were increasingly disinterested.

While I was a staff photographer at the N&M, we received a bunch of demographic data from a company about who lived in the county, where they were from, what they preferred and, presumably, why they didn’t buy our paper.  Here are the two most important findings to me: 

Over half the county population had lived there less than 6 years.

A large percentage regarded “their city” as Washington.

It’s a demographic issue. Simply put:  people in Prince William County don’t care about high school football (I can back this up with a long-winded response that I won’t bore you with, here, but suffice it to say, 500 readers and 100 comments from the same 10 people does not mean anyone cares about HS football), and they don’t care that Joe Smith opened a dentist office on Liberia Avenue.  They don’t care, because they aren’t from there.  Over the past 3 decades, PWC has become a Washington suburb.  People moved there to work in DC.  They’re from other parts of the DC metro area, or the country. 

I mentioned I worked as an intern at the York Dispatch.  I don’t claim to know intimately what their subscription numbers are, or their monetary position, but I know this:  York is a 2 newspaper town.  Washington DC is barely a 2 newspaper town.  The YD is an afternoon paper, and the York Daily Record is the morning paper.  I believe the biggest reason the papers still exist is due to the fact that most people in York are from York.  Most people in York County claim some part of the county or York City as their hometown.  They don’t say “Baltimore”, even though many in the county are just as far from Baltimore as those in Manassas are from Washington DC.  That is to say, they care about their community paper in ways that people from a Washington DC suburb can’t, or don’t. 

It’s interesting to note that the YD suffers from some of the same problems as the N&M. I can share many similar stories of head-scratching decisions bad photo assignments and staffing issues about both papers.

Both papers had small staffs, and low pay.  Everyone multitasked.  Both papers covered a geographically large county.  I should mention at this point that the N&M outsourced the printing of the paper in 2009, and eliminated the copy desk in the process.  This created a host of other problems, not the least of which was having a deadline of 8-9pm for a morning paper.  But I truly believe the proverbial horse was out of the barn at this point.  It really was academic on whether the paper would close or not.  Many of us believed it was just a matter of when, not if the paper would close.  

Perhaps it could be argued (I can attest that many would) that the decisions made at The News & Messenger accelerated it’s decline.  I think, however, in the face of the march towards Washington Suburban-dom, the paper was doomed. 

There is a future (online or otherwise) for community newspapers.  Of course they should be well written and staffed with hard-working, professional journalists.  That goes without saying.  But they need to exist in communities where people actually care about their community.  In DC, there simply aren’t enough people who grew up and consider their neighborhood their hometown.  Most people are from out of town and consider their town to be Washington, even if they are from Manassas, Fairfax, or Hagerstown.   The closest community daily is the Free-lance Star, out of Fredericksburg.  It won’t be long.  And everyone will blame the internet, but it’s not the internet, it’s Sprawl.  That will eat the community paper.