Editors’ efforts to hold onto readers and advertisers

‘We don’t want to shut down’

Norman Styer has devoted his career to reporting news in Loudoun County, an outer Washington suburb that has quintupled in population over 30 years and is now Virginia’s third-most populous county. He signed on as Leesburg Today’s first full-time reporter in 1989 and was editor-in-chief in 2015 when rival Loudoun Times-Mirror purchased it and shut it down the next day.

But “a couple days later people got together and said, ‘Well, we don’t want to shut down. We want to keep it going,’ so we started the new paper the following week,” said Styer. Without missing a beat, he became publisher and editor-in-chief of Loudoun Now, a community-owned weekly with a print edition mailed for free to 25,000 homes in Leesburg, Ashburn and western Loudoun and a website updated almost daily.

Before COVID, it reached 40,000 homes and is trying to build back up while competing with the Times-Mirror for ads and revenue.

Leesburg Today had seven or eight reporters when it folded. Styer, in addition to himself, has two full-time reporters, a part-timer and two freelancers. They are stretched, but “we haven’t really changed our philosophy about what needs to be covered in a community paper. We still cover the meetings of all six town councils, the board of supervisors and the school board pretty intensely,” said Styer. “What we’re missing is the time to do the extra, more in-depth stuff. But I’m not willing to sacrifice the government watchdog function. We sit through the meetings so you don’t have to.”

It has been a particular challenge covering angry protests at Loudoun School Board meetings by parents upset with the district’s efforts to address racial bias and promote diversity and its policy allowing transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice. The protests intensified after a transgender student was accused of sexually assaulting two girls in restrooms at different high schools five months apart. Republican Glenn Youngkin made the case and parents’ rights an issue in his successful 2021 campaign for governor and has since pushed schools to require students to use bathrooms of the sex identified at birth.

Styer said it was a tough story for his then-new school board reporter to handle, but “we caught up to it” when a special grand jury issued a scathing report on how the district handled the assaults. The school superintendent was arrested and fired for allegedly lying about the case.

Pleasing readers can be hard.

“Like anyplace else in the country these days, we have extremes on both sides [who are] the most vocal, and that could be a bit tough to deal with,” Styer said. “With the echo chamber we have on social media, people want to be fed what they want to hear. That’s not the way we do business. All we can do is give everybody the same set of facts, but not tell them what they need to be mad about.”

Hanging on to advertisers and fighting competition from the Internet are the biggest challenges. Local advertisers – retailers, real estate companies and health providers – still want to be in the print paper, but other businesses “are sending all their [online advertising] dollars out to Silicon Valley.” Loudoun Now has 22,000 followers on Facebook, but advertisers “don’t see the value of those online eyeballs.”

His goals for the new year are to drive the controlled circulation back up and to turn his part-time reporter into a full-timer. “Those would be successes,” said the 57-year-old journalist.

Is he optimistic? “You’ve got to be sort of an optimist to keep doing this,” he replied.

What about young people who get all their news online?

“Well, we’re in their phones and their in-boxes. We’re there, too.” 

A Korean-language daily bridges the gap for those new to America

Five mornings a week, the large and growing Korean-American community in Northern Virginia and the Washington metro area can get the news in their native language thanks to the Korea Times, a 52-year-old daily whose Los Angeles parent also publishes local editions in other major U.S. cities.

The Korea Times is a full-color broadsheet that runs 40 to 48 pages and reaches 25,000 subscribers. On Saturdays subscribers also get an e-edition with fresh news that looks exactly like the print newspaper. The paper has three editors and five reporters, but employs more than 20 others to design the broadsheet, sell ads and handle other jobs at an office building in Annandale, the heart of the region’s Korean-American diaspora. 

Deputy Editor Chang Yul Lee has played an instrumental role at the Korea Times for 22 years (“plus three months”), editing copy but also writing three or four articles himself on a typical day. “I’m very proud of what I’m doing,” said Lee.” This is not easy, but I like my job. 

“I cannot make much money [as a journalist], but there’s a lot of other things I can get,” said Lee, 54, who is an American citizen. “Many Korean-Americans don’t know English yet and the U.S. system. Maybe I can be a bridge between the Korean community and the U.S.”

He tried without success to convince his first daughter to go into journalism. She is now a software engineer for J.P. Morgan. Two siblings are still in college, at Virginia Tech and George Mason universities.

They aren’t regular readers. Like many in the second generation, they understand spoken Korean, but not to read and write it. No matter. “Even though my kids are not reading the Korean-version newspaper, the new Korean immigrants are,” he said.

Lee has interviewed governors and other top state officials in Richmond and Annapolis and traveled to Capitol Hill to meet with members of Congress. In election season, the politicians often come to the newspaper’s office to make their cases. “Because Korean people vote and they need votes,” he said.

A recent front page reported on the Korean ambassador to the United States’ return to Seoul to become national security adviser; the soaring price of airline tickets to South Korea (now more than $3,000 for economy class), and an easing of that country’s travel authorization requirements for visitors. Inside were numerous local stories, including a Maryland appeals court’s ordering a new trial for a man whose conviction for killing a Korean-American former girlfriend was overturned.

There are also regular articles with practical advice on matters from COVID and securing public health services, registering to vote, and applying for financial aid for college.

In one way or another, “all our stories are connected to Korea,” Lee said.

“This is not a language issue. This is the issue of what we care about. Our newspaper is needed. When I write a story, always I think, ‘What kind of article can help those who are living here?’”

Soft news sells ads in a rural county

Danny Clark takes exception to the State of Local News project’s judgment that King and Queen County is a news desert. “We’ve had a local paper for the last 33 years,” said the publisher of the Country Courier, a twice-a-month publication filled with feel-good features and ads. But the State of Local News counts only dailies and weeklies, and it assesses whether they publish enough hard news, including covering local government and school boards.

Clark left a successful career in sales to strike out on his own in the community news business in 1989. He made up a mock newspaper and walked it around to local businesses, asking if they’d be interested in running ads. They were. 

“We netted $147 from the first issue. I said, ‘This is great,’” said Clark, 75, who gets to the office two or three days a week when he’s not riding his Harley-Davidson Heritage Softail Classic. He relies on an editor and three-person office staff. “We seem to get the bills paid and everybody gets a little paycheck,” he said. 

The Country Courier covers some “hot potatoes,” as Clark calls them, like a current dispute over whether books in the school library should be labeled if they have content about being gay.

But more often it runs stories such as one on a charity dodgeball tournament or what to do with an injured baby squirrel. 

His is a “TMC” publication, an acronym for Total Market Coverage, a term for advertising distributed to everyone living in a targeted area. “If you have a mailbox in King William [County] and King and Queen” – and 8,500 households do – “we’re going to put it in there,” said Clark. “It’s something to hold in your hand when you get home or have a moment to relax. I tell people, ‘If you don’t like it, put it in your birdcage.’” 

The struggle to get a newspaper out with two reporters

It was hard to get a newspaper out five days a week with only two reporters. Emily Oaks faced up to that challenge during four years as editor the Culpeper Star-Exponent by doing considerable reporting herself. It wasn’t easy. 

“The daily grind of putting out a small community newspaper is an enormous effort and a huge sacrifice,” said Oaks, who left the job last summer for personal reasons. “The people who are doing it really care about their work and the community. They don’t do it for the money.” 

The Star-Exponent – one of 13 Lee Enterprises-owned papers in the Commonwealth, including the Richmond Times-Dispatch – publishes Tuesdays through Fridays as well as Sundays, running local news but also stories from other Lee papers and the Associated Press. 

“We put the most important local news on Page One along with the biggest state story of the day,” Oaks said. “The idea was to put content in the paper that people couldn’t get elsewhere.” 

She’d field complaints from readers that it was missing stories or not covering Culpeper as thoroughly as it once did, but they were also proud “when their own kid (or grandkid) was in the paper or their neighbor or church was featured in some way, they’d come in and buy 10 copies and save them forever.” 

Oaks, now executive director of the news nonprofit Foothills Forum, worries about what happens when a community paper withers or gives up the ghost. Most of the 2,500 newspapers that have closed nationally since 2005 were community papers, usually weeklies. 

“Much of what would disappear with the loss of a newspaper is difficult to quantify, but at the local level, losing a newspaper means a loss of community love, community pride, community responsibility – people don’t know one another in their own community any more,” said Oaks.

“People do not realize what a loss it would be.”

Christopher Connell is an independent journalist and former assistant bureau chief for The Associated Press in Washington. He writes primarily for foundations and nonprofit organizations about higher education and other public policy issues, including reports for the Carnegie Corporation on efforts to improve the education of tomorrow’s journalists.

Foothills Forum is an independent, community-supported nonprofit tackling the need for in-depth research and reporting on Rappahannock County issues.

The group has an agreement with Rappahannock Media, owner of the Rappahannock News, to present this series and other award-winning reporting projects. More at foothillsforum.org.

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