The Washington Examiner to close

While I rail about articles and editorials in the Washington Examiner, I am sorry that they have announced that the paper will be closing in June ("Washington Examiner shifts from daily newspaper to political site and weekly print magazine".

Even if the headlines and story selection is slanted, it means one less source for news.  They cover transit somewhat better than the Post, with fewer resources, and I always like having a chance to see AP wire stories that wouldn't normally run in the Post either.

The Examiner was a repositioning of the Suburban Journals into a "Washington" paper, in order to be better able to sell advertising.  But with the continued consolidation of retail and banking, and the decline of the real estate and automobile sectors--especially local dealerships--after the 2008 crash, there was never a large enough base of potential advertisers to make the paper a going concern (which are the same reasons why they shuttered the Baltimore Examiner within a couple years of its launch).

I wish that the Express, the free Monday through Friday daily published by the Washington Post, would have some local columnists and writing (well, they do this a bit with features), more like the Metro papers that are also free, and distributed in cities such as Montreal, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.

Those cities, well not Boston, are much larger than DC, and more likely to still have a greater volume of local advertisers able to fund a free paper.