Davis Kennedy, a one time force in local community newspapers, dies at 87

-- "Davis Kennedy, former publisher who pioneered growth of Gazette papers, dies at 87," Baltimore Banner

Most recently, Davis ran the Current newspapers, which published a number of free weekly newspapers, with neighborhood-focused editions in Northwest DC, with Georgetown Current as the flagship, and for awhile a Capitol Hill Current.

I had a bunch of op eds in some of the papers.  Community newspapers at this scale were great at covering the kind of "minutiae" that would never make the big paper unless there was a scandal.  Community council meetings, more detailed coverage of City Council and Executive Branch dealings related to the neighborhood, real estate matters, business openings, and lots of ads. 

Sub-city newspapers rely on independent businesses as primary advertisers, car dealers, and at one time had a strong revenue base in classified ads.

With the shift of print media to online, and the decline of local businesses, sub-city newspaper revenues dried up, and the Current Newspapers shut down in 2019 ("DC's community newspaper weekly, the Northwest Current, goes out of business").

From the Post article:

Former managing editor Chris Kain recalls the early 2000s as boom times for the Current, with page counts reaching as high as 56 for standard issues and 84 for special editions.

Until the coverage of that, I didn't know he was responsible for the expansion of the Gazette Newspapers, which covered a good swath of Maryland with sub-county editions for Frederick, Carroll, Montgomery and Prince George's Counties--and the Fairfax County Times.

But it began with his purchase of the Gaithersburg Gazette in 1981.

When I lived briefly in PG County, I read it, and they had a newspaper box at Takoma Station--in DC but on the border with Montgomery County--so I read that edition too.  I tried to read multiple editions.

They also published an official paper intended for legal notices for Maryland State Government, distributed and giving them presence in Annapolis.  

There was a vending box outside Tastee Diner in Silver Spring, and I happened to pick up a copy in 2003 when they published a masterful investigative impact on Prince George's County crime and housing, "Shouldering the Burden," a response to the downsizing of DC's public housing complexes through the HOPEVI federal housing reconstruction program, which added market rate units at the expense of subsidized units.

The Washington Post acquired them, and as advertising dried up--the papers were distributed for free also--they figured they'd save money to use elsewhere by shutting them down in 2015.  But there was no new money available, the papers ran based on the revenue collected for advertising.  

These shut down in 2015, before Current Newspapers. These free weeklies marketed as a group to get advertising inserts from big box stores.  Kennedy said when the Gazette Newspapers shut down, advertisers stopped their insert program, because they wanted the multi-county coverage, not just DC.  He said this was the final financial blow to the Current, leading to the shutdown four years later.