DC's community newspaper weekly, the Northwest Current, goes out of business

The Washington Post has a nice piece, "The Death of a Ludicrously Local, Incredibly Essential Newspaper," about the Northwest Current community newspaper, which in May, finally succumbed to financial woes.

The Current had four editions, covering mostly the area west of Rock Creek Park down into Dupont Circle, Geogetown, and Foggy Bottom.

It was a weekly, and the only community newspaper in the city covering neighborhood commission meetings and activities by local government, new construction, etc., in depth.

Looking at the Washington Postt or Washington Star back files pre-1990, there were plenty of articles about developments around Washington neighborhoods (less about the suburbs).  But that hasn't been the case for a long time, and community newspapers like the Current, Hill Rag in Capitol Hill (which also has editions for East of the River and midtown DC), and the no longer printed InTowner, fill/ed that gap.  I think I've had op-eds in all of them.

Like many newspapers big and small, it succumbed, ultimately to the decline of local retail as well as the shifting of advertising to online settings.  Without local retailers willing to advertise in your paper, it's impossible to keep publishing.

(That was an issue for the Ann Arbor News, which shut down in 2009.  Ultimately, from a business standpoint, most of the retailers in the area were chains, or regional businesses like banks based elsewhere, and such firms don't advertise locally very much, with some exceptions.  Combined with the loss of classified advertising to the Internet, and you can't keep a paper going.)

People who worked for the Current have created the Northwest Courier ("The Northwest Courier, started by two Current alums, says it will bring a weekly paper back to the quadrant," DC Line), which just published its first print issue.

Time will tell if they can succeed. At least they won't have the overhang of past debt.

While plenty of people don't read printed newspapers anymore, from the standpoint of "omnichannel" delivery of information, it's important to provide print as an option. And research finds that readers of newspapers are more likely to participate in local civic affairs. the Journalist's Resource initiative of the Shorenstein Media Center at the Harvard Kennedy School offers a couple of interesting articles on this fact:

-- "Political polarization increases after local newspapers close"
-- "Civic engagement declines when local newspapers shut down"

Past entries on community media:

-- "One more blow against community media: Washington Post drops Thursday "county" news special sections," 2017
-- "A brief comment on the connection between newspapers and civic affairs with the offer by a vulture hedge fund to purchase Gannett Newspapers," 2017
-- "Voting vs. civic participation | elections vs. governance," 2016
-- "DC's Current Newspapers introduce weekly e-letter," 2013. Note that post-bankruptcy (last year),
-- "The ongoing tragedy of dying print media, the latest being community newspapers in Montgomery and Prince George's Counties, Maryland," 2015
-- "Grassroots communications capability in the city," 2015
-- "Protest as Civic Engagement and the role of the media," 2007

Digital. Besides blogs, which vary and tend to wax and wane, but can be great sources of community information, some public radio stations, including WAMU in DC which took over DCist, have acquired digital media operations to complement their web presence. Other nonprofit entities, like DC Line in DC, have been created to cover local matters, but again I would argue their reach is diminished by not having a print counterpart.

For me, one great resource, potentially, from listservs, blog and newspaper comments, etc., is the ability to learn from other equally knowledgeable people.  But too often, such commenters are few and far between and so I don't even check out those blogs in the first place.

I know that's how I felt about DCist when it was published before, and the same with PoPville (Prince of Petworth).

On the other hand, I've harvested plenty of insights by smart commenters at Greater Greater Washington and here.