DC Local
The news at our doorstep
Solid local news is hard to come by anywhere these days. Community newspapers just don’t seem able to stay afloat anymore, with folks increasingly reliant on social media that rarely do a good job of covering local stories.
DC’s problem with community news was always a little different, mainly because our “local” paper, the Washington Post, never has given local news much attention, focusing primarily on “Washington, DC” as the national capital. Soon after I had moved here, in 1981 the Washington City Paper started up, but as a free paper its coverage was not always very complete either. So in my family we learned to rely more on neighborhood-centric papers like the Uptown Citizen and the Northwest Current (reflecting our own northwest DC bias!), but I’m not sure all eight DC wards got similarly in-depth neighborhood coverage.
Then, over the past few years, most of our print newspapers dried up or went online. What makes us more fortunate than some places, though, is the fact that there are some online outlets that operate as membership organizations or nonprofits, and receive enough in donations to stay afloat – so the City Paper, the DC Line, and The 51st somehow manage to limp along, at least for now.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post covers less and less local news, and just this past week – shortly after I took the photo above - it folded what was previously known as the Metro section into the Sports and Style sections of the newspaper, which seemed to us a little odd. But of course, a lot of the best writers about local DC matters had long ago been reassigned anyway.
And it’s too bad, because there’s a lot of local news to cover: a vigorous arts scene (not just on the National Mall); new restaurants opening up; exciting new developments along the Anacostia River; hot debate in the DC council on whether the old RFK stadium will become the old-new home to the Commanders; and more challenging issues like adequate and affordable housing and shoring up an economy that has been hard-hit by layoffs of federal employees.
For those of us who live in DC – and to some extent in the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs – the Washington, DC news that we care about most is what is right at our doorstep, not down 16th Street NW at the White House, or at the Capitol – although those places do at times have a strong impact. More often, though, our eyes are on the actions of DC’s mayor Muriel Bowser and our DC council – except, of course, when Congress decides to play around in the DC sandbox some more, while still refusing to allow us to spend our own local tax monies.
https://washingtoncitypaper.com/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/
https://anacostiabid.org/development