Team News-Press is grateful to the Falls Church Chamber of Commerce and its new chair Dave Crance for the opportunity to present its case for the importance of newspapers for the future of democracy at the Chamber’s luncheon at the Italian Cafe this week. Owner-editor Nicholas Benton, managing editor Nick Gatz and reporter Brian Reach, who taped the event that will go onto YouTube soon, made the case before a lively and enthusiastic audience. Ironically, despite the integral role of the News-Press with the local Chamber in its founding and earliest days, it marked only the second time in 34 years that the paper’s leaders were invited to speak at the monthly luncheon.

As Editor Benton pointed out in his introductory remarks, the News-Press has been since its inception in 1991 not just a chronicler of events, but a decisive shaper of Falls Church’s moral commitment to economic development not just for its own sake, but for ensuring the resources have been there to fund a first-rate, world renowned K-12 school system, unique now for its International Baccalaureate curriculum that runs from preschool through the 12th grade. The result has been in recent years the construction of a new, state of the art high school at the same time residents enjoyed a 13-cent reduction in their real estate tax rate.

It was Benton’s and the News-Press’ pivotal role in the early 1990s after the paper began its weekly production and Benton became president of the Chamber for two years that he collaborated with Mike Diener and Carol Jackson on the Chamber board to win a first ever endorsement by the Chamber of the full funding of the City schools in a critical City budget fight. That had been an unheard of notion in the City up to that point, as the business community saw itself advocating solely for lower taxes. Public appreciation for the move was expressed by the then School Superintendent Dr. Stuart Roberson and a new spirit of cooperation was introduced.

It was just one case that Team News-Press presented on the importance of newspapers for democracy and what Benton termed as “City building.” He cites the role of newspapers in the founding of the U.S., as exemplified by Ben Franklin’s early newspapers and the fact that the Federalist Papers were published in local newspapers to win popular support for the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. He cited the role of seminal newspaper publisher William Allen White of Kansas who, though he was a Republican, backed FDR’s recovery and war efforts because the alternative was the kind of isolationism that would have handed the world over to Hitler.

Newspapers are vital to our democracy because they bring the full spectrum of a community to the shared interest of an informed citizenry in ways that the fractured presentation of data represented by the Internet simply can’t do. This is what the News-Press is committed to continue doing going forward in its 34th year.