Editorial: Our Editor Talks to The Chamber

The following are excerpts from a transcript of comments by Nicholas F. Benton, founder, owner and editor of the Falls Church News-Press to the monthly luncheon of the Greater Falls Church Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday, February 13, 2024:

Thank you. I have with me my managing editor of many years, Nick Gatz, and also Brian Reach. This is the Falls Church News Press, right here.

I started this paper in 1991, and it was always premised on a partnership with the Chamber of Commerce. Does anybody remember Hap Day? He was one of the founding executive directors of the Chamber of Commerce here, and he and I became good buddies. My paper was founded to be a vehicle for advertising for small businesses in Falls Church. My core idea was that being pro-business was the way to support the schools and vital community services.

Now we are just about the only print edition newspaper left in Northern Virginia. Almost everybody has gone out of business, in terms of print editions at least. But I am here to make the case that print newspapers need to make a comeback. Megan McArdle of The Washington Post wrote that “the Internet has dissected your daily newspaper into its constituent parts, letting readers find the news they want without ever having to buy a paper or visiting a homepage.” Another columnist wrote, “Facebook, Google and YouTube have mutated human communication so that connecting people has often become about pitting them against one another and turbocharging the discord to an unprecedented and damaging volume.”

I stand for the continued print publication of our newspaper and its distribution as widely as possible to everybody in the City of Falls Church as we have done for over 1,700 consecutive weekly editions since 1991. It’s important because newspapers are a critical element of community building, city building, and nation building.

What was the impetus for getting this republic going? It was Ben Franklin with his newspaper in Philadelphia. After the revolution came The Federalist Papers, distributed through newspapers around the country. Everybody read them, everybody talked about them, and from that the Constitution was ratified.

In the 20th century, the role of newspapers was critical, exemplified by newspaperman William Allen White from Kansas. He was a Republican, but a staunch Roosevelt supporter, because to be against Roosevelt was to be pro-Nazi in that era. Then there was T.M. Storke, who ran the Santa Barbara News Press in California where I got my start, a similar type of person.

They saw their newspapers not as providing information, but for building community, building a city, building a nation. That’s the kind of newspaper that has got to come back as an effective means of retaining our democracy.