Notice to Readers: Beginning next week, the Falls Church News-Press, for the first time in 33 years, will not be carrier-delivered free of charge to every household address in the City of Falls Church. However, abundant copies of the paper will be provided at over 40 locations www.fcnp.com/locations in and around the Little City. Please check the list of locations printed elsewhere in this edition. An electronic version of the paper will also continue to be available online at www.fcnp.com, along with updates and website versions of key stories. Also, persons can receive mailed subscriptions by going to www.fcnp.com/subscribe
This announcement comes amid considerable and strong emotional tolls at our office. It is a difficult but unavoidable move in the effort to keep the paper solvent, and we intend it to be only temporary. We are engaged in an exhausting, pitched battle to keep the News-Press going, as we have informed our readers over time, and we appreciate the support we’ve received from those members of the Falls Church community who have stepped up so far to help out. But it should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention that we are not immune from the fact that print newspapers are facing their greatest challenge in these times. But we here at the News-Press are fully committed to staying in the game.
Print newspapers are vitally important components of a functioning democracy. Online sources simply can’t match what more traditional forms of the conveyance of information can do. Numerous studies have shown that people retain information they read in books or newspapers far more, and by orders of magnitude, compared to reading off an electronic screen. The recent pandemic certainly underscored this.
Learning and knowledge are social activities, as they are what we, as people, are: That is, social beings who learn in social ways far more than the one-on-one experience of facing a computer screen can. We all live in communities of one sort or another, too, that are not defined by a narrow slice of perceived special interest. We all live in the presence of others who do different things, have different life experiences and face all of life’s challenges from cradle to grave. We are better people when we are aware of these elements of our surroundings. A “community” can be defined in terms of a small town, or a nation, or, why not, a planet. What print newspapers do is to help bind and make these communities possible, and to thrive, by being instruments that digest the varieties of a community’s experience and make them the shared experience of all who read them.
We are physical beings with all that means, which includes pockets in our jackets into which newspapers can be folded and carried about, to be read at times of convenience, often over and over, or to be shared, clipped or mailed.
Falls Church has thrived because of its newspaper. It is not all, by any means, that has done this, but a pretty major part.
