Manassas News & Messenger and InsideNoVA.com, top Prince William news sources, closing down - The State of NoVa - The Washington Post

Click title for link for the latest obituary of traditional print - and now on-line - media sources which cover local government.  From the article:

Prince William County Board Chairman Corey Stewart (R-At Large) said that he noticed that as the News & Messenger and Washington Post newsrooms have shrunk over the years, fewer people approached him to ask about county issues. He said residents are less informed about local issues than they once were.
“People will always be interested in local news,” Stewart said. “But where do you go for local news? Right now there just aren’t a lot of resources for that other than the local papers. As those are withering away, I’m not sure what’s going to replace them.”

On November 9 of this year, I moderated a panel as part of the Palm Beach County Planning Congress' Sixth Annual "Ethics" Seminar.  Our session was called "Ethics and Public Corruption: "Old" and "New" Media Perspectives."  The other panelists included Dan Christensen, editor and founder of The Broward Bulldog and former investigative reporter for The Miami Herald and The Daily Business Review based in Ft. Lauderdale and Roger Williams, reporter and columnist for Florida Weekly.  Both had extensive career backgrounds in traditional print media outlets, but now were primarily engaged in the digital media domain.

During the discussion, we shared the lament that the role of the "fourth estate" and the local paper of record has indeed gone the way of the dinosaur.  We can no longer count on the local media, in our case The Palm Beach Post, to adequately cover the intricacies of local government.  This absence creates a fertile ground that provides the perfect cover for misdeeds to flourish.  Remember the Post's claim that the Casino building "is being gutted, but not torn down" despite clear photographic evidence to the contrary.  Attorney Joslyn even mentioned the newspaper's role in propelling myths related to the Greater Bay project being spread by opponents of the project - with no questioning of whether or not these wild stories had any ounce of truth to them.  The Post's editorial board seemed enamored with this rag-tag group of grassroots activists and were swept away by their zealousness.  It seems at times they enjoyed vicariously being part of "their cause" and only wished that they could be more like them, but, alas, they had succumbed to the comfort of their regular bi-weekly checks and cozy paneled offices.  The facts, they thought, didn't really matter anyway - they were perpetuating part of an ideology.

The panel discussion concluded that to find out what is really going on in local government, we will more and more rely on the work displayed in blogs like this one and others.  People will have the freedom to decide which are objective and which are not and choose which source they consider more reliable.  The day of a monolithic editorial, and public, opinion is over - if it ever really existed.