By Marc Fisher
Sunday, April 9, 2006

E ighteen years ago, with next to no money and a notion that what people really cared about was their house, their kids' school and their family's security, Brett Phillips started a little newspaper in Loudoun County.

Leesburg Today was the kind of paper that showed up in the mail every week with stories about whether Jennifer Jenkins would get permission to open a coffee shop in Round Hill (yes), how Hillsboro proposed to slow speeding traffic on Route 9 (build roundabouts) and what happened to the Loudoun County High student who came to school with a rifle and beer cans in his truck (10-day suspension).

At a moment when audiences are declining steadily, even dramatically, for daily newspapers, TV networks, radio stations and movie theaters, Phillips has just sold his 56,000-circulation weekly paper, and its building, for more than $10 million. He's a happy man.

"Community newspapers are thriving because if you think about your life, 90 percent of the services your family depends on are delivered by your local government, not the state or the feds," Phillips says. "That's particularly true for newer people who move in and don't have a clue. They don't know what county they're in till they read it on the side of the school bus."

The Internet hasn't closed any daily newspapers quite yet, but Phillips is right to focus on what ultimately connects readers to the news, whether it's delivered online or in print: the stories that make us feel we are part of a group of people who share a place.

Politicians often complain that the Internet has diverted Americans' attention from local issues, reducing participation at community meetings and distancing residents from one another. Yet when neighborhood electronic bulletin boards get cooking on a topic, they can pack a meeting hall with a swift blast of e-mails. Whether the issue is development around the Vienna Metro station, school closings in the District or the path of the intercounty connector in Maryland, activists use the Web to confront elected officials with a powerful shout of the people's voice.

The paradox of the Internet age is that a nation awash in information seems less well-informed than ever. The Web has broken down old hierarchies of news authority, liberating people with a cause to get their views across without waiting to be blessed by recognition from professional editors and reporters.

But the foundation of any community is the information people have in common. A thousand blogs braying in as many directions still leave people craving a public commons, a way to connect. In many places, the community weekly fulfills that function, online and in print. Nearly a dozen papers serve Loudoun; The Post covers the county daily and in its twice-weekly Extra.

Phillips and other owners of community papers say their traditional, advertising-based business model is holding up well even as people divide their attention among ever more media sources. Americans now devote an average of eight hours a day to consuming media, according to ratings services, but that time is split into ever-narrower slices. And in most of the big media, cutbacks, bureau closings and layoffs are the order of the day.

American Community Newspapers, the Minnesota-based company that is buying Leesburg Today from Phillips's group of investors, is a chain that owns more than 60 papers. It is expanding, as weekly papers are nationwide. (The Washington Post Co. owns the Gazette papers in suburban Maryland.)

Too many community weeklies are being bought up by large out-of-town companies, straining the local roots that make great weeklies feel so intimately connected to the people they cover. But the continued strength of those papers carries a lesson for all other media.

"Even if they've grown up on the Web, when young people buy their first house and have kids, they're going to want to know what's going on where they live, and they will come to the source that has that information," Phillips says.

He believes local papers are thriving because they share the spirit of the Internet -- a quick and easy accountability of the sort that larger media institutions are now trying to put in place. "We have a system of checks and balances that they don't have at big metro papers," Phillips says. "If we write an editorial and the people we write about don't like it, they can walk right in and punch you in the nose."

E-mail:marcfisher@washpost.com.