Media Outlets Flounder in Loudoun County

For the past couple of decades, Loudoun County, home of the country's third-fastest rising population (now about 280,000) and the nation's top household median income ($107,210), has been seductive territory for media outlets, as newspapers, broadcasters and Web sites clamored to serve -- and profit from -- the exurb's remarkable growth.

But lately, members of the local Fourth Estate who tried to cover all things Loudoun have been disappearing as quickly as the county's acres of green space.

In recent weeks, the Loudoun Easterner, a 41-year-old weekly that once brimmed with real estate ads, folded; the county's only radio station, WAGE, ended its AM broadcasts after more than 50 years; and The Washington Post ended its LoudounExtra Web site, an experiment in micro-journalism.

Earlier this year, the Blue Ridge Leader in Purcellville, a paper founded in 1984 to serve Loudoun's western end, ceased publication. And the county's oldest newspaper, the Loudoun Times-Mirror, has cut staffing, although its editor won't confirm layoffs. New media technologies are not necessarily faring better than the old ones: In addition to The Post's move, a popular high school sports blog, LoudounPrepSports.com, halted continuous coverage after the site was sold to New Jersey-based Vantage Learning, which could not come to financial terms with the site's main writer, Dan Sousa, according to Sousa. (A company spokesman declined to comment.)

The impact of the recession on local advertisers has been a big part of the problem. But in Loudoun -- where the housing boom of the past decade attracted tens of thousands of tech workers and others new to the region -- publishers are also stumbling because they are not "hyperlocal" enough, media experts say.

Although the news on The Post's LoudounExtra site, for example, focused exclusively on stories in the county, the stories might not have been narrowly enough targeted: Countywide news has proven to be a tough sell in a place where many residents' sense of community rarely extends beyond their own subdivisions, neighborhood schools and the crime and traffic problems closest to their homes.

In interviews, Loudounites, many of them newcomers, said their desire to know about traditional countywide news -- development trends, political stories, crime in someone else's neighborhood -- is not as great as their interest in keeping up with the latest in and around their own developments: teenagers egging houses, complaints about trash removal, school boundary disputes or, in one recent case that heated up the Broadlands community Web forum, a new Dunkin' Donuts and its allegedly stale Munchkins.

Many residents said they are hooked on the Broadlands homeowner association Web site and another site called the Brambletonian. Both offer multiple forums for residents to exchange news and debate neighborhood issues, as well as lists of where to shop or eat.

"We get papers delivered" for free, said John Falconer, 40, who moved to Broadlands in 2002 from Reston for more square footage and a cheaper mortgage. "I don't even know their names." He rarely bothers reading the countywide papers, he said.

A couple of miles away, at the Bluz Brothers barbecue restaurant, several former journalists and the county's School Board chairman debated the local media's problems.

Dave Scarangella, a marketing consultant who moved to Loudoun in 2000, thinks residents' lack of deep roots is partly to blame. "People in Montgomery, they went to high school in Montgomery County," said Scarangella, a former general manager of WAGE and the Loudoun Times-Mirror. "They probably know some of the politicians. They have some connection."

Increasingly, however, some people are finding out what's going on in their neighborhoods or schools from community e-mail lists, Web forums or automated phone calls, all of which might deliver the news faster than professional journalists.

Scarangella recalled a telling moment from the other night: "The phone rings. It's a recording of Jim Person, the principal of Stone Bridge High School, saying, 'Just want to remind you your child has to go to orientation . . . blah, blah, blah.' " Scarangella said he checked his e-mail right after he hung up -- a transcript of Person's recording immediately popped up in his inbox.

Robert DuPree, the School Board chairman who moved to Loudoun more than 25 years ago, said the media's problems were, for better or worse, a reflection of the county's growth. "We were at 65,000 residents then, and now we're at 280,000," he said. "We lost a radio station, and we lost one of our papers. We used to have a local cable news show. In some respects, we've gone backwards."

Erica Garman, a former "Living in LoCo" blogger for The Post's LoudounExtra site, said that with so many homeowners association junkies populating community forums such as the Brambletonian -- which receives 250,000 monthly visitors, according to its founder -- it was hard for The Post to gain leverage. LoudounExtra "had great bells and whistles, but most of the time, people would say, 'I love your blog. I read it every Sunday,' and I'd say, 'But you know I post every day?' "

Katharine Weymouth, The Post's publisher and chief executive of Washington Post Media, said the "resources required to maintain [the site] were far greater than the appetite of the local advertisers." She said a sustainable model would instead rely more on user-generated content -- readers posting news of their own communities -- and aggregation -- links to news and comments on many locally focused sites. Weymouth and other media executives said the key to hyperlocal success might be for news organizations to work closely with local bloggers and citizen journalists who are reporting on their own communities.

Some Loudoun media moguls are undeterred. Amy Burns, 40, publisher of the Loudoun Independent, newly purchased by technology magnate and Republican fundraiser Bill Dean, is fighting to get her weekly out of bankruptcy. She said she's hopeful her rival's misfortunes might create an opening. Burns's family once owned the recently folded Easterner; she was forced out after Landmark Communications purchased the paper, which is why she launched the Independent, a paper that runs multi-part investigative stories on topics such as a vice principal's child pornography case and a recent battle between two hospitals.

It's that old-school competitiveness that drives Burns in the new world. "We're developing different streams of revenue," she said, "and we are making it impossible for our competitors to replicate." And what sorts of ideas might those be? Burns won't say: She doesn't want LoudounExtra.com relaunching anytime soon.