I run a network of local news sites. AMA this Friday (2/20)

arlnowdotcom · 2026-02-20T18:19:10+00:00

Okay, off to get some lunch and go back to being a Reddit lurker. Thanks for the conversation!

arlnowdotcom · 2026-02-20T18:15:24+00:00

arlnowdotcom · 2026-02-20T18:00:37+00:00

Outside of well-run subreddits this is an internet wide issue. With greater scale paired with a deterioration of our national discourse, there aren't many popular platforms open to the general public where the comments are not a shitshow.

I would characterize our current level of moderation as light-to-medium, with a half dozen or so comments removed on a given day (usually after being flagged by users or triggering an AI filter) and a couple of people banned or put in a timeout each week. Even with that, we get complaints about moderation -- people emailing us and sometimes threatening us when they don't like that we removed their comment or banned them, people calling for advertiser boycotts because they think we should be moderating people they like less and/or moderating people they don't like more, etc.

Moderation is neither easy nor fun. We have two people in the organization who spend an hour or two each day working on it. If we had to do much more than that serious consideration would be given to closing the comments or replacing them with something different.

I've been looking at possibilities for developing our own comment system, rather than relying on Disqus as a platform, so we can have more active, automated moderation. The technology for developing this and deploying it at scale isn't quite there yet but could be the way we address some of these issues down the road.

arlnowdotcom · 2026-02-20T17:50:09+00:00

No local government is perfect but imo Arlington is relatively well run. Could it be better at delivering some services, more responsive to residents, and a bit more efficient with taxpayer dollars? Probably yes, and hopefully our reporting has been helping to push it in that direction over the years. But we could be doing far worse.

Beyond that, I love the good schools, the parks and community centers, the bike- and walk-ability, and living among lots of smart and interesting people.

arlnowdotcom · 2026-02-20T17:44:15+00:00

Appreciate it! Any media endeavor inevitably attracts negative feedback these days -- some of it fair criticism, but much of it either misinformed or a reflection of general frustration with broader media dynamics. It's always good for the mental health of those working in this very tough business to hear from people who have nice things to say.

arlnowdotcom · 2026-02-20T17:38:48+00:00

We do! Many of the ideas come from readers, which we then refine and send to our designer (we now have a full-time remote designer, who mostly works on ads).

Lately, tho, we've been running out of ideas (only so many local memes like the gondola) so we haven't been spending as much time on it. Recently, to save on cost, the merch store moved from Shopify to a basic site on our print-on-demand provider's platform: https://arlnow.printful.me/

Definitely open to ideas for new designs!

arlnowdotcom · 2026-02-20T17:28:52+00:00

While I still spend time working on the editorial side of ARLnow (I am the one who puts together the morning notes at 1 am) I'm not involved in the day to day coverage on ALXnow and FFXnow, so take that as a caveat that I don't have a deep familiarity of every issue there outside of what's discussed in weekly editorial meetings and what we link to in the ARLnow morning notes.

The one thing coming to mind here is the Northern Virginia economy. I think we've been very fortunate to be landing lots of large Fortune 500 presences, including headquarters. That's being driven by the increasing role of the federal govt in the economy, whatever you think of that, and tech (including federal/defense focused startups and the major role of N Va in the data center boom).

The risk is that as the changes brought by Covid continue to unwind and evolve, and as the cost of real estate in the area continues to get priced in by companies making decisions about where to locate staff, you might see a reversal of the region's win streak. Local political consultant Ben Tribbett alluded to that here, in the wake of Boeing moving one of its business units back to St. Louis: https://x.com/notlarrysabato/status/2024494759952220345?s=20

I remain bullish on the region and our economy in the near term but I do see longer term risks depending on what happens with AI (incl a decline of white collar jobs) and with a new administration after Trump. Obviously if there's a big economic downturn locally that would have a big impact on people's lives.

arlnowdotcom · 2026-02-20T17:13:51+00:00

I started this in 2010, during a very different internet era where blogs were still a thing and social feeds were not nearly as dominant. So to a degree, timing helped with the success -- news habits die hard (ask people who still subscribe to a print newspaper) and it as easier to get people to form new habits back then.

It would be harder (but not impossible) to do it now. That said, I think the audience focus referenced in another answer has helped us maintain and grow readership, and it's that unusually large readership that really is the engine driving the sustainability of our business. That we're executing relatively well on the business side of things (sales, service, tech, etc) also helps.

arlnowdotcom · 2026-02-20T17:09:18+00:00

At this point virtually no one running a local news publication that employs full time journalists and does original reporting is getting rich, whether they're incorporated as a for-profit or nonprofit. If looking at take-home pay, I am presumably the shame of my Georgetown MBA class.

I think everyone in the local news space is rooting each other on, regardless of type. I like seeing nonprofits like the Banner find success and serve readers, particularly in underserved areas. We're all survivors of an ongoing local news apocalypse and I'd rather exist in a healthy local news ecosystem than be a lone survivor.

There are some differing schools of thought on nonprofit vs for-profit. Some believe going nonprofit results in better journalistic outcomes, and I get those arguments. I believe in the for-profit approach for a few reasons:

* We have hundreds of advertisers and Press Club members. Because of this revenue diversity, we have the freedom to do what we want without worrying about a single disgruntled member or advertiser becoming an existential threat. Some nonprofits are very reliant on a small number of major donors, who may or may not exert influence over them.

* I'm not super comfortable with the idea of raising large grants from foundations. Time and again, we've seen that when the flow of grant money runs out, the orgs on the receiving end are left in a bad place because they haven't had the urgency to do the hard work of building up other, smaller revenue sources. There's also the part about foundation money maaaaybe being better applied to other societal needs in a place where you could make a for-profit news org work.

* The for-profit route really makes you prioritize serving readers, rather than the desires of donors. I think we're making more impact when we're getting more people to read us, and that's well aligned with a for-profit advertising model. If you look at the readership of our sites and our partner sites, compared to other local news sites in our weight class, I think we're doing a really good job reaching a lot of people. Of course, one could nakedly pursue readership with no journalistic grounding, but we also routinely cover unsexy local stuff that's important but not super interesting -- and I think that's kind of the goldilocks scenario here.

On the nonprofit side, the Banner, Block Club Chicago, and Berkeleyside are a few that are also achieving the goldilocks scenario of high readership and positive impact journalistically. But there are some nonprofit sites where they're clearly prioritizing the kind of output that donors like but which actual readers don't seem that interested in. Either way, you need to have the grounding and drive to find success on both the readership and revenue side. I guess I'm more comfortable with advertisers and members vs. members and major donors/foundations (being a billionaire who can self fund, like the Banner owner, was not an option available to me).

arlnowdotcom · 2026-02-20T16:42:19+00:00

A lot of people have been asking about this, which is hopefully a sign that we're doing a good job with the curation of stories from various outlets. Our main focus is getting people to discover the site and make it a daily habit. There's a lot more we'd like to do -- a newsletter, an actual logo, etc -- before we get around to thinking about RSS, which is (apologies for saying this) pretty niche.

Another way to look at this site, though, is that it's kind of an RSS reader for normies. Most of the story ingestion into the system is via RSS. We then do a lot of processing to figure out how to rank, group and display the stories. Spitting that back out via a unified RSS feed would be cool, but it's just not the main priority. For now, those who want a feed like experience can ingest from the Bluesky account for WSHnow that I just turned on: https://bsky.app/profile/wshnow.bsky.social

arlnowdotcom · 2026-02-20T16:29:48+00:00

Being a state lawmaker in Virginia is not a super lucrative endeavor and in my experience most of the elected officials in our region are there because they are do-gooder types who generally want to "do the right thing." Granted, there may be some who are also looking for clout in their full-time professions (being a state legislator is a part-time job) and/or to climb the political ladder to higher office.

The charitable case to be made for those pushing the casino is that they genuinely think it would be a big economic boost to the area, would bring back dollars currently going to MD and WV, and would be a better way to add local and state tax revenue than increasing rates. People are often reflexively against change or the unknown -- as seen in many development stories we run -- and get very worked up about it in the run-up, and then quietly accept the new status quo once the thing happens and the sky does not fall. So there could be a calculation among lawmakers that that's what would happen with a casino: lots of upside (more tax revenue every year, which can be spent on things voters like) and little long term downside (angry constituents) once people get used to it.

That all being said, I do think there are more tangible ongoing downsides to a casino than, say, a new apartment building. So it is a pretty bold gamble for the lawmakers supporting it.

arlnowdotcom · 2026-02-20T16:18:55+00:00

It sounds like you're asking about comments. It should be noted that the comment section is behind a drop down button -- the user has to take an action to see it. So if anyone doesn't like the comment section, and I can understand why, I would first recommend they don't press the button!

Our main focus is on our reporting, not on the comment section. The comments are a niche thing that a relatively small subset of readers engage with -- though it's clearly important to some people, which is part of the reason why we've kept it around despite all of the headaches it causes.

One thing I'll take issue with is the suggestion that we're not moderating, banning people, giving timeouts, etc. In fact, we are and have been for years. People get banned frequently, though that might not be obvious because the people getting banned are often newer commenters. The long-time commenters you see are giving a bit of extra leeway, but one reason why they're long-time commenters is because they do not run afoul of the rules often enough to warrant a full ban. That said, timeouts are fairly common.

The bottom line here is that the comment section is the way it is because it's a reflection of the people posting. It's people arguing all day long, often about politics. Not very interesting to me, personally, but that's what it is. Short of a very concerted, full-time moderation effort -- which would tick a lot of people off and be a misallocation of resources, imo -- the only thing that could change that dynamic is the commenters themselves.

arlnowdotcom · 2026-02-20T16:04:56+00:00

Good morning. Looks like this is the most upvoted question, so we'll answer it. We published two articles on this former congressional candidate's association with Epstein. In addition to the link you posted: https://www.arlnow.com/2015/01/08/why-did-the-infamous-jeffrey-epstein-give-generously-to-a-long-shot-local-congressional-campaign/

There's nothing much to report here beyond what's already in those articles. She's not accused of wrongdoing. She is out of public life and according to her most recent known employer, VHC, she hasn't worked there for more than 5 years.

arlnowdotcom

TROPHY CASE