RIP Precursor to Our News-Press

RIP the journalistic forebear to the mighty Falls Church News-Press

The legendary Santa Barbara, Calif, daily of the same name has shuttered after 168 years with a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing last week ending its run as California’s oldest and longest-running newspaper.

The Santa Barbara News-Press, founded in 1855, was the place where our founder and owner Nicholas F. Benton first got paid for his journalistic endeavors, notwithstanding the 15 cents a few of his kindly neighbors dished out when he went from door to door as a seven-year-old in little Avila Beach, Calif. to peddle a few of his own hectographed Benton Star newspapers.

“News-Press” is the name our hero chose in founding his newspaper in Falls Church in 1991 among alternative choices, such as “Independent,” as he wanted it to be clear to readers that it was a real newspaper with real news, and not anything else. (He was in recovery from a bad period in his life when everything, no matter what it was called, was a political thing).

Benton wasn’t stealing the News-Press name because there are other papers with that same name across our land. But his appreciation for his first newspaper job was more clearly reflected in his decision to adopt the sevenpart Platform that has been reprinted on the editorial page of each and every one of his newspaper’s editions since its founding in 1991.

That noble, classic and aspirational Platform, beginning with “Keep the news clean and fair,” was originally authored by Thomas More Storke (1876-1971), the Santa Barbara native who spent $2,000 buy the first of a series of local papers in 1900 and eventually merge them into the Santa Barbara News-Press. His Platform was published in his newspaper every day from the day Storke penned it in the mid-1920s until he sold it to the Philadelphia Bulletin in the mid-1960s, including through the 1960s when Benton worked there as a stringer in high school and college then as a full-time reporter for a year before he left to attend a graduate theological seminary.

When Storke, whom our Benton, then a cub reporter, encountered on a couple of occasions when the much revered, moderately rotund old man in his signature white hat and dark business suit walked through the editorial offices, finally sold the paper, the new owners immediately ceased publication of the Platform, retaining only the phrase, “Without Fear or Favor,” as a sort of motto.

Stroke was a Democrat who served briefly as an appointed U.S. Senator in the late 1930s and as a FDR delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1962 for his editorials attacking the rabidly right-wing John Birch Society.

Sadly, in recent years the paper fell into the hands of a rabidly pro-Trump owner, which resulted in little sympathy in the community for its steady decline and now demise.

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1. Keep the news clean and fair

2. Play no favorites, never mix business and editorial policy

3. Do not let the news columns reflect editorial content

4. Publish the news that is public property without fear or favor of friend or foe.

5. Accept no charity and ask no favors.

6. Give ‘value received’ for every dollar you take in.

7. Make the paper show a profit if you can, but above all keep it clean, fearless and fair.

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Schools Must Prepare Students for Efforts

Editor,

Thank you very much for publishing this paper. In a time when many do not have alternatives to fake news readily available, Falls Church and Fairfax residents are lucky to have the Falls Church News Press. After working as a teacher in public secondary schools in the Washington, DC area, I discovered an unhelpful regional trend we need to reverse. The trend is not allowing students to receive F’s or grades below passing. This trend is not new or surprising. The first D I ever earned came in college, and caused me shock and upset. Although I had prepared as usual, my performance had not been rewarded with the usual B- or better. That horrified me, but thankfully, not my mother. The year before last, in 2022, a student in Pittsylvania County committed suicide after his parents criticized him for receiving a failing grade. In spite of such a tragedy, not allowing students to fail tests is a mistake. Businesses avoid failure and often refuse to admit to it because it is their job to produce products they hope will earn them profits. It is the job of a school to do something different: to educate people for myriad different futures in which they will, inevitably, experience failure as adults. A good school system must prepare its students to expect to have to try hard and to try again, and to avoid being unduly shocked if at first they do not succeed. Where failure is forbidden, success is meaningless. Where failure is possible, it can help reveal deficiencies which we could not fix were they hidden. If everyone passes, could a test be too easy? If everyone fails, could something be wrong? Administrators need to ask these questions. The number of enticements to teachers fudge the numbers in the world of digital assessments is great, and teachers are human. Most of us might be tempted to take the occasional short cut. Success looks great, and feels great when meaningful. Yet failure itself is not meaningless. It can teach us the long, slow, hard work of being patient with the effort taken to do something difficult. That is a lesson we do not want our students to miss.

Ann Bayliss Falls Church

Editor,

I’m on my bandwagon again! Why does Fairfax County want to discontinue leaf pickup? Is it because they can’t find companies on a contract basis to do the work? If they can’t find people to pick up the leaves, can the homeowners find someone without being gouged? If service is discontinued is Fairfax County going to refund the $178.77 that they charge me every year for leaf pickup? Additionally, if Fairfax County wants to save money for leaf pickup, they don’t need a third pickup date as the leaves are gone in January. Citizens — rise up and oust the rascals!!!!!

William J Dunn