Our Mission:
We give you the information you need to make intelligent decisions about your community and hold government officials — elected and appointed — accountable. Our readers are involved citizens who vote in local elections, pay taxes and volunteer at their church, PTA and other local organizations. They care passionately about this great community we are fortunate to call home.
Our readers understand that not everyone will agree on the best solution, but all of us are neighbors and should treat each other with respect.
Who I am:
My name is Digby Solomon, and I retired as president of The Daily Press, The Virginia Gazette and the Tidewater Review in 2016 after a 40-year news career that included being a foreign correspondent in Latin America and stints in television, radio, internet platforms and newspapers across the country.
I started as a cub reporter covering James City County in 1972 for the late Times-Herald, the Daily Press’ afternoon paper. I moved back in 2007 to run The Daily Press group, with the goal of retiring here. My youngest daughter, now a journalist herself, attended Williamsburg-James City County public schools for part of her elementary and all of her middle and high school education.
The newspaper economic model was imploding when I left in 2016, and I have sadly watched newspapers across the country dwindle to irrelevance or go out of business altogether.
The decline of local news is, as my colleague Marisa J. Porto so cogently argues, a problem that stresses the very fabric of our democracy and how we treat each other as citizens and neighbors. Here’s a link to her thoughts on the matter.
But technological developments such as this platform are making it possible for small organizations to provide local residents with the news that matters to them.
For the next few months you will have free access to our local news. We will continue to evolve our coverage and content based on your feedback, as we work to better suit your information needs. We are currently publishing updates three times a week — Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday — with extra editions as news warrants.
Eventually, we will require a paid subscription to access most of our news — for a modest price equivalent to a latte at your favorite coffee shop.
Join the crew
We are looking for a few local residents who have well-informed and passionate opinions about our community to serve as guest columnists. We are specifically looking for a contributor who wishes to write from the liberal point of view, and one from the conservative point of view. But we want opinions on current local issues, not generic national conversations.
Our goal here is to ensure balanced and factual editorial opinions from all sides, not a free for all. This will require a serious commitment to produce one good piece of 500 words or less every month. It will be edited for clarity and content. And you must agree to follow our ethics policy.
All our readers will be invited to comment on every story and column we post.
We also want your suggestions about stories, events and topics you want us to cover in our community.
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To learn more about the tech platform that powers this publication, visit Substack.com.
