FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS | FCNP.COM
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FEBRAURY 14 – 20, 2019 | PAGE 13
Wall Street Eats Newspapers
This week it is not the Russians, or Trump and the National Enquirer that a new, heavily-researched expose in the Washington Post has brought front and center as guilty parties in the would-be destruction of America and her democratic institutions. It is the third leg, so to speak, of an ugly Martian war machine of utter destruction (as imagined by H.G. Wells in his “War of the Worlds” fantasy of over a century ago), Wall Street and its indifferent, insatiable designs. It’s Wall Street’s so-called “hedge funds,” to be exact, and they’re ripping to shreds the public’s ability to know by systematically buying and dismantling newspaper organizations FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS across the nation. Most newspapers are vulnerable these days because the combined effects of alternative media (the Internet and organizations that masquerade as news, like Fox News) and declining advertising revenues that are the result of competition and the general “new normal” downsizing of the U.S. economy. The numbers are staggering with 45 percent of newsroom positions having vanished just between 2008 (the Great Recession) and 2017. Some 1,800 newspapers, primarily weeklies, have disappeared from the U.S. landscape since 2004, according to the University of North Carolina’s School of Media and Journalism, leaving 171 counties without any paper and roughly half the 3,143 counties in the U.S. with only one newspaper, usually a small weekly. In this context, reverting to digital alternatives has also proven wanting, as the bulk of advertising revenues derived from that source have already been gobbled up by Google and Facebook, collecting 57 percent of all the digital advertising revenue in the U.S. last year. In addition, sites like Instagram, Amazon, Snapchat and Twitter, none of which are news organizations per se, also corner large shares of the ad revenue market, according to a recent article by Paul Farhi in the Post. This has led to the recent stunning announcements of huge newsroom layoffs of online news sources like Buzzfeed, showing zero net revenue despite a $300 million budget, Yahoo, the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast, among others. So, from top to bottom, except where an incredibly wealthy individual is willing to subsidize a news organization, such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos with the Washington Post, everybody is hurting. There is nothing on the horizon to suggest a change for the better, either. It’s in this context that, as the Post’s Jonathan O’Connell and Emma Brown reported this week (“Hedge Fund Guts Newspapers As It Profits from Their Land”), Wall Street asset-stripping operations like Alden Global Capital and their fronts like Twenty State Holdings and Digital First Media are coming after newspapers, including with a present, attempted hostile takeover of Gannett News, to sell off their tangible assets — mostly real estate holdings — and leave the remains (the newsrooms) writhing in pain and paralysis in snow-bound gutters. This approach has led to the veritable demise of formerly proud urban daily newspapers like the Denver Post (long after its rival, the Rocky Mountain News, went under) and Gannett’s USA Today. This is a horrible, predatory process that does not constitute capitalism, but the lowest form of bottom-feeder exploitation, and the losers are not the ailing news organizations themselves, so much as the American people and the health and stability of the national democratic process that depends on public information to survive. The bloodthirsty wretches of Wall Street who fever over the carcasses of once proud newspapers neither know, nor care, anything for what makes for a truly free society. They’re so deeply wallowed in their own cultural perversions that they wouldn’t know a moral argument for preserving democratic institutions if it hit them in the face. I’ve experienced this first hand with my own newspaper, the Falls Church News-Press, now going on 30 years of consecutive weekly publication. That criminal enterprise known as a bank, Wells Fargo, called in my line of credit a decade ago simply because they surmised that the paper wasn’t going to make it. Well, we’re still here and the debt has been paid. But, unfortunately, so is Wells Fargo. Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com.
Nicholas F. Benton
Our Man in Arlington By Charlie Clark
During the grandiloquent debate several years back over whether Arlington should allow backyard chicken coops, references were made to the glories of household egg production practiced by our forebears. Last month I got to chat with one such natural foods practitioner: The almost-80-year-old Sam Day, an exemplar of our county’s salt-of-the-earth workforce. I was also able to update him on county preservation developments in his own chicken coop story. Growing up in the 1940s on N. Kenmore St. in the Maywood neighborhood (at 21st Ave., “the only avenue in Arlington,” he notes), Day helped with his father’s egg business. Behind the 1908 house in which Sam Day was born was the two-story “chicken house” built in 1920. “The chickens didn’t run loose,” he assured me. But the birds were fed well enough to support a basement egg distribution operation that endured for 35 years. As a boy, Sam and three siblings helped judge and grade the eggs (looking for blood spots, considered a flaw). The family sorted them — medium, large, extra-large, jumbo and double yokes. Then they packaged them, first in brown bags, later in boxes
they made with a hand-operated machine. “Some eggs were brown” from Rhode Island Red hens, he says. The Days would pack 30-dozen crates in a gutted 1935 Dodge for delivery to regular customers in North and South Arlington, as well as across the Potomac. Because the customized car held only two people, Sam would catch the old Arnold bus at Quincy St. at Wash. Blvd., ride into Georgetown and transfer at Wisconsin Ave. to meet his dad at Massachusetts Ave. They delivered eggs until 7 or 8 p.m. every day but Wednesdays and Sundays. Customer demand exploded. So his father began driving weekly out to farms near Culpeper. “He bought them as is,” Day remembers, “and while most farmers cleaned their eggs, one didn’t.” So it was left to the Day kids to brush away the manure. Sam played the egg man until he began junior high in 1951 at the still-under-construction Stratford building, before moving on to Washington-Lee High. While the egg profits allowed his siblings to attend American University, Sam tried it but chose a different path. “I wanted a job where I didn’t have to depend on anyone else,” he said. First he went full-time delivering eggs. Then he landed a job driving a delivery truck for Schlitz beer out
of a warehouse at Four Mile Run and Walter Reed Dr. Putting in 60-70 hours a week, Day married, and, with two children, bought a house in 1964, mortgaged “for $169 a month.” His father retired from the egg business in 1968. When his mother died in 1995, the Kenmore St. house (their home for 70 years) was sold. The chicken house fell into disrepair. Last year, the home was purchased by Tom and Chrissi Gelson, from Marion, Mass. “We knew it was one of the oldest homes in Maywood, and the chicken coop one of the oldest agricultural outbuildings standing in Arlington,” Tom told me. During renovations — still ongoing under strict guidelines of Maywood and the Historical Affairs and Landmark Review Board — they kept only the shed’s brick chimney as a memory. “We wish we could have restored the chicken coop,” said the new owner. “But much of it collapsed years ago because of disrepair.” *** Update on a traditional rivalry: At the Jan. 26 high school basketball game between Yorktown and Washington-Lee, an unusual ritual unfolded. In a nod to the recent fight over renaming W-L, Yorktown Patriots taunted the Generals by sporting T-shirts reading “Beat W-?” They chanted, “What’s your name?”