Here Comes the Sun: On the Birth of an American Newspaper

By Lori Perkins

I almost wrote an essay about what it felt like to cancel my Washington Post subscription this year after Bezos fired half the newsroom staff.  I had been inspired to go into journalism (I have a journalism degree from NYU, where I taught undergraduate journalism because I started a neighborhood newspaper in upper Manhattan when I graduated from college). I didn’t because I figured that most of my readers wouldn’t care that I had taken a bus down to the United Nations once a week when I was 12 years old because The Washington Post was covering Watergate and that was the only place I knew where could buy it in the 70’s. It broke my heart to stop my subscription.

So you can imagine how overjoyed I was to wake up yesterday morning to the news that 28 of the fired Washington Post journalists had joined NOTUS, a small local Washington DC news group, to become The Washington Sun, a new newspaper that would cover DC, both locally and nationally.

The birth of a new newspaper in these so difficult times for journalism is a joy, an extreme optimism in these very downward times.  Someone wrote that the demise of professional journalism in America is like the fall of the American factory worker in the 70s/80s.  More than 3,500 newspapers have closed since 2005. I think 2/3 of the jobs in this field have disappeared in the last decade.

So even though we are all broke, because inflation is truly eating away at us, please try to support this newspaper, with a free subscription, or a paid one! https://washingtonsun.com/?redirected=notus_org