Publisher's Note: Newsrooms are closing across the country. The Alexandria Brief just published its 2,500th story.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Nieman Lab, the Harvard-based journalism research publication, published a piece this week that stopped me for a minute.

The headline called 2026 a “super El Niño year” for local news — one of the worst on record. Newsrooms closing. Reporters laid off. Communities left without anyone covering city hall, school board meetings, or the development project going up on their street.

Yet again, local journalism is having its worst year ever. I’ve been doing this for 15 years. Every year is supposed to be the bottom. It never is.

And then I looked at what’s happened here in the past eleven months, and I felt something else.