The Northern Virginia Sun was a newspaper published in Arlington, Virginia, from the 1930s until 1998. For much of its life, it was a six-day-a-week broadsheet, published Monday through Saturday, that emphasized local news.
Its legacy can be seen in the Arlington public library, which has maintained a collection of the Suns "Then and Now" series about Arlington landmarks and history. These began appearing in the Sun in the 1950s and continued, on and off, through the 1980s.
The Suns corporate descendant, Sun Gazette Newspapers, was sold to American Community Newspapers in 2005.
The Sun drew national attention in the late 1970s when owner Herman J. Obermayer said the Sun would print the name of accusers in rape cases that came to trial, out of a sense of "fairness" between the two sides. Time magazine reported that Obermayer's policy was "hotly denounced by local feminists, police, prosecutors, hospital officials and nearly all the Sun readers who have written or telephoned Obermayer to comment." Time quoted Benjamin C. Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post, as saying, "It's wrong. It's misguided. We wouldn't do it."
History
The Sun began as The Arlington Sun in the 1930s. In 1957, new owners renamed it the Northern Virginia Sun "and moved the entire operation into a former A&P supermarket" at 3409 Wilson Boulevard.
The new owners were mostly well-connected and well-off Democrats "who had fought shoulder to shoulder in the [Adlai E.] Stevenson campaigns" in 1952 and 1956. The four principal partners were George W. Ball, later an under secretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations; Philip M. Stern, a grandson of Sears, Roebuck chairman Julius Rosenwald and son of a president of New Orleans Cotton Exchange; Clayton Fritchey, a journalist and Democratic operative who, as a reporter for the Cleveland Press, had covered Eliot Ness's campaign to root out police corruption in Cleveland; and Arnold Sagalyn, who signed on as assistant publisher. Stern and Fritchey were alumni of the New Orleans Item, Fritchey's next career stop after Cleveland. Fritchey had been the editor in New Orleans, Stern a reporter and editorial writer.
Other backers of the Sun included Gilbert Hahn, a Republican who was heir to the Hahn shoe store empire and chairman of the D.C. City Council.
"The investment proved to be a disastrous mistake from the beginning," historian James A. Bill wrote.
"Their dream was to turn [the Sun] into a suburban success like Newsday on Long Island, whose concentrated circulation and affluent readership had managed to scare the large New York City newspapers," the author Eleanor Lanahan wrote. But the Washington dailies had deeper penetration in suburban Virginia than the New York dailies did and readers' habits were changing as early-evening television news undercut afternoon newspapers like the Sun, which later billed itself as the "daily hometown newspaper of Arlington, Falls Church and Fairfax."
Compounding the problem, Ball and the Suns new other owners—along with some of the reporters they hired—were outsiders. Fritchey, for example, lived in the Georgetown section of Washington and was a regular on the dinner-party circuit there, not in Arlington. One of the reporters was Frances Lanahan, the daughter of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. "
"The staff … was young and underpaid," or worse, unsophisticated and unaware. The nationally syndicated columnist Drew Pearson ran an item about Fritchey in 1958 that did not reflect well on the Suns staff. Gov. W. Averell Harriman had called the Sun, looking for Fritchey. The person who took Harriman's call did not know who Fritchey was.
By 1960, Fritchey left the Sun. "The paper had been losing money, and management decided that the readership had been too transient. Arlington was a temporary stop for airline stewardesses, Pentagon employees and foreign service people who had no investment in the schools as most of their children weren't educated there. Too few residents of Northern Virginia were calling it a home. Also, the Sun had never been able to attract major advertisers. Supermarkets and department stores had concentrated on the wider circulation of the metropolitan papers. Compounding the problem, in 1960 the newspaper union went on strike for higher wages and selected the Sun, as one of the weaker papers, to make its point. [the Sun] brought in scabs, which was unsettling for the liberal, pro-union management, who had to cross their picket lines to get to work. The strike was so costly that it precipitated the sale of the paper."