Bang up story!

A new "Indie" community newspaper debuted yesterday, taking the place of the familiar Loudoun Independent that was "merged" with the Loudoun Times-Mirror last month.
The challenge of maintaining two community newspapers using the leadership and staff of both papers is to maintain reader interest in both.
Keeping the Times-Mirror as a weekly Wednesday publication and shifting the Independent to Friday publication, as was announced along with the merger, could have relegated the Independent to simply publishing the community news already reported in the Times-Mirror, possibly with updates or a late-breaking story.
But the Indie is not at all "your buyer's newspaper." It's a brand new newpaper aiming at a separate readership from that of Times-Mirror (as well as the old Independent).
Most newspaper readers go to the sections that interest them most. Editors try to offer a mix of what the business calls "hard" and "soft" news in an effort to make the newspaper attractive to everyone. "Hard" is the "important" news about government and crime and development -- the information that the editor believes readers need to be contributing citizens in the community.
But most readers are more interested in "soft" news about kids, schools, health, sports and their own neighborhoods.
Because the Times-Mirror (as well as the competing Leesburg and Ashburn Today newspapers) do a good job of covering the community news -- the "hard" civic news as well as some of the "soft" news -- the Indie has choosen to focus on news that is more interesting to more readers than simply a repeat of what county supervisors did Tuesday and the recent actions of the Sheriff's Department.
The first issue of the new Indie includes an eye-catching design plus a bang-up lead story spread over the front six pages. The story is about the use of the drug Adderall (I'd never heard of it) in our public schools!
Adderall (a prescription drug for treating ADHD, says the Indie) apparently is being used by healthy local high school students to sharpen their attention spans while taking tests or "cramming" for tomorrow's test. Students told the Indie that it definitely improves test scores!
Writers Alex Withrow and Christie Boyden did a bang-up job on the story, interviewing students to learn about how the drug is used (or mis-used), and interviewing school officials who clearly had little knowledge about the drug's use in the schools they administer.
Well they do now! And so do parents.
For me, that was reporting worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.
I doubt that the Indie can come up next week with another story of so much interest to so many readers, but I'll be watching my driveway for my copy of the Indie to see what it does offer.
Welcome Indie!

(If you didn't see a copy of the Indie in your driveway on Friday, there still may be copies at your local library.)

-- martin casey

(Note: The author served as editor of the Loudoun Times-Mirror, 1996-2003, and as editor of the Loudoun Easterner, 2005-2009. The Independent was founded in 2005 following the sale of the Easterner to new owners. The new owners closed the Easterner in June, 2009.)