Lake of the Woods Democratic ClubTown of Orange Community Room
135 Warren Street
Orange, Virginia
Jim Phillips of Richmond, the third candidate seeking the 7th District Democratic Congressional nomination to oppose Eric Cantor will be at our meeting this Saturday to meet with the Committee and introduce himself to us. He will be introduced by Joseph T. Samuels, Jr., the son of Joseph T. Samuels, Sr., Commissioner of Revenue for Orange County for many years.
Dr. Christopher Lillis will speak to the club about the President’s health care reform law at a special time and place. The presentation will be in the lower level of the LOW Clubhouse.
The March Steering Committee meeting will be held at Lois Powell’s home at 417 Birdie Drive.
Here’s a map to that location:
Top editors from the three newspapers who most often cover Lake of the Woods participated in a panel discussion at the club’s Feb. 16 meeting, telling an audience of about 60 members and visitors that political bias is not a factor in their editorial decisions but that the economic condition of the industry often is.
Dick Hammerstrom, local news editor of The Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg; Jeff Say, community editor of The Star-Exponent in Culpeper; and Jeff Poole, managing editor of the Orange County Review, participated in an informative discussion of the issues facing their industry and answered questions from the audience.
The three editors said the flagging profitability of newspapers has greatly reduced the size of news staffs and made the news-gathering process more difficult than ever. Mr. Say and Mr. Poole, whose papers are both owned by Richmond-based Media General Corp., said the content of their news columns are edited at a central copy desk in Lynchburg in order to keep costs low. The result of this, they said, is news coverage that is less locally oriented and less likely to reflect the needs of local readers.
Each of the editors said that changes to the media landscape brought on by the Internet and other factors have resulted in newsroom budgets being slashed and editors being asked to do more with less.
Not waiting for a member of the audience to bring it up, Mr. Hammerstrom addressed an error that appeared recently in the Free Lance-Star regarding the estimated cost of improvements to the LOW Clubhouse bar. Despite journalists’ best efforts to keep such errors from occurring, he said, “We are human, and we do make mistakes.”
Each of the editors encouraged residents of Lake of the Woods to keep them informed of newsworthy events in the community.