Twice-weekly in Republican county in No. Virginia drops 'Democrat' name, citing need for circulation

If you're in a struggling industry at a time when the country has become politically polarized, being identified with a political party is not good business. That's what the twice-weekly Fauquier Times in Northern Virginia horse country said when it abandoned the name "Fauquier Times-Democrat" June 19.

"In an age which is, perhaps, more shaped and informed by political identity than any other in our history, having a word in our banner that is so associated with a political party is no longer a very astute business decision," Executive Editor Bill Walsh explained to readers in an editorial. The 14,000-circulation paper is part of Times Community News, a family-owned chain.

The Warrenton newspaper, founded in 1817, adopted the partisan name 40 years after the end of the Civil War, when rural Virginia was firmly Democratic. But now Fauquier County is reliably Republican, and Walsh said the paper's circulation department concluded the "Democrat" was a drag, even though the paper is editorially independent and its last presidential endorsement went to Republican Sen. John McCain in 2008.

The change prompted an editorial in The Boston Globe, which said of the paper, "Hopefully its action isn’t a harbinger of things to come. For decades, readers of all political stripes have been mature enough to take newspapers with historical partisan names in stride. If that’s no longer possible, it would be a sad commentary on our hyper-polarized era." (Read more)