Northern Virginia Sun

The Northern Virginia Sun was a newspaper published in Arlington, Virginia, 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 Sun's "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 Sun's 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."

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.

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