Richmond News Leader, R I P

National Review, June 22, 1992

ON MAY 30, the Richmond News Leader, one of the nation's great newspapers, published its last issue. The headline, from Poe, read, "NEVERMORE."

The newspaper had been published for 104 years, but its golden age was marked by the editorship of Douglas Southall Freeman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Robert E. Lee and George Washington. Its contributions to national journalism were extraordinary, including James Jackson Kilpatrick, who ran the opinion page from 1961 to 1967, cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, a national presence, Roger Mudd, who soon went on to TV, and the most recent editor, Ross Mackenzie.

The News Leader succumbed to the troubled fortunes of afternoon newspapers, and has been folded into its sister paper, the Times-Dispatch, with most of its employees joining the new entity. But this distinctive journalistic voice will be missed. Its disappearance represents yet another advance of homogenization and yet another erosion of the sense of place in American journalism. Ave atque vale.