That Was the Week That Was
And the Inaugural H. L. Mencken Award Goes to…
By Steve Watkins
ADVANCE EDITOR
“As I look back over a misspent life, I find myself more and more convinced that I had more fun doing news reporting than in any other enterprise. It is really the life of kings.” —H. L. Mencken
Shoeless Keith Epps at The Free Lance-Star wins the inaugural H. L. Mencken Award (minus the anti-Semitism) for kick-ass Fredericksburg journalism. Day in and day out the most productive writer in town, Keith absolutely crushed it on Friday, June 5 with a story he broke about a suspect detained in the series of sexual assaults on the city’s walking paths. (Keith, who knows how to work his sources, managed to get hold of the search warrant affidavit late Thursday afternoon.) He also had stories about a man charged with molesting his former girlfriend’s daughter thanks to the girl’s grandmother snooping through the man’s cell phone, and a “domestic incident” involving a terrifying car chase and crash near the University of Mary Washington, with two small children in the vehicle, followed by what police say was a murder, a second car chase, and a suicide. I would link to the articles, but The Free Lance-Star has a firewall and you should be subscribing already anyway.
With a new editor and a new features and business reporter to replace the recently-retired and irreplaceable Cathy Jett, the FLS—or “The Lance-Star” as my Mom used to call it, out of respect for the hyphen—is on the rebound, with local stories now dominating the front page. That new hire, Pilar Davis, nailed it twice this week—once with a feature on a local kid who just graduated from Columbia University after a stint in prison, and the second time with a feature about Stafford High School Methuselah James Andrews, who after 60 years in the classroom may gave set a Guinness World Record for longest career as a public school teacher. Pilar, who has a doctorate in Higher Ed Organizational Leadership (and with whom I fully expect to pull out my PhD and do that “Doctor, Doctor, Doctor” routine from the movie Spies Like Us whenever we meet in person), left out relevant details on the young man’s conviction—she wrote that he drove the “getaway car” during an unidentified crime “where someone was killed”—but she’s nonetheless an important addition the the FLS, as is the new editor, Carrie Sidener, who’s already made a number of smart upgrades to the paper, plus she graduated from Hollins University where two of my four daughters also went to school.
The indefatigable Alex Murphy, meanwhile, continued to own The Lance-Star sports section with three bylines in Friday’s paper as well—one on James Monroe boys’ tennis, and one each on Riverbend and King George boys’ baseball. Alex could stand to work on his ledes, and last I checked there are a lot of girls playing high school sports (including my youngest, Lili, who was on the girls’ basketball, soccer, field hockey, and lacrosse teams when she went to JM). We’ll cut Alex some slack, though, as he works himself ragged trying to keep byline pace with Shoeless Keith.
A Florida billionaire named Jeff Bezos David Hoffman, who already owned a bunch of newspapers, recently bought a controlling share of Lee Enterprises, the company that owns The Free Lance-Star, meaning he now holds sway over 140 papers in 29 states, with circulations ranging from 5,000 to 250,000. (The Free Lance-Star’s print circulation is around 15,000.) Hoffman says he has copies of all 140 delivered to his $105 million Gold Coast mansion every morning so he can mark them up with a red felt tip pen. His mission, he says, is to bring back local journalism in America, and he’s pledged to invest serious money to make it happen. Forbes Magazine featured him in a cover story titled “Paper Pusher.”
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A shout out to Joey LoMonaco at the Fredericksburg Press Press for his story about Delegate Josh Cole earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of Mary Washington after Cole dropped out of Liberty University years ago to enter the ministry. Joey’s sharp eye for detail (which he must have developed as one of my UMW students back in the day) was on the money in the article, headlined “More than a decade after flunking out, Del. Cole earns a degree of redemption.” Here are the first couple of grafs:
Joshua Cole has held a number of titles. Reverend. Delegate.
But, until earlier this month, one honorific eluded him: college graduate.
“I legitimately never thought I would graduate,” Cole said during a recent interview.
When Cole — wearing an African stole and draped in a purple cord — walked across the stage at the University of Mary Washington on May 9, it marked the final steps of a circuitous journey that included as waypoints the Rev. Jerry Farwell Sr., a lost election, and a degree program that’s a credit to second chances.
Nice.
A nod as well to Kathy Knotts and Taft Coghill at The Free Press for their science reporting this week—Kathy for taking on fecal coliform monitoring in the Rappahannock, and Taft for wading into the acronym-infested waters of data center pollution. On the one hand—the one that’s clapping--Kathy went with a lively scene lede. On the other hand—the one signaling “Meh”—she buried the news, which is that the river is mostly poop free and OK for you to swim in, at least for the moment.
From Kathy’s “UMW team tests the waters — literally — with weekly coliform monitoring along Rappahannock”:
Two University of Mary Washington students lower a pole into the Rappahannock River at City Dock. They collect a cupful of water and pour it into a small bottle. Next, another device is lowered into the river to measure dissolved oxygen, temperature, pH and salinity.
University of Mary Washington student Garrett Driscoll shows some of the equipment used to test for bacteria levels in the Rappahannock River Wednesday May 27, 2026.
The sample, collected on a recent Wednesday in May, will be taken to campus and analyzed in a lab.
What are these students looking for? Harmful bacteria, similar to what was discharged into the Potomac River just a few months ago.
Question transitions? No, thank you. Better to just say.
Taft, meanwhile, was off setting a modern acronym record for 15-inch stories in his article “DEQ issued air pollution violations on Spotsylvania data center campus in 2025,” an overly technical exegesis that contained IOP, DEQ, ADS, SCR, PM10, and PM2.5, the full name for only one of which I was able to remember after (and while) reading the story—twice.
All was forgiven, though, when Taft trekked over to King George to write a lively piece with killer quotes from a packed meetinghouse full of pissed-off King Georgers who had only just discovered that county supervisors approved several data centers on tracts of land almost literally their back yards—a year ago.
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And last, writer/editor Uriah Kiser with The Potomac News wrote a story I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention—about FXBG Advance co-founder and now-former editor Marty Davis leaving The Advance to start a statewide newsletter he’s calling The Virginia Free Press. Folks over at the Fredericksburg Free Press aren’t happy about Marty swiping their name, and are wondering if it has anything to do with the journalistic antipathy that has strained relations between the two publications since their respective launches a couple of years ago. No word on what recently-installed CBS news chief Bari Weiss, editor of the national online publication The Free Press, thinks about the name. My cousin-in-law Adam Fried confessed to me at lunch the other day that he wasn’t sure which Free Press was which any more. I didn’t have the heart to tell him what we called the underground newspaper my friends and I published back in high school.
Here’s the Potomac News article, in any event, with a surprising amount of inside information, and a passage in which Marty declines to answer when asked if his new venture is being funded by any of those tech companies shrink-wrapping the Commonwealth with data centers: “Martin Davis Leaves Fredericksburg Advance, Launches Virginia Free Press.”
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I sought in political reporting what Galsworthy in another context had called “the significant trifle”—the bit of dialogue, the overlooked fact, the buried observation which illuminated the realities of the situation.
—I. F. Stone
I. F. Stone’s Weekly
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Steve Watkins is editor of The FXBG Advance. You can contact him at 540-842-2066 or swatkins000@gmail.com.