Welcome to The Fairfax Machine

A newsletter covering Fairfax County, Virginia, from a former Washington Post editor who lives here, too.

My wife and I moved to Fairfax County in April, to a neighborhood near Lake Anne that is, best we can tell, run by the geese. We got here a few months after I left my job in the Washington Post’s Metro section, where I edited news and enterprise stories and, for a spell, ran the Post’s history vertical. I wrote sometimes, too.

Whether the richest man in the solar system owns your news organization or not, it’s a hard time to make local news work. Limited space often squeezes out hometown coverage on national papers’ homepages, and hedge funds continue to gobble smaller ones up and strip them down. A bunch here in Northern Virginia have folded, or merged, or shrunk.

The Fairfax Machine will try to fill the gap.

Each week, The Machine will connect and reflect what it means to live today in Fairfax County — the D.C. region's largest county, the nation’s fifth-wealthiest and a swing vote in a purple state. I'll focus on topics that matter to residents most, spanning housing and development, education, local and county politics, criminal justice, transportation, restaurants, business, and culture.

Being here for a month means I’m no expert on Fairfax like the geese are, but it also means I have so much I want to learn about and then share with you. Things like:

• How can Fairfax County reverse its population slide?

• Does anyone actually want that Tysons casino?

• And: Why are all the restaurants at that one Herndon shopping center so good?

Subscribers can expect in their inbox a mix of news and analysis, Q&As, local history, and narrative features. You can also expect some trial and error.

To get The Machine humming, I’ll need your help, too. What news are you seeing or hearing around Fairfax? What neighborhood weirdness or controversy is your group chat or dinner table buzzing about?

Send your tips my way: fairfaxmachine@substack.com.

Ryan