The table was simple: a folding tent, a Local News Day sign, a spread of cards for three local newsrooms, and a handmade bookmark telling the 200-year history of journalism in this city. What happened around it was anything but ordinary.
Over the weekend of April 11 and 12, Bloom Labs founder Stephen Jefferson and students from Theogony, the student newspaper of Alexandria City High School, staffed three Local News Day pop-up events across Alexandria — Saturday morning at St. Elmo’s Coffee Pub in Del Ray, and Sunday at both the Old Town North Farmers Market and the Four Mile Run Farmers Market. The Alexandria Brief stopped by all three.
The events were organized as a belated, in-person extension of the inaugural Local News Day on April 9, the national day of action that drew more than 1,300 newsrooms and 200 partner organizations across all 50 states. Jefferson, who has spent more than a decade working in the journalism ecosystem through Bloom Labs, said farmers markets felt like the right venue from the start.
“They are already embedded in the community, already a resource, an accessible resource for any walk of life,” Jefferson told The Alexandria Brief. “Folks can walk up into a farmers market and they’re also dispersed around Alexandria.”…