FFXnow
FFXnow is an online local news publication covering Fairfax County, Virginia, published at ffxnow.com. It describes itself as the definitive local news source for Fairfax County, combining countywide coverage with hyperlocal reporting on the Reston and Tysons areas. The site is published by Local News Now, a Northern Virginia-based company whose other publications include ARLnow in Arlington County and ALXnow in Alexandria. FFXnow officially launched in February 2022, but its community coverage in Fairfax County reaches back to 2013, when its predecessor site Reston Now began publishing.
Origins in Reston Now
The roots of FFXnow lie in Reston Now, a hyperlocal news site for the planned community of Reston in western Fairfax County. Reston Now was launched in November 2013 by Scott Brodbeck, the founder of Local News Now, as an expansion of the model he had developed with ARLnow in Arlington. Contemporary coverage of the launch in Street Fight, a publication covering hyperlocal media, noted that Reston was a nationally recognized planned community of about 60,000 people, built from farmland in Northern Virginia, and that the new site arrived ahead of Reston's 50th anniversary celebrations in April 2014 and the planned connection of the community to the Washington Metrorail network. Reston Now joined ARLnow and Bethesda Now in Brodbeck's growing group of suburban Washington, D.C., news sites at that time.
Over the following years, Local News Now's portfolio changed. Some expansion sites were sold or closed, and the company refocused on its Northern Virginia communities. In Fairfax County, Reston Now was joined by Tysons Reporter, a sister site covering Tysons, the county's major commercial district. Those two hyperlocal audiences—Reston in the west and Tysons in the east—formed the foundation on which FFXnow was built.
Launch of FFXnow in 2022
FFXnow was announced in January 2022 and officially launched on February 22, 2022, as a Fairfax County-wide news source and a new home for Reston Now and Tysons Reporter. The two predecessor sites were folded into FFXnow, although each retained its brand identity through separate social media accounts and daily email newsletters focused on its coverage area, and their archives remained on their original domains at the time of the transition. Within FFXnow, Reston and Tysons each have their own section, preserving the hyperlocal identity readers knew while adding reporting that spans the whole county.
At launch, FFXnow was led by a team of three full-time journalists. The publication said it planned eventually to expand hyperlocal reporting to additional areas within Fairfax County, while immediately giving Reston and Tysons readers more coverage of county government and other countywide issues than the community sites had previously offered. The launch was announced alongside additional business partnerships and an editorial leadership hire at Local News Now, indicating that the countywide site was a significant investment for the company.
Coverage and editorial focus
FFXnow covers local government, development, business and breaking news across Fairfax County, together with community news from its hyperlocal areas. Its reporting follows the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and county agencies, land-use and development proposals, transportation, schools, public safety and the businesses and institutions that shape daily life in one of Virginia's most populous counties. The site emphasizes up-to-the-minute news and stories its editors say readers will not find elsewhere, an approach inherited from the Local News Now model of frequent updates throughout the day.
The Reston and Tysons sections reflect the distinct characters of their communities. Reston coverage deals with a large planned community with its own village centers, lakes and community associations, while Tysons coverage follows a major employment and retail center that has been adding residential development and Metrorail-served urban districts. Countywide stories—budgets, elections, countywide services and major incidents—run alongside that neighborhood-level reporting, so a reader interested in one community also encounters the county government decisions that affect it.
Publisher: Local News Now
FFXnow is one of three Northern Virginia sites published by Local News Now, alongside ARLnow, covering Arlington County, and ALXnow, covering Alexandria. The company was built by founder Scott Brodbeck, a former local television writer-producer in Washington, D.C., who launched ARLnow in January 2010 after leaving NBC4 in Washington. Brodbeck has described starting ARLnow after recognizing that web-based local news was the future and that his own community was not covered in depth by existing outlets; he registered the domain and built the first site himself. The company grew from a one-person operation run from his home into a credentialed news organization with employees and office space.
The Local News Now model, applied across its sites, pairs frequent, free online reporting with advertising from local businesses. Brodbeck has credited the model's success to producing a news product that a large share of the community reads and talks about, together with advertising that is reasonably priced, simple to understand and effective for local businesses. FFXnow brought that model to the county scale, arguing that Fairfax County—a large and diverse jurisdiction—had surprisingly few mass online advertising options for local organizations outside the major technology platforms.
Audience and newsletters
The combined audiences of Reston Now and Tysons Reporter gave FFXnow an established readership at launch, and the publication reported rapid early growth: by April 2022, about two months after launch, it said monthly readership had risen above 250,000 readers and 500,000 pageviews. Email newsletters are central to its distribution. Reston and Tysons readers continued to receive afternoon newsletters under those brands, and readers can also sign up for the FFXnow daily newsletter, which delivers government, business, development and breaking news from across the county every weekday. The site also distributes its reporting through social media accounts on platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky and Instagram, with separate accounts maintained for the Reston and Tysons identities; Reston Now's Instagram account, however, was converted to the countywide FFXnow brand at launch.
Community engagement
FFXnow invites news tips, feedback and press releases from readers, and provides a form through which tips can be submitted anonymously, while noting that it cannot reply to anonymous submissions without contact information. It also conducts an annual reader survey, asking its audience for feedback to shape the direction of its coverage in the coming year. In announcing the 2023 survey, the publication reflected on its first decade since beginning as RestonNow.com in 2013 and its expansion to cover the entire county. That cycle of surveying readers is part of a broader effort to treat the audience—spread across a county of many distinct communities—as participants in setting the news agenda.
Place in Fairfax County media
Fairfax County is covered by Washington, D.C., regional media, by the Washington Post's metropolitan reporting, and by a range of community newspapers and digital outlets, but sustained, dedicated reporting on county government and individual communities has often been thin relative to the county's size and population. FFXnow was created to fill that gap at two levels at once: hyperlocal desks for Reston and Tysons, where Local News Now had already built loyal audiences, and a countywide desk able to follow the Board of Supervisors, county agencies and stories that cross community lines. Its structure reflects a judgment that in a county as large as Fairfax, neither a purely neighborhood site nor a purely regional one fully matches how residents experience local news.
How to read and follow FFXnow
FFXnow is published online at ffxnow.com and is free to read. Readers can follow its coverage through the site's Reston and Tysons sections, sign up for its daily and community email newsletters, and follow its accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky and Instagram. News tips can be sent to the newsroom by email at news@ffxnow.com or through the tip form on its about page. Although the publication's mailing identity is rooted in Reston, its stated mission is countywide: to serve as Fairfax County's definitive local news source, from its oldest planned community to its newest urban centers.
