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Report on decline — precipitous, nationwide and as @AlecMacGillis says, brutal — of local newspapers since Great Recession. By @keachhagey @lalpert1 & @iarynam. This has major political implications.
With fewer sources of news about their own neighborhoods, towns & states, Americans are forced to turn to online faux-communities, sorting themselves by ideology or interest instead of geography. As @JamesFallows was observing yesterday, this can leave people in Indianapolis...
...oblivious as to events in Muncie, barely an hour away. It can also strengthen partisan or other identities, as real-world local communities become less real to the people living in them. Finally, the decline in the number of reporters on the ground makes it easier...
...for people in power to get away with stuff. Facebook doesn’t do interviews or investigations. The hard fact is that there may not be a business model offering to local news sources an economically stable, predictable future. [end]
