The other day i read an article in a magazine which focused on thriving small town newspapers afflicting the nation's metropolitan daily newspapers have far more to do with the collapse of the monopoly distribution model then with the quality of reporting in those newspapers.
Community newspapers are doing quite nicely because they have not forgotten their mission, their responsibility to their readers, the service they must provide to their advertisers, their duty to report the good and the bad; to expose corrupt public servants who betray the public trust and seek to serve themselves first at the expense of the taxpayers.
I'm willing to grant that small-town papers have been less likely to get bloated and arrogant and out-of-touch than their big-city brethren. The rest is a load of hooey, though. A few community newspapers do a great job of serving their readers
and exposing corrupt public servants. Many more do a great job of publishing photos of their readers, but generally shy away from any exposing of corruption.
But all of them benefit from the reality that
--their communities are too small for webworld facilities to have gotten to
--in most cases they serve populations less transient and less Internet-addicted than those of big metropolitan areas
--nobody ever looked to them for national or international news, so the fact that you can get all that on the Internet now is irrelevant
--the real estate bust hammering many newspapers now has been mostly a big-metro-area phenomenon.