I was thinking the same thing when I read about the outrageous salaries paid to officials in Bell, California: Where are the local papers? Because when small papers get taken over by large ones, coverage of the local communities suffers greatly — and so does democracy.
Community Papers
I think it is absolutely the case. The single most devastating blow to democracy was allowing the monopolization of media. The single greatest contribution to continuing the American Dream would be to destroy those monopolies utterly.
A big second to that!
For awhile the NYTimes was supporting “hyper-local blogs” to fill in those gaps. Last I heard that was being phased out.