I really hate to see weekly newspapers suffer. The dailies ... not so much.
Some dailies, like the Boston Globe, are so liberal, so out of touch, that they deserve any abuse heaped upon them.
But weeklies are the last bastion of real news. (Having spent a quarter-century working for weekly newspapers, this is my zone of expertise.) If your kid gets an award for playing Little League, you can bet that your local weekly will run at least a story, if not his picture. Weekly reporters are those poor souls who sit through school committee and planning board meetings, plugging away to get even the boring news into print while keeping officials honest.
Christine O’Donnell refused to talk to the national media until she had visited all of the weekly newspapers that were interested. She gets it.
Sad day. I have no idea what’s going to happen when elected officials can do whatever they want because they know there won’t be any reporters around to ask annoying questions.
I agree to a certain extent with you. The weeklies do the weddings, funerals, little league, Lions Club, church news, etc, etc that the big newspapers don’t do, and that’s good.
On the downside, the familiarity between the local power structure and local newspapers often allows the brother-in-law deals between the county commission and someone’s nephew to happen unnoticed.
I know first hand about this, because I started my own local news blog a year and a half ago and cover local government and see it happen every day.
Adding to the problem is the practice of local government buying sympathetic ink via “legal advertising.” The printing of minutes, legal notices, etc. in local newspapers is little more than legalized bribery.