Comment by lenerdenator

There are still plenty of local papers that run based on subscriptions and ad placements. They're not the big names, but I am willing to bet you could find at least one in your county if you're in the US. There's going to be a relatively small newsroom and a few reporters who do go to public meetings and the like to get the news.

The problem is about 25 years ago, a few main outlets bought up a lot of publications, from small-town papers to larger regional papers, and loaded up on debt to do so, thinking that there would be a good way to get that money back. My regional paper, the KC Star, built a huge printing press building in the middle of downtown, thinking that of course, they'd need this extra capacity. This coincided with the rise of the internet in popular use, and a lot of the traffic went to social media.

These main outlets, and their investors, of course, wanted to make a profit off of their purchase of these publications. You can absolutely run one of those publications in the internet era and cover all of the costs, but if you're expecting unending/ever-increasing growth in returns every 90 days forever, you're going to have a problem. Naturally, that's exactly what the investors expected, and instead of just taking the haircut, they started to gut their investments.

There are classes of institutions in societies that need to exist and can cover their own expenses for the most part. Not everything needs to be a unicorn. That's where we screwed ourselves on local journalism.