No Newspaper Towns
Yes, without sunlight, mischief will ensue:
There's the real possibility that very soon we'll start to see major metro areas without a newspaper. The owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, that city's remaining paper, has lost 97% of its market value over the past year and may no longer be a "going concern." . . . Who's going to cover meetings of the city council, the board of education, the zoning commission, the board of property assessment appeals and review, not to mention hearings of the state legislature's finance committee? Local TV news is almost universally a joke. Local bloggers can't do it — most of them have day jobs and often use the local paper's output as their raw material. I don't have any answer to these questions, but the problems are real — without sunlight as a disinfectant, tax-and-spend pols, crooked developers, and grasping unions are all going to be able to get away with a lot more than before.