[WorldMaker]

I live in a relatively big city and my local (Gannett-owned) news website is just as awful in the same way you describe.

I don't even check the website. There's a daily email with maybe a dozen tops "top stories" and I find it usually contains everything of local interest that I used to expect to read almost cover-to-cover when I last had a physical paper subscription, despite how few headlines make it into the email.

> I get the impression the journalists are told to live off a diet of aggregated reports sent to them rather than getting out to speak to anyone.

I have friends that were laid off in one wave or another from the newspaper. The impression I've been given is that Gannett runs papers on local skeleton staffs that of course don't have time to do in depth journalism because after all the lay-offs there's only one or two people to cover a city of a million plus people. Gannett thinks they can coast on nationally syndicated content instead, which is why all Gannett "local" papers start to look/feel alike (and start to just resemble USA Today with a "local" rebranding/rebadging).

At least we still have a regular alt-weekly. (For now, I'm still not sure about the new owners this year and the disappearance of some Editorial content seems to indicate to me a need to watch for a similar scrubbing to a skeleton staff and nationally syndicated content pretending to be local.)