[tyjen]

It's rare to find local newspapers owned locally, and even rarer to find a local newspaper that's a fair representation of the local population instead of an insulated clique with heavy handed control over what's represented.

Local online forums dedicated to a locality produce more representative content and everyone can participate as long as their isn't a similar controlling clique in charge of moderation. See /r/Seattle and /r/SeattleWA for how moderation manipulates outcomes. Both perspectives are important, but each clique tends to omit what others deem important; leading to topic over-representation/under-representation problems.

There's clearly a loss on long forum informational pieces, but your community is misinformed or misrepresented if those pieces only support the motives of the clique.

[quasse]

Seattle actually happens to have some absolutely great examples of local journalism as well as some extremely bad examples of corporate owned "news" factories.

https://westseattleblog.com/ is run by a single person (formerly a husband and wife team) and she attends huge numbers of local events and city meetings providing hyper-local coverage on things that are happening in the area.