Local news has long provided a vital civic bond. Can we afford to let it disappear?
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, the French aristocrat and political scientist who observed American culture in the early 1830s, saw local newspapers as the lifeblood of civic participation in the United States and called them “the power which impels the circulation of political life.” America’s founders considered journalism so vital to informed democracy that 
they not only guaranteed the press unprecedented freedom in the first amendment to their new constitution but also subsidized it with special low postal rates, since in those days most newspapers were distributed by mail. “Newspapers were traditionally the common bond in the community, with shared information being the basis for people thinking somehow they’re on the same ship,” says Professor Thomas Patterson of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.
Patterson, the Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, says because local news organizations gave citizens the information necessary to make important decisions about their lives and their communities, they functioned for more than 200 years as de facto civic infrastructure. 
But now that infrastructure is crumbling in many places and nonexistent in others—devastated by transformations in the economic ecosystem of local news, by takeovers by cost-cutting corporate chains and so-called “vulture capital” firms that strip them of their assets, and by changing habits of information consumption. The Shorenstein Center’s director, Nancy Gibbs, who with Patterson has been raising the alarm this year about the decline of local news and its effects on democracy, including voting rates and other forms of civic participation, says the situation has reached a critical stage.
