That big fish and small fish explanation is really spot on, and it’s also really important to explain to people. Whenever people hear that newspapers have vanished, they tend to blame the Internet.

It’s definitely true that losing all that classified advertising and display advertising didn’t help! But really what killed a great many of these local papers was exactly what you’re describing — they were sold by their longtime owners (who cashed out big) to a conglomerate that had no interest in actually running the newspaper, and now had to cut the staff to the bone to pay for the debt servicing.

Ugh. What’s worse, the demise of local news has been part of what has caused partisan politics to become so toxic — because people, without a good steady supply of local news, wind up reading disproportionately national and federal news …