Thanks to the internet, many newspapers in major U.S. cities — the New York Times, the Washington Post — have become much easier for out-of-towners to access than they were in the past. The Times has plenty of online subscribers who don’t live in the Big Apple; the Post has many readers outside of Washington, D.C. The internet has, in effect, made it easier for urban newspapers to become national publications.

But at the same time, many journalism professors and media analysts have been sounding the alarm about the shortage of local news in the United States — especially outside of major urban centers. Nancy Gibbs, who serves as director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, addresses that topic in an op-ed published by the Post on December 27.

“Every couple of weeks,” Gibbs explains, “you can read about another newspaper shutting its doors, or moving from daily to weekly, or hollowing out its newsroom until it’s little more […]