Gastonia, NC Correspondent — This is my trade, so I’ll take some length and then be quiet on it for a while.

The short answer is that a great deal of it isn’t surviving, and that the pandemic finished something that was already most of the way finished.

The chain that owned a large share of American local papers filed for bankruptcy in February, before any of this, and was sold to a hedge fund in September. Advertising collapsed in the spring at outlets that had already cut everything cuttable in 2009 and again in 2015. Something like two thousand papers have closed since 2004. The furloughs this year hit the same newsrooms twice.

Here’s what I’d want people to understand about what actually gets lost, because the public conversation about this is about opinion and the loss isn’t about opinion at all.

What goes first is the reporter who sat through the county commission meeting. That job was never glamorous, it never drove traffic, and it was always the first cut. Nobody misses it on the day it’s cut. What happens over the following five years is that the commission stops being watched, and the research on this is fairly consistent — municipal borrowing costs rise in places that lose their paper, because the bond market prices the absence of scrutiny. That’s a measurable number attached to a thing that looks like a cultural loss.

The second thing that goes is the local check on a national story. When something happens in a town, somebody who knows the town used to write the first account. Now the first account is frequently written by somebody four states away from a video, and it’s wrong in ways only local people can see, and them seeing it is part of why nobody trusts any of it anymore.

I’d also be honest about my own side. We did some of this to ourselves. We chased scale, we let the national opinion product cannibalize the local reporting product because it was cheaper and traveled further, and we spent a decade telling ourselves that the audience had abandoned us when we had substantially abandoned the audience first.

Does it matter if it doesn’t survive? It matters the way a fire department matters. You don’t notice the year nothing burns.

Myrtle Beach Correspondent — I buy digital distribution for a living, so I can tell you exactly what replaced the local paper here, because I use it.

It’s a Facebook group. Several of them. A community page with thirty thousand members where people post about a road closure or a business opening or a crime, and it’s fast, it’s free, and it’s frequently wrong.

What it can’t do is call anybody. There’s no one in that group who can phone the county and ask a question and expect an answer, because the group has no standing and nobody in it is going to spend a Tuesday on it.

So the information function partly survived and the accountability function didn’t, and from the inside those feel like the same thing right up until you need the second one.

The other thing I’d note professionally is that the advertising didn’t move to the local paper’s website. It moved to platforms. A local business here can now reach exactly the people it wants for less money than the paper ever charged, and that’s genuinely better for the business. It just happens to have defunded the thing the paper did with the money.

Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent — I’ve watched what happens when nobody is in the room, because I’m in the room.

Our commission meetings used to have a reporter. Now they sometimes do. On the nights they don’t, the meeting is different — not corrupt, just looser. Items move faster, explanations get shorter, and something that would have generated a question generates nothing.

I don’t think anybody is doing anything wrong. I think being watched is a discipline, and the discipline has been withdrawn in a lot of counties, and the people who miss it least are the people being watched.

The related thing is that national coverage moved in to fill the vacuum, and national coverage covers a county commission only when it does something that fits a national story. So a body that does two hundred boring things and one inflammatory one gets covered once, on the inflammatory one, by somebody with no interest in the other hundred and ninety-nine.

That’s worse than not being covered. It teaches a commission that the only way to be seen is to be inflammatory.

Long Island, New York Correspondent — There’s a legal dimension nobody raises and it’s about to become a real problem.

Public notice statutes require certain things to be published in a newspaper of general circulation. Foreclosure notices. Zoning hearings. Estate proceedings. Bid solicitations. The requirement exists because publication is how the law gives constructive notice to people it can’t reach individually.

Those statutes assume a newspaper exists. In a growing number of counties one doesn’t, or the one that does has a circulation that makes the phrase “general circulation” a legal fiction.

Two things follow. First, revenue — public notice money is a meaningful share of what keeps small papers alive, which is why every few years a legislature proposes moving notices to a government website and the papers fight it. Second, and more seriously, the notice function itself. If a foreclosure is noticed in a paper nobody reads, the person losing the house didn’t get notice in any sense that a court should accept, and eventually somebody is going to litigate that successfully.

So it matters legally, not just civically. The infrastructure of due process in this country partly runs on an industry that’s disappearing.

Wheeling, West Virginia Correspondent — We lost the paper before we lost the industry, or near enough that the order doesn’t matter.

What I’d say is that a place without a paper loses its own record. Not the accountability — the record. Who died, who married, who won the game, who retired after forty years at the plant. That was the archive of a town’s existence, and for the last decade it’s been in nobody’s hands.

I write for a living now and I’m aware of the irony, because the market I write for is national and pays better than the local one ever did, and it doesn’t cover Wheeling at all.

Does it matter? A place that doesn’t record itself starts to doubt it existed. I hear that in how people here talk about the past, and I think the missing paper is part of it.

Owatonna, MN Correspondent — I’ve been on the freelance side of this for years, so I can describe the economics from underneath.

The rates have not moved in twenty years in nominal terms, which means they’ve fallen by about a third in real terms. The outlets that pay reasonably are national. The outlets that would want a piece about southern Minnesota can’t pay for the reporting time it would take.

What survives locally is what can be produced in an hour — a rewritten press release, a scores roundup, a photograph with a caption. What dies is anything requiring three days.

I’d add that the demise gets narrated as a technology story and it’s substantially a private equity story. A number of these papers were profitable when they were bought, and were then loaded with debt and cut to service it. That’s a different mechanism than readers leaving, and it has different implications for whether anything can be done.

Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — I taught journalism, and I’d say something uncomfortable about the pipeline.

We were still training people for a profession that was shedding jobs faster than we could place graduates, and we knew it, and the honest conversation with a talented eighteen-year-old was difficult to have.

What’s been lost isn’t only the outlets. It’s the entry-level position where somebody learned the craft — covering a school board for very little money for three years and getting good at it. That job was the training system, and the training system is largely gone.

So even if funding appeared tomorrow, we’d have a generation gap in people who know how to do the work. That’s a longer repair than the money.

Jacksonville, Florida Correspondent — I spent two years in a state office that measured its success in press releases, so I know exactly what fills the vacuum.

It’s us. Government communications staff. Agencies now employ more people to produce content about their work than there are reporters covering them, and the content is professional, well-designed, timely, and entirely uninterrogated.

That’s the replacement, and everyone in government understands it. When there’s no reporter at the meeting, the agency’s own account of the meeting is the account.

I’d say it matters enormously and I’d say the port is a good illustration. Ours is a public authority spending public money on projects that shape the city for decades, and the number of people covering it seriously has fallen by most of what it was. The decisions haven’t gotten smaller.