It's regional "news" to me, but I have no doubt that I would not have heard of it if it had not somehow eddied it's way onto hn.

Regional media is dead, it's attention bandwidth has been taken up by spacially distributed, but otherwise super narrow opinion bubbles. And unfortunately I don't see any substitute for the kind of local information that we should have, like communal level politics. For a while it looked as if Facebook might survive filling that gap, but that's not really what happened.