I live in a city of one and half million. There are two "local" newspapers with histories that, in one case, reaches back over a century. One used to have offices across the street from city hall and regularly broke stories when somebody stumbled out of city hall and into their offices to report dirty deeds. The other paper was of an opposing political slant and the two papers used to fight like cats and dogs. People would read both papers to get a handle on local political winds.

Today, both papers are owned by the same Toronto-based, American-owned media conglomerate. Both papers have lost their local offices. Some work-from-home types produce localized content. Just enough to make the papers look somewhat local. Much of the local content is lazily scraped from reddit, showing up in the city's subreddit one day and appearing in the papers the next. However, 99% of the content is the same as the "local" paper in Toronto runs. The former disagreements over politics are over, and both papers run the same ranting opinion columns.

And yet... You can still walk into any convenience store in town and buy a paper copy of these two "local" papers. My parents still have both papers delivered, and haven't seemed to clue into the fact that they're both the same, American owned paper.

It's not just a loss of ad revenue that have killed local news. It's media conglomerates who are hoodwinking people into thinking they still have local news coverage when they really don't.

Consumerism has eaten the world.

It seems to me that the media should have its own non-profit designation and should be prohibited from becoming objects of market transactions.