One of the seasons of The Wire is largely about a major newsroom (the Baltimore Sun, unsurprisingly) taking its first hard punch from the collapse of the news market and unchecked M&A activity, so I'm not surprised he commented on it elsewhere too. God, what a great show.

I'm not sure there is a viable business model for local investigative reporting waiting to be discovered, any more. At least not in the US, not in mid-sized or smaller markets. It's semi-functional in rich, dense cities. Might remain so for a while longer. It's just everywhere else that now has no watchdogs aside from the occasional, lazy, probably partisan look-see from state regulatory agencies, and maybe resource- and access-starved hobbyists if they're lucky. The pros are gone. A few still watching big national-scale stuff (bigger audience!) but all the smaller parts of the system have gone dark.