Read the beginning of Chapter One, "Everything Old is New Again" from Emus Loose in Egnar: Big Stories from Small Towns by Judy Muller:

"With all the hand-wringing about the “death of journalism,” it is more than a little ironic that small-town papers have been thriving by practicing what the mainstream media are now preaching. “Hyper-localism,” “Citizen Journalism,” “Advocacy Journalism”—these are some of the latest buzzwords of the profession. But the concepts, without the fancy names, have been around for ages in small-town newspapers. And the weeklies have learned a lesson from watching the financial stress of their city cousins: don’t give it away. Most of the weeklies have discovered that people are still willing to pay not only for something they can hold in their hands, something they can clip and file in the family scrapbook, but also for content on the Web, especially if they cannot get that news anywhere else.

And so far, anyway, they can’t.

When I started this journey, a veteran journalist from a major daily paper said, “Better hurry, or there won’t be anyone out there left to interview.” But I found the opposite to be true. There are some eight thousand weeklies in the United States, and most of them are doing quite well, thank you very much, thanks to an endless source of material (i.e. life in a small town) that local readers crave, not to mention advertising that local merchants are willing to buy to reach their “target” audience (i.e. their neighbors).

When I toss out some of the circulation and profit figures for weeklies as a rejoinder to the mainstream media naysayers, they invariably counter with, “Well, they’re bound to die out eventually, once the older generation retires,” as though small-town journalism is a quaint piece of Americana destined to fade away.

Not so."