The Atlantic

For the Love of the Local Newspaper

Regional publications do work that really matters to their communities. And local journalists know it in their bones.
Source: Joshua Roberts / Reuters

A fatal single-engine plane crash in a corn field was the first story I ever covered for a local newspaper, the Kalamazoo Gazette.

Life and death. That’s the bread and butter of local newspapers. The obituaries are among their most-read sections. What journalists don’t expect is to find their own colleagues in those pages, gunned down in the place where they work, the way five members of the staff of the were, in Annapolis, Maryland on

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