Practical limits for journalistic effort do really exist, but we are really not straining at those limits today. The main interest served in the consolidation of the newspapers in our nation, that has placed the majority of them under the control of five huge conglomerates, is to reduce costs. Of course profits are less of an issue when you own several hundred newspapers and can centralize all national and international news coverage under one structure for all the newspapers that you own. Then the only things that will be left to report on, and add costs at each paper that you own are local stories. Your staff can shrink marvelously and you can spend money on building color presses into your operations and still pocket a decent profit at the end of a year.

No independent newspaper can really compete with this consolidation phenomenon for long. That is among the reasons why local news coverage is slipping nearly everywhere in the USA today and international or national news is constantly expanding to fill the void. The local and regional news stories that used to fill our newspapers are either missing in this formula; or the stories are written without information vital to the reader. At the same time states have barely begun to utilize the Internet to keep their citizens informed. Many State sponsored sites lack vital coverage of laws in process and meetings that are open to the public in name only. Local governments have neither the money nor the expertise to offer much in the way of an information service to their citizenship. Among the press coverage there used to be information about who sponsored the bill, what the bill proposed, what things the bill would change, what would remain the same, and your local representative's position on the matter. For the most part these things are not present in most stories these days. The contraction of ownership has broken the local news reporting system without creating something equally valid to replace it.

Now I am addicted to the written word and I freely admit that I am an informaholic, an unrepentant news junky without hope of recovery. Perhaps I merely need a treatment program in which I am forced to watch Faux News all the time. Now that would be excellent aversion therapy! Reading the Wall Street Journal weekdays is as close as I can come to that pinnacle of treatment on my own. Nonetheless there is a growing problem in this gap in coverage that should be treated seriously. After all; all news is really local at its core. If the citizen reading the story cannot relate to it they will never complete reading beyond the headline. I really don't care if you are Republican, Democrat or Independent; you need information in order to run this Democracy effectively.

I remember an old friend, Hjalmer was his name. He ran the farm across the road from where I grew up. He worked eighteen hour days some of the year and ten to twelve hours a day the rest of the time. I was younger than he was but I remember his collection of newspapers to this day. He became our local mayor and later was elected to State office where he served on many agriculture related committees. He once told me that he read two newspapers every day and three on Sunday. That was no mean feat with his schedule. He hired the kid next door, me, to help him with the milking so he might have a little more time to spend keeping informed. He would be appalled at the coverage given to local affairs today if he were still around to have an opinion.

There are ways that the internet can help fill the gap but we are obsessed with the news about terrorism right now. If we do not take care of the local issues, schools and public health to name two of them, what happens in regard to the terrorists will not matter! Remember all politics as much as all news, is local in every impact that matters most to all of us. The hope and responsibility of all of us as citizens of this nation is that we can make our choices with good information at our command. Without that we are doomed to a Democracy that can only fail to work even adequately. God bless you all and keep you safe from the loss of effective local Democracy that news-less journalism portends.