View this link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/business/media/12papers.html

From the New York Times:

At least Denver, Seattle and Tucson still have daily papers. But now, some economists and newspaper executives say it is only a matter of time — and probably not much time at that — before some major American city is left with no prominent local newspaper at all.

One of the strange and perverse outcomes of the financial crisis is that it seems to have brought about a world-historical paradox apropos news coverage. In older times, people generally had quick access to news coverage regarding whatever was going on in their local community, while national and international news sometimes took months to arrive.

Effectively, under late capitalism, we’re confronted with the possibility that something like the opposite will occur: our access to local news will be drastically diminished, while our access to international news will be rapid and up-to-the-second. One can’t help but draw a parallel between our consumption of news, now of course mass-produced and standardized by groups like the AP, and our consumption of fast food—the monstrous appearance of “McNews” sold and resold, packaged and repackaged to various third party networks, i.e., profit-maximizing mass media corporations, for whom independent journalism is costly, labor-intensive, inefficient, and, of course, ideologically suspect. This appears to be the disavowed truth of today’s “cosmopolitanism.”

One could go further and identify both trends as examples of Time-Space compression under postmodern late capitalism, a la David Harvey’s thesis in The Condition of Postmodernity.