Excellent points - I hadn’t thought of it in quite that way. The historical time line seems pretty accurate.
People and reporters who are local have a vested interest in the health and welfare of that locality, unless they’ve been financially comproprised by some outside influence.
That same reasoning can be extrapolated to multi-national corporations in general as well. The obvious question being, do they care about particular local populations health and welfare? They virtually have no country and imho, it appears a lot of them have kissed the US goodbye, despite the rhetoric to the contrary.
Of course, other elements have come into play that have not helped newspapers. Stiff competition from other kinds of advertising, the fact that the public schools no longer turn out truly literate readers (also, the public schools churn out millions of kids with short attention spans), and finally the devastation of our national paper manufacturing industry. The environmental movement ran it into the ground. There are only one or two remaining paper mills producing newsprint in our entire country, there is no competition or large-scale capability, so it is expensive, and most of it has to be imported. That is one of the reasons newspapers are getting smaller and smaller.