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Is Local News Shrinking ... Or Just Morphing?

If the Las Vegas Sun disappears due to business decisions by the people who own it, how will the community suffer, if at all?

A classic dictum of political science is that democracy cannot survive if the populace is not well informed. When two newspapers compete, each keeps the other honest.

But people have moved on from reading text on stone tablets. What is there to suggest that U.S. society won't also survive a transition away from reading the news on newsprint?

Political reporter Jon Ralston, however, has written that the business decisions made by owners of the two Las Vegas dailies have so weakened their news products that, frankly, he doesn't give a damn which paper survives.

Ralston will be joined by two men who were upper-level newspaper executives in Denver and Seattle in 2009, when each city dwindled from two daily papers to one.

 

 

JON RALSTON, independent Las Vegas-based journalist at Ralston Reports

JOHN TEMPLE,  senior Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, formerly of Rocky Mountain News

DAVID McCUMBER, bureau chief of Hearst News Service, former managing editor of Seattle Post-Intelligencer                                                

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