Local news outlets are shutting down at a rate of two per week, and I think that's because paywalls are killing them faster than social media ever did. When my hometown paper put up a $12 monthly paywall, I stopped reading it and got my news from a free aggregator instead, but that feeds on outrage, not reporting. If we want investigative journalism to survive, we need to accept that someone has to pay for it, either through subscriptions or public funding. Is a paywalled local paper better than no local paper at all?