No longer represented by local shoe-leather reporting done by a journalist you knew and saw at town meetings, many American communities now only think of the media as distant strangers who can’t be trusted. So the scarcity of hometown newspapers doesn’t just make it so some communities are dark on local news, but it’s actively feeding our lack of trust and the partisan divide at a national level. Add this together with the rise of multimedia conglomerates and partisan news sources and it’s obvious why our problems in journalism are Big Wicked Problems, and time might be short to stop the most profound consequences that lie ahead. And if we lose our paper, just who can we blame but ourselves?