Tampa Just Lost a Daily Newspaper; Is This The Continuation of an Old Trend or The Start of a New One?

I rewatched Page One not long ago — the documentary, shot mostly in 2010, about The New York Times’ media desk and the travails of the news industry more broadly. (Got the DVD? I’m a talking head in the deleted scenes!) It holds up well, but it’s also a window into how much has changed in just six years. (Facebook barely gets a mention, for one.)

But one thing that stands out in the movie is the degree to which the 2009 closure of two newspapers — the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer — looms large. There were Senate hearings about it. There were fears that, with the economy collapsing, those two were the vanguard of a flood of closings. There were worries about one-newspaper towns becoming zero-newspaper towns:

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