Residents felt its loss in the dearth of information about local life: births, deaths, proposed developments, high school sports scores.
A friend of Rebecca Young's died and there was no obituary. [...]
So Young [who founded the newspaper in 1975] and six other residents started a new newspaper, the Sopris Sun, run as a nonprofit and staffed mostly by volunteers. [...]
"Isn't it crazy? Starting a newspaper now?" asked editor and reporter Trina Ortega, a former Valley Journal employee who has become the first paid member of the staff. [...]
"There was a void. Every town should have a park, a library and a newspaper."
Hyper-local News In The Post-Newspaper Era: Decentralized news-gathering processes can incorporate small contributions from a huge number of people who aren't primarily in the news business. You don't need to be a professional reporter to write a blog post every couple of weeks about your local city council meeting. Nor do you need to be a professional editor to mark your favorite items in Google Reader. Yet if millions of people each contribute small amounts of time to this kind of decentralized information-gathering, they can collectively do much of the work that used to be done by professional reporters and editors.
