I can follow a few people on fb to get the same content that local newspapers provided. For free. Where's the downside?

Does your circle of friends on FB actually go to every county, water board, school board, etc. meeting and take notes? Because that was the old role of the local paper, which could often get scoops from a reporter whose job it was to go to those.

Anything interesting that happens at a school board makes the news now because everyone there has a phone and internet. What exciting scoops do you think we're missing?

Towns where the newspaper has shut down have provably higher levels of excess spending and governmental waste & corruption:

> Cities where newspapers closed up shop saw increases in government costs as a result of the lack of scrutiny over local deals, say researchers who tracked the decline of local news outlets between 1996 and 2015.

> Disruptions in local news coverage are soon followed by higher long-term borrowing costs for cities. Costs for bonds can rise as much as 11 basis points after the closure of a local newspaper—a finding that can’t be attributed to other underlying economic conditions, the authors say. Those civic watchdogs make a difference to the bottom line.

> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-30/when-loca...

That seems like a pretty big downside.

That's a press release for an unpublished paper disguised as an article.