I'm happy the price of my local weekly paper (about £2.50) for a town of about 10,000 (most of the paper is the wider county which has a 300k, the first 4 or 6 pages are specifically local)

Because if I (and the others that do pay) don't pay it for local news, then nobody will cover local news, and I value local news coverage far more than £2.50 a week.

Think of it as paying for a youtube channel on patreon.