Maybe you missed out on all the concentration of media assets that has happened over the past 40 years. We went from every small town having their own newspaper and small cities having their own TV stations to having moguls like Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch buying up newpapers and TV stations to form giant empires. Naturally, one of the first steps in making your empire scale is to start cutting the excess "fat" in the form of local reporters, as your media empire can use reporters in the bigger cities to cover the entire region. Then your regions start getting bigger and bigger. All the local content is now gone. This process was mostly complete by the end of the 1990s.
Then advertising on the internet took off in the 2000s, further depleting the pool of local advertising dollars available to many media organizations. Today most media organizations are a hollow shell of what they once were.
Without local news, democracy can't work, and it's sad that many places no longer have it. And quality reporting takes time and money, exactly what we don't have in today's internet. Sure, plenty of niches previously ignored are now well served, but there's a glaring gap in quality local news these days in most places.
