Local news organizations are dying — and that is not news. The decline has been rapid, spectacularly so. The tech-bubble recession of 2001 set the collapse in motion. The 2008 recession dealt a near-fatal blow made far worse by the subsequent pandemic. Steven A. Smith is a former editor of the Spokesman-Review. There are other reasons, of course. Technology advances moved key print and broadcast advertising categories to the internet. The post-2016 political divide led many Americans, especially on the right, to express their distrust by walking away from mainstream news sources. And news organizations, notoriously poor at marketing and customer service, have contributed to their own collapse.