Wired has a good piece about the value of local reporting.

“In every town in America, almost, you have reporters going out and
doing humble jobs and turning over rocks every day and seeing what’s
under them,” says John Carroll, the former editor-in-chief of The Los Angeles Times, a man who led his newsroom to 13 Pulitzer Prizes over his 5-year tenure.

These “humble jobs” help keep government honest. David Simon, the creative force behind HBO’s The Wire and a former newspaper reporter (once an employee of Carroll’s at the Baltimore Sun),
put it quite bluntly in a recent congressional hearing: “God, the next
10 or 15 years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state
and local political corruption.”

See also their piece about mobile news (a potential income stream).