Today, Thursday, April 9, is Local News Day — a day that aims to reconnect communities across the country with their local news sources and celebrate the key role local news plays.
We, thankfully, live in a community that is incredibly supportive of local news.
We are consistently grateful here at The SUN for our readers, our advertisers and the organizations that seek to disseminate information using The SUN and The PREVIEW.
We know that’s not the case elsewhere and that news deserts are, unfortunately, becoming more and more common (though efforts to fill those gaps are also increasing).
Those communities that have lost local news sources have lost more than a newspaper that comes out periodically or a website that gets updated regularly.
They’ve lost a vital piece that connects people to the information that affects their day-to-day lives.
From school boards to town council, the county commissioners and many more, so much of what affects us each day starts locally.
And it’s the local level where citizens can really make a difference.
But, that difference needs to start with trustworthy local information.
That’s where local news sources are key. Trustworthy, consistent local news about the issues that matter to our lives here in Pagosa Country doesn’t come from national news. It comes from fellow citizens who are here to work to provide that local information.
We also get the pleasure of highlighting different parts of our community and fellow citizens doing their best to make this place a little better. That helps us all understand where we might be able to help out and connect with our community.
But, beyond providing local information and connecting the pieces of a community, local news can serve another purpose.
A Columbia Journalism Review study shared in June 2025 showed that corruption increases when newspapers decrease.
“Our focus was on the closure of sixty-five major daily newspapers—the sort that would have the resources to conduct serious investigative journalism—from 1996 to 2018. We then compared the trends in federal corruption charges filed in US district court across districts that did and did not experience the loss of a major daily newspaper. The results were unambiguous,” the organization wrote. “All else being equal, the closure of a newspaper yielded a 6.9 percent increase in corruption charges, a 6.8 percent increase in the number of indicted defendants, and a 7.4 percent increase in cases filed.”
The study also took steps to “tease out causation, not mere correlation,” and was able to do a follow-up study using the same approaches with data from Brazil, where it found the same pattern.
The study also found changes in how things like public corruption charges are handled in areas where newspapers exist and where they don’t.
Local news, informed citizens and community connections matter.
Thank you for supporting local news.
Randi Pierce
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