I see your point, but I don't think it's a good counter-example. News needs a new paradigm entirely most-likely. The NYT isn't "the news" and the only options seem to be subscriptions and/or ads. For smaller operations, the problem gets a lot harder a lot faster since there's an upper-bound on the number of people they serve.
At the end of the day, I think the answer is that local news rooms just aren’t going to be viable, by and large. This is a consequence of a century long trend to begin with.
The way I see it, either you have a broad enough reach, or you have to niche yourself into the broader content generation ecosystem. Local news publishing that just reprints of AP stories or talking about some new pop health study of the week isn’t going to survive. To the degree that local investigative journalism is valuable, it’s going to have to find an entirely new model to sustain itself.
corruption is an endless feature of human communities. one way to keep it somewhat under control is to publicize it to the broader community rather than allow it to remain secret. the corruption doesn't need to be extreme enough to warrant legal action (though it might); it could just be "bad for most people, good for a few".
stupidity has most of the same properties.
the main feature of those human communities that we've used for a few hundred years to try to accomplish that control is called "a free press".
