“Local newspapers are basically little machines that spit out healthier democracies,” Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab, has written.

Now the virus is taking this crisis to a new level.

The rapid shrinking of the economy — at the fastest pace since the Great Depression — has led to a further decline in advertising. Some newspapers that were on the brink may not survive. And many more journalists have been laid off. As The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan has noted, “it’s happening around the world,” with newspapers in Australia and Britain announcing that “they were going out of business or suspending print publication.”

What’s the solution? In the short term, Sullivan and some media observers have called for government stimulus money to be directed at local news outlets, as is happening for many other industries.

Writing in The Atlantic, Steven Waldman and Charles Sennott of Report for America offer an intriguing idea:

The federal government can do something quite concrete right now: As part of its stimulus plans, it should funnel $500 million in spending for public-health ads through local media. The government already spends about $1 billion on public-service ads that promote initiatives such as military recruitment and census participation. The stimulus should add another $1 billion to support the communication of accurate health-related information. Some of those ads should go to social-media platforms and national news networks, but half should go to local news organizations. This is not a bailout; the government will be buying an effective way of getting health messages to the public, and could even customize the notices to specific audiences.

Long term, however, stimulus isn’t the answer. Local journalism needs a new business model. (National journalism, by the way, is doing OK, thanks in part to the growth of subscription-based journalism, at The New York Times and elsewhere.)

My hope is that somebody will eventually find a way to make money providing useful local information. Until then, the answer will almost certainly need to involve philanthropy, much as philanthropy has long supported public radio.