BALTIMORE — WHEN the Baltimore Sun Media Group recently announced that it was buying the Baltimore City Paper, the local alternative weekly where I work as an editor, the prognosis for aggressive, independent journalism in Baltimore was pretty grim. Tom Scocca, a reporter who used to work at City Paper, declared that the city was now one step closer to being a “zero newspaper town.”

This glum outlook is understandable after the recent demise of venerable alt weeklies like The Boston Phoenix, which closed last year, while standard-bearers like The Village Voice have fired many of their most popular writers, like the longtime gossip columnist Michael Musto.

Many have been bought by corporate conglomerates, then thinned out and tamed. Not that we get much sympathy: For many people, the alt weekly as a genre is already passé, rendered irrelevant by the rise of the Internet.

But an alt weekly is connected to a city in the way that a website can never be. In Baltimore, somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of the population doesn’t have regular Internet access. The glib techno-utopians who not only foresee a paperless tomorrow, but also lobby for a paperless present, are ready to forget about these people. Alt weeklies might not always reach everyone in the city, but at least, like the dailies, they try to be available and relevant to everyone.