Viktorya Vilk:

We spent the last year, my colleagues and I at PEN America talking to dozens of journalists, elected officials, community activists and media scholars. And we were hearing the same refrain over and over again. Local news outlets across the country are shrinking and shuttering at an alarming rate. And it is very bad news for our communities.

If you look at some very powerful studies that have come out in the last few years, what they found is that if you look at just newspapers over the last 15 years, they've lost $35 billion in ad revenue and nearly 50 percent, nearly half of staff, over 2,000 newspapers have shut down across the country, local newspapers and over a thousand more are ghost papers. So they're just shells of their former selves, they're producing very little original reporting.

And the reason newspapers matter is because if you think of journalism as an ecosystem where you also have TV, radio, social media, all the places people get their information, newspapers are still providing the bulk of original reporting at the local level. So when you lose them, you lose that watchdog function that is so important in our democracy.