A Google spokeswoman said, “Every month, Google News and Google Search drive over 24 billion visits to publishers’ websites, which drive subscriptions and significant ad revenue.”

Newspapers have faced devastating financial losses for years. One in five newspapers has closed since 2004 in the United States, and about half of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties have only one newspaper, many of them printing weekly, according to a report by the University of North Carolina published in late 2018. In the last year alone, Facebook and Google added tens of thousands of employees and reported billions of dollars in profits.

Take Mr. Collins’s district in northern Georgia. The Atlanta Journal Constitution, the state’s biggest newspaper, has cut its staff by half in the past eight years. In Mr. Collins’s hometown, The Gainesville Times, one of the biggest papers in its region, cut its weekly print publication schedule to five days from seven a year ago.

The demand for local news remains. One day shortly after the fatal car crash, all of the discussion at Fender’s Diner, a 1950s-inspired eatery in Cornelia, was about the victim and allegations that the woman behind the wheel of the S.U.V. had been drinking.

“I care more about the people who walk through my front door of my place and the issues that matter to them than anything going on in Washington,” said Bradley Cook, the owner of the restaurant.

Many local leaders say the power of local newspapers was on display recently in Jesup, in southeastern Georgia. One of Mr. NeSmith’s papers in the area, The Press Sentinel in Wayne County, discovered that an Arizona-based company backed by wealthy investors, including Bill Gates, had quietly applied to dump 10,000 tons of coal ash per day in Jesup.