In 1952, American newspaper publishers ranked Louisville’s Courier-Journal as the fourth-most important paper in the nation, behind the Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and the St. Louis Post Dispatch. By then, the C-J, as it’s known, was nearly a century old. It was founded in 1868, when two Louisville papers, one that had been opposed to slavery and one that had been in favor of it, merged. (A decade earlier, the papers’ editors had squared off in a duel. Both survived.) For a white-owned, Southern newspaper, the young C-J was relatively enlightened on issues of race, supporting improved schooling for blacks—though racial slurs and racist cartoons appeared in its pages. In its early days, news reporting wasn’t the paper’s strong suit. That began to change after it was bought, in 1918, by Robert Worth Bingham, a progressive judge who had married into an oil fortune and saw civic value in good journalism. After the Second World War, the C-J moved into a new Art Deco building downtown, and a quote from Bingham was engraved above the elevators in the lobby: “I have always regarded the newspapers owned by me as a public trust and have endeavored to conduct them as to render the greatest public service.” The paper has won ten Pulitzer Prizes, including the Public Service award, in 1967, for its “successful campaign to control the Kentucky strip mining industry, a notable advance in the national effort for the conservation of natural resources.”

James Bruggers kept a reprint of those 1967 stories on his desk at the office. “I just kept it there all the time because it was inspiration for me,” he told me recently. Bruggers, a gray-haired, ruddy-cheeked man in his early sixties, was the C-J’s environmental-beat reporter for nearly two decades. He wrote about mining, air quality, water quality, and environmental job hazards around Louisville and in rural parts of Kentucky. In 2015, he published a series of stories on a massive rural landfill that was fed by “trash trains” full of sewage sludge brought in from out of state; after his reporting, the practice was curtailed. The following year, he wrote about the hauling of radioactive fracking waste to a Kentucky landfill, prompting the approval of new regulations.

In his years at the paper, Bruggers saw the newsroom and the newspaper grow smaller and smaller. The C-J now has a weekday print circulation of around sixty thousand, down from more than two hundred thousand in 2006. (Kentucky has about four and a half million residents; three-quarters of a million people live in Louisville.) Last May, Bruggers left the C-J, to take a job at the Web site InsideClimate News. He was not replaced.

Judy Petersen, the former executive director of the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, was in frequent contact with Bruggers over the years. “We trusted Jim, and he trusted us for background,” she told me, adding, “We often got good coverage on critical issues.” She pointed to the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission (ORSANCO), which, she said, has periodically looked at “loosening the bacteria standards for safely re-creating on the Ohio River,” which absorbs bacteria-rich overflow from more than a thousand sewers during heavy storms. Bruggers went to Louisville’s poorer west side and talked to people who fish along the riverbank to feed their families. “He asked, ‘Do you know about the mercury in the river that’s in the fish you’re taking home?’ ” Petersen recalled. They didn’t. “Jim was able to connect all these dots and tell the story of how we have to make sure we adhere to laws and keep protections in place,” Petersen said. “He really blew the story up.” ORSANCO dropped a proposal to loosen bacteria standards, in 2006, and Bruggers, Petersen said, was “a big part” of the reason. “He demonstrated how important local newspaper reporting is,” she said.

InsideClimate News won a Pulitzer for national reporting, in 2013, and has been a finalist in the Public Service category. But it reports on the country as a whole and does not, in Petersen’s view, have nearly the same impact as the C-J in Kentucky. Even in its diminished state, the paper has a particular power where it’s published, Petersen said. “When you get a story above the fold in a major newspaper like the Courier-Journal, it typically has a big result,” she told me. “It gets picked up by other media outlets; governors notice it; ORSANCO commissioners notice it. People start asking questions. People turn out for public hearings.” She added, “When you just have a story on a Web platform, like the one Jim works for now, the reach isn’t the same at all.”

I asked Tom FitzGerald, the director of an influential nonprofit environmental-advocacy group called the Kentucky Resources Council, if he’d noticed any gaps lately in environmental reporting. “We no longer hear anything about environmental issues out west concerning the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant and the massive contamination there,” he said, referring to a former uranium-enrichment facility. “In the east, we’ve stopped seeing any coverage of mountaintop removal, and of the squashing of the health-impacts study on mining that the Department of the Interior had authorized and that this Administration cancelled. More and more, local news of import is being drowned out by generic USA Today coverage—the idea that anything that is more than three paragraphs long is too much for people—and by the fact that, you know, you can basically hold up the entire newspaper and see right through it some days.”

USA Today is the flagship publication of the Gannett Company, which bought the C-J from the Bingham family, in 1986. At the time of the sale, the C-J newsroom had grown to more than three hundred employees. It now has around sixty. Gannett owns more than a hundred publications; as measured by the total circulation of its properties, it is one of the largest newspaper publishers in the country. Most of its media properties are struggling, and a New York hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, has been angling to purchase many of them. (Alden currently owns a seven-and-a-half-per-cent stake in Gannett.) Gannett’s profits sank by nearly two-thirds, from more than two hundred and eighty million dollars to ninety-seven million dollars, between 2014 and 2017. Last week, its stock jumped, after another hedge fund expressed confidence that Alden could pull off a hostile takeover of the company. (Gannett disputed the claim.) Alden’s strategy in purchasing Gannett, according to a recent report in the Washington Post, involves “efficiently buying, selling, leasing and redeveloping newspapers’ offices and printing plants.” The company has been called “a destroyer of newspapers.” Since Alden took over the Denver Post, in 2010, that paper has lost nearly half of its staff.

According to an Associated Press analysis of data compiled by the University of North Carolina, some fourteen hundred American cities and towns have lost a newspaper during the past fifteen years. There are now more than a thousand communities in the United States that have no local news source whatsoever; recently, Facebook, which has sucked up much of the advertising money that once went to newspapers, acknowledged that it was struggling to find the local news that its users want to read, because, in many places, nobody is reporting that news. A recent study concluded that areas where local papers have disappeared are more likely to be politically polarized. In 2017, fellows at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism conducted a detailed study of attitudes toward the media in two Kentucky communities. They found that residents were more likely to trust local reporting than national reporting and less inclined to see it as politically motivated.