What do you call it when a hedge fund buys a local newspaper and squeezes it for revenue, laying off editors and reporters and selling off the paper’s downtown headquarters for conversion into luxury condos or a boutique hotel? The devastation has become common enough that some observers have resorted to shorthand for what collectively amounts to an extinction-level event. One former editor calls it a “harvesting strategy”; Margaret Sullivan, in her new book, “Ghosting the News,” calls it “strip-mining.” ...“Disinformation” and “fake news” bring to mind scheming operatives, Russian troll farms and noisy propaganda; stories about them are titillating enough to garner plenty of attention. But what Sullivan writes about is a “real-news problem” — the shuttering of more than 2,000 American newspapers since 2004, and the creation of “news deserts,” or entire counties with no local news outlets at all.... “When local reporting waned,” Sullivan writes, “municipal borrowing costs went up.” Local news outlets provide the due diligence that bondholders often count on. Without the specter of a public shaming, corruption is freer to flourish....“Ghosting the News” concludes with a soaring quote from the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci about “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will,” but the local reporter in Sullivan follows it up with a more immediate analogy: Even if no one seems to be coming to the rescue while your house is on fire, you still have to “get out your garden hose and bucket, and keep acting as if the fire trucks are on the way.”

The Vindicator is among the victims of the local-media implosion that Margaret Sullivan chronicles in “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy.” As her title suggests, the collapse is taking with it one of the foundations of the journalist’s craft: holding city, county and state government officials to account.... The erosion of local news means Americans are more polarized and more disconnected from their communities. They’re less interested in running for office. And taxpayers even pay more, according to one study she cites, as government spending and borrowing costs rise because of a lack of oversight....As she surveys the damage across the country, and outside the United States as well, Sullivan finds local newsrooms that are shells of their former selves, picked over by hedge funds or distant conglomerates that have no connection to local audiences. She looks at “news deserts” with no coverage at all....But when that newspaper landed on the porch, the first thing they saw was the big headline of the day — perhaps a story germinated in one of those municipal meetings like the ones the Vindicator once covered. Those in power saw it, too, because it was right there on the front page. And even when it wasn’t, as Youngstown’s Brown said, at least they knew someone was watching.

Anybody who follows the media business is familiar with the broad outline of the problem the author lays out in this unapologetically dour book: Newspapers have shuttered with distressing speed in recent years—more than 2,000 since 2004, she reports—and many of the ones that remain are shadows of their former selves....the author’s goal isn’t to lament the good old days of once-mighty businesses. Instead, she trains her eyes on the “news deserts” that now litter the landscape and voices concern about how corruption will consume communities that no longer have media watchdogs.... The author chronicles her discussions with the leaders of some promising startups and considers more radical ideas, such as federal subsidies for media. But her glass is resolutely half-empty: She predicts that “American politics will become even more polarized; government and business corruption will flourish, the glue that holds communities together will weaken." A no-nonsense retort to the notion that we live in a time of abundant information.