In the aftermath of major layoffs at the New York Daily News, Rachel Martin talks to Kyle Pope, editor-in-chief and publisher of Columbia Journalism Review about the state of local papers. Sweeping layoffs at the New York Daily News this week has many people asking about the value of local news. The decline of local news has been happening for some time. KYLE POPE: I think really this gets to the question of, why does news matter, both in a democracy, but more importantly for this story, why does it matter for you in wherever you live? I mean, how does it make a difference to the kind of school that you send your kids to or where you choose to live or how you want your local officials to spend your money? And I think this is the conversation that we need to be having. I think what we really have to do is shift the conversation away from that and toward what are we not going to be able to think about and do and act on if that local news goes away? MARTIN: But the fact is people just weren't buying the subscriptions, right? So why is the kind of local journalism that the Daily News represented, why is it losing in the marketplace of ideas? MARTIN: What about all of the new digital news sites that seem to be popping up everywhere? Because it does feel like there are an awful lot of sources of news these days, and many of them are trying to be these hyper-local sources of information that are supposed to fill the void when local papers shut down. Read more