Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor in chief of Current Affairs magazine.

I am joined today by Margaret Sullivan. She has served in her career as managing editor of the Buffalo News, public editor of the New York Times,

a media columnist at the Washington Post, and is the author of the books,

ghosting the news, local journalism, and the crisis of American democracy,

and newsroom confidential lessons and worries from an ink-stained life.

Margaret Sullivan, thank you so much for joining me on

Current Affairs. Thanks very much for having me. Okay, so you have seen local journalism from the

inside through your many years at the Buffalo News, and you write a lot about the collapse of

local journalism in this country. I think a lot of people now

know about this on a broad level. They know that newspapers have closed in their town. They've

seen reports of newsroom staff being cut. But I think it is difficult for people necessarily to grasp what it is they are losing,

because it's hard to see an absence. And so one of the things I was hoping you could do for us

is help us to understand what happens as a result of the loss of local newspapers and staff. I mean, you've seen what they do

in a city, in a town. So help us understand what we would be seeing but aren't. Okay. So I'll give

you an example of something that did happen and ask you to imagine what would be the case if it hadn't happened.

So in Buffalo, when I was the editor, I think it was in 2009, there was a horrible plane crash.

It was a Colgan Air commercial flight, like the kind of thing I would get on every day.

It was flying from Newark,

New Jersey to Buffalo, New York. And the plane went into a stall, and it never came out of the

stall, and it crashed into a house in suburban Buffalo, and 50 people died. The pilot, the crew,

and everybody on board. And the people on board

were people like a cantor, a human rights activist, you know, professors, dads, you know, just

...