I was the editor for a small weekly community newspaper and we covered the the city council, park district, school board, local elections, etc. Our reporting was far better than the corporate regional paper based in our town (owned by Lee Enterprises). We were highly motivated to "out report" the larger, better-funded paper, which helped improve our coverage. All that stands to reason, yet our coverage forced the regional paper to do a better on covering our town since it was a bad look to get continually owned by a small independent weekly. Such competition, even at such a micro level, made a big difference in the overall quality of how local politics were covered in the region.