From interviews on 60 Minutes headlined “Local newsrooms strained by budget-slashing financial firms”:

Newspaper industry in state of decline: not exactly a stop-the-presses headline. For two decades now—owing largely to the loss of advertising revenue to Facebook and Google—fewer and fewer Americans get their news, comics and sports from all those gazettes and tribunes and journals. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. As we first reported in February, there’s an additional threat: hedge funds and other financial firms that own nearly a third of the daily newspapers in America. And these new owners are often committed not to headlines and deadlines but to bottom lines. One fund in particular has been called by some in the industry a “vulture,” bleeding newspapers dry. It all prompts the question: as local newsrooms and local news coverage shrivel up, to what extent does democracy shrink with it?