From a Washington Post column by Nancy Gibbs headlined “Newspapers are disappearing where democracy needs them most”:

Nancy Gibbs is the director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.

Every couple of weeks you can read about another newspaper shutting its doors, or moving from daily to weekly, or hollowing out its newsroom until it’s little more than a skeleton staff bulked up with j-school students. Study the maps made by Penny Abernathy, visiting professor at Northwestern University and an expert on dwindling sources of news, and you can see the dead zones — the 200 or so counties with no local paper. About 1,600 other counties have only one.