Why we should support our local paper

Thanks mainly to the internet, the media world has undergone massive changes over the past few years.

People can access the news of their choice instantly, from anywhere in the world, and for free. And of course, columns like this one, and hundreds of thousands of blogs, are never printed at all '“ if anything, there is more news available online than offline.

So this must be a good thing, right? Well, not entirely. The world's newspapers are in big trouble at the moment. Newspapers' sales figures are dropping dramatically, and more and more titles, particularly local papers, are going bankrupt and falling off shops' shelves. In America, there was even a national 'buy a newspaper' day recently, to encourage support for printed papers.