U.S. local newspapers are dying at a rate of 2 per week

I disagree. In the old days, when there were lots of small newspapers, most of them had reporters who went to city hall events and wrote and did investigations of things, went to school events, other city happenings. They usually didn't attack the foundations of the city, but making those events public with discussion was a great value. I love reddit and use it daily, but there's no way to know what neutral info there is, it's far from the neutrality of journalism.

Most of the worthwhile content in my city’s sub are links to local journalists who are paid to do more than cursory research. Outside of food and apartment recommendations, a lot of the user-generated subreddit content is unreliable.

I don’t doubt there are exceptions, and in subreddits for large cities, perhaps a few users are willing to do free in-depth journalism for those audiences. But I’ve looked at several other cities’ communities, mostly of small and medium size, and seen similar dynamics.

> and not just acting as advocates for one issue or another.

I think one clear lesson of the last few years should be that every human being has their biases. Trying to provide unbiased and objectively accurate information about things that are in nature often very nuanced and subjective is a foolhardy endeavor. Even with the big technology firms trying to provide "independent fact checkers", there's no way to accurately gauge truth on social media without essentially picking one point-of-view and censoring other perspectives.

Instead, taking into account human bias should be part of the system. Take ProjectVeritas as one example. I think that it's great that they're biased and argue their own point-of-view as long as their bias is known by people. That way you can take that into account when judging how likely something is to be true. I'd love it if there were more organizations like ProjectVeritas with their own biases who worked to expose corruption on issues they care about regardless of political perspective.

IMO, the worst situation to be in for determining truth is the one we're in with the media now where we have journalists who are playacting at being unbiased who clearly have a point of view they push for.

> What value does a local newspaper offer that, say, a subreddit for a city doesn't offer?

I live in a city that's majority non-white and at least 50% conservative.

The subreddit for my city is 99% white and hyper-leftist.

At least local newspapers attempt to be unbiased.

Reddit is run by an American company. Thus, whatever is featured on the site needs the implicit approval of that company's owners. Thus, the content on Reddit needs to be palatable to that company's advertisers or else the company will lose money. This leads to homogenization and mainstream voices drowning out everything else. Small, independent, local newspapers are supposed to counteract that. It doesn't happen though since most local newspapers are owned by large conglomerates.

> If that's the gap, how do we achieve this at a local level?

You have to pay for it. It used to be that advertising space was limited, so it was paid for through that, but that revenue is gone and nobody wants to pay.