In her Slight Detour post this morning, Marianne Love focuses on prospect of life after newspapers. Quoth: "One of the guiding principles I learned while working as a professional journalist was that communities rely on the newspaper to sort out truth from fiction/gossip/hearsay/inuendo and downright lies." As a City Hall/courthouse reporter from 1984-93, I was part of the heyday of newspaper reporting in Kootenai County. On any given weekday, I was matched against aggressive reporters from the Coeur d'Alene Press, like Keith Erickson and Les Tidball, trying to get a scoop. If we didn't dig out the story, John Rook and Ron Rankin were firing away re: local politics and issues from the KCDA studio above the old Wilson Drug store on Sherman Avenue. If it was news, one of the three media would sniff it out. Now, with the cutbacks at both the Press & SR in North Idaho,  news goes unreported. I don't think anyone is keeping close tabs on the county commissioners or county government. I doubt that the situation is going to get better in the near term. Nor do I see bloggers having the expertise or time to fill the void. The misinformed who relish the demise of "liberal newspapers" are myopic. Once the papers are gone, who's going to provide the reliable info to discuss at the coffee shop?