A large national outlet, however well resourced, cannot know a small town the way a local reporter who lives there does, which means community journalism regularly notices details, a subtle shift in a local economy, tension building around a specific development, that larger outlets simply have no reason or capacity to track closely.
This local knowledge accumulates over years of sustained presence, a reporter who has covered the same council for a decade develops a memory and set of relationships that a rotating national correspondent, however talented, cannot easily replicate on a short visit or a single assignment passing through the area.
When community journalism disappears, and many local outlets have struggled financially in recent years, what is lost is not simply a smaller version of national news but a genuinely different kind of coverage entirely, one that larger outlets were never really positioned to replace in the first place.