It's Sunshine Week

Join News Leaders Association and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in the annual nationwide celebration of access to public information and what it means for you and your community.

WAYNESVILLE, Mo.- Five minutes late, Darrell Todd Maurina sweeps into a meeting room and plugs in his laptop computer. He places a Wi-Fi hotspot on the table and turns on a digital recorder. The earplug in his left ear is attached to a police scanner in his pants pocket. He wears a tie; Maurina insists upon professionalism. He is the press in its entirety.  

A Facebook blogger, he is the only person who has come to the Pulaski County courthouse to tell residents what their commissioners are up to, the only one who will report on their deliberations _ specifically, their discussions about how to satisfy the Federal Emergency Management Agency so it will pay to repair a road inundated in a 2013 flood. Last September, Waynesville became a statistic. With the shutdown of its newspaper, the Daily Guide, this town of 5,200 people in central Missouri's Ozark hills joined more than 1,400 other cities in the United States to lose a newspaper over the past 15 years, according to an Associated Press analysis of data compiled by the University North Carolina. Blame revenue siphoned by online competition, cost-cutting ownership, a death spiral in quality, sheer disinterest among readers or reasons peculiar to given locales for that development. While national outlets worry about a president who calls the press an enemy, many Americans no longer have someone watching the city council for them, chronicling the soccer exploits of their children or reporting on the kindly neighbor who died of cancer. Local journalism is dying in plain sight.