The State of Local News 2025 report by Northwestern University’s Medill School opens like a quiet heartbreak. It says America is losing 2.5 local newspapers every week. Entire counties have turned into what the report calls news deserts, places where no one records the daily rhythm of life anymore. It is not only a loss of print, but it is the loss of belonging.

When the town paper shuts down, the people who once saw themselves in its pages become invisible. This decline in the United States, a country with the strongest media structure in the world, is more than a statistic. It is a warning. If the most advanced democracy cannot save its local journalism, what chance does a fragile democracy like Pakistan have, still struggling with access, literacy, and digital inequality?

In Pakistan, the story takes a harsher turn. The digital wave has come, but it has come unevenly. The gap between the connected and the disconnected keeps widening. Big cities tweet, stream, post, and go live, while smaller towns wait for the paper that never arrives.

The Business Recorder reported last year that in Punjab, only Lahore and Rawalpindi fall in the high digital category, and not a single district in Balochistan meets that mark. What this means is that while our elite universities and newsrooms talk about artificial intelligence and newsroom automation, large parts of the country are still negotiating basic connectivity.

Once, every district had its newspaper, sometimes handwritten, often crude, but deeply rooted in its community. They........

© The Friday Times