85k Circulation

I've been watching Jon Bois' Reform!, a look at the weird and wonderful happenings with and political legacy of the Reform party. (I'd like to do something like that for the various electoral incarnations of Euroscepticism over here, maybe called Referendum! or something similar.) Something that really stands out to me (and this is something I remember noticing when I watched his Seattle Mariners documentary) is that a lot of the quotes he uses are from local papers. Commenting, very often, on national issues, with some degree of intelligence and perspecacity. How many of those papers are even around now? Since noting this down as somethign maybe to write about and now, I watched this episode of Pretty Good where he calls this out specifically. You don't have as many stories of people slipping on banana peels as you used to because local papers just don't exist to publish them! (I think there's possibly a happy medium between that paper he mentions that publishes stories about a town of 126 people which go something like "two hay carts came through" and the next-to-nothing we see today.) I remember a while back Josef mentioned this story on the podcast. The thing that really jumps out at me is a local newspaper with a circulation of 85k. The way things are going there might be national newspapers that'd be happy to see a number like that.