My news travels, I hate to say, are at an end. Rolling back into New York City last week, the familiar felt alien, and the thirty states I visited over three months on the road suddenly felt far away. This is a paradox of return that I recalled from earlier stints away – routine turns on its head, and you reel in the recognizable day-to-day.

This is the time for reflection.

I spent just shy of 100 days recording the hopes and troubles of twelve local newspapers, and I heard variations of the same story all over America. The internet age has pulled readers away and made an old business model obsolete. Ad sales and reader revenue can no longer fully support a little newspaper, though certain publications, like the Cascadia Daily News and the Park Record are still trying to get there. In reality, both of those papers heavily rely on independently wealthy owners while still operating in the red.

Out on the road, I found that this situation has yet to be fully understood by the public. Fiona and I introduced ourselves as journalists and those Montana cowboys were starstruck. Ladies in cafés treated us like successful career women. Even though newspapers have been shuttering for 20 years, and these people are, like all of us, loyal to their social media feeds, the idea of newspapers as glamorous businesses still exists.

The view from the inside is more harrowing. I visited two papers, the Sandusky Register and the Kingman Miner, who were owned by media chains, and both had been stripped down, Up in the Air-style. This is one path forward for newspapers: join a conglomerate, tighten the margins, and use the larger network to fill in the gaps. A company like River City Newspapers that can support its publications without killing them, may be one of the ways that local news prevails.

But for many of the editors I spoke to, giving up independent ownership is a bridge too far. Instead, they have turned to their readers for help. Donations, grants and other kinds of philanthropy have become essential to the newspaper business model – we now rely on public affection for the news to keep the lights on.

So here’s my theory: the age of journalism for the masses is shifting. There is no stopping the AI onslaught and our attention will continue to be splintered in all kinds of directions. Amid this, real, human-written, local news will be a niche market, supported by people who make a conscious decision to seek it out and donate to the cause. I will be one of those people, and I met many other young journalists in America who will join me.

What will keep us reading? Something I heard from nearly every journalist I met: the personal. People open the local paper to see faces they know, places they recognize, stories written by journalists they see in the diner every week. Even Libor Jany, the LA Times reporter serving a city of millions, told me his most memorable stories were those that touched other people’s lives directly. Of course, there are new frontiers in video, social media, podcasts, even documentary to explore as ways to diversify revenue and bring in new readers, but those readers will only stay as a gesture of care for their community. My challenge, as a 21st- century journalist, is to prove that it’s worth it.

This is the Journal’s challenge as well. It is no easier for us than for any other publication making a go of it. But our stories are a part of this community, and looking to the future, we will need you all to help us pave the path of the local news niche here in Ellenville, which we hope will thrive far beyond us. This is how we fight the AI glut, the slop, the rhetoric, and keep a window open for what’s intimate, Ellenvillian, and true.