Want to know about break-ins on your block? How about issues at your local schools? Sadly, it’s unlikely you can turn to a local metro daily for that kind of information.

In the rush to write about lifestyle issues, the issue du jour and to save costs, local has been forgotten at many dailies. The only local issue that gets in-depth coverage is local pro and college sports. If local crime, schools and politics were covered anywhere near the level sports is, we might not have the cartoonish politics of soundbites we have today and student achievement might get the respect it deserves.

It hasn’t always been this way. Like a lot of journalists, I cut my reporting teeth on local stories. That meant school board, city council and local police reporting. You showed up, you listened and tried to stay awake and, in time, you got to know these folks who cared enough or had egos big enough to want to be a part of local government. In the meantime, you got to know what was going on at a very local level and the stories you wrote were informed by a strong sense of your audience and what they cared about.

It was the TV reporters who showed up for the hit-and-run stories about one-shot issues who were the object of our scorn. In addition to being paid better and better looking than us, they always pumped us for information they used on air to look like they knew the issue inside-out.

Today, almost any story is hit-and-run, usually covered by overworked print reporters covering issues and beats they haven’t had the time to learn in-depth. The disconnection of the papers from the communities they are located in has been years in the making and the Internet has only given readers in many markets an alternative to the watered-down coverage they had been tolerating for years. For media sources, this is no longer a distribution issue that must be solved, it’s a relevancy issue – readers are as interested in news as they ever have been, but many newspapers have lost the ability to connect with them and provide them with information that is meaningul to their lives. Google just gave them the means to go elsewhere.

All of which makes it ironic to see local newspapers looking for bailouts, handouts and antitrust exemptions. I feel terrible for the reporters and editors who have lost jobs, but I’m having a hard time sympathizing with institutions who, through short-term decisions and arrogance, brought a lot of this on themselves.