An offshoot of the trend toward mega-corporate consolidation is a need for product advertising to reach large national and even international audiences, which has given rise to correspondingly large media enterprises.

As we move in the direction of fewer and larger mega-media outlets, we reduce the number of local voices and viewpoints to which people are exposed, and in the process consolidate the power and prestige of a small set of media elite who are left to tell us virtually everything we hope to know about the “larger world.”

In losing the voices of local editors and columnists and other commentators whom we had a chance of meeting or even knowing personally, we lose also a sense of the ability of people like ourselves to originate valid and useful insights into what makes the world work.