Only because in recent decades there's been a huge dieoff of newspapers. In the 1980s and before it was quite typical for a US city of any size to have multiple

Only because in recent decades there's been a huge dieoff of newspapers. In the 1980s and before it was quite typical for a US city of any size to have multiple newspapers (as NYC still has). You would have at the very least a Democratic-leaning and Republican-leaning one, and you would often find others (for instance evening newspapers which were published later in the day and had more up to date news than the morning papers).